The Stack On Software and Sovereignty · 第 280 页

This massive mutual prostheticization (a form of nested parasitism, even) takes time to arrive, and the mediatization of the automotive experience did not arrive recently. Many years ago, I jotted down these notes while stuck in a particularly slow traffic jam:

Sitting in traffic on a Los Angeles freeway, I am reminded of Joan Didion ’ s revelation that this trap is the most authentic Angeleno social experience. We are not going to any place, all lined up behind our windshields, we are all already there. ⁴⁹ Today, bumper to bumper, we are now all also talking to ourselves, taking meetings, texting, emailing, Googling, checking on this and that, editing essays on our phones. This is the home and office. We do not always need to arrive, because we are already there: if this was your home, you would live here by now. … The freeways as boulevards of “ fast parking ” are a grid that segments and enables an inertial sort of mobility. Ensconced in our furtive provisional networks, the car is no longer the primary technology of mobility, even in LA. The car has gone the way of the building: too slow. … By the time Reyner Banham arrived, the car had eaten LA, but now the smartphone is eating the car. ⁵⁰ The “ ‘ mobile ” first appeared in 1970 ’ s as a “ car phone ” but now the terms are reversed. In The Transformers movie, the alien robot became a car and the phone became a robot. Here now, the car becomes a phone (as the car, in turn, becomes a robot). … As the economy of mobility slides from mechanical to informational the car is augmented by hands-free telephony, Bluetooth networks, in-dash GPS navigation systems offering visualised or spoken directions, audio jacks, big screens counting down the drops of fuel while talking to you in weird accents, and emergency concierge communications by builtin satellite intercom. The handset does all this too, steering us in different directions by maps, recommendations, search results, tags and so forth. The phone and car find ways to subcontract each other’s functions, one to the other and back again. … In ways that would have made no sense in Banham ’ s Los Angeles, the car ’ s interfaciality is an important criterion of performance as a personal vehicle. The most visible change to the car in recent years is in the display electronics within its primary interface, the dashboard/cockpit. If the grille on the outside used to be the car’s face — its look — now the face comes with the voice and is seen (worn?) now from the inside, in the driver ’ s seat. That most brandable experience is not the profile of the car seen passing through the world, but rather how the world looks gazing out through the lens of the car. … The car+phone hybrid is a mass medium, a mobile cinema + micro-urbanism for one driver/user, a habitat organised and narrated by data networks. But in the end, they are not equal; the handset

In conceptualizing how Stack transportation might evolve, it ’ s tempting to suppose that the aggregation of systems into central platforms at the Cloud level would be replicated at the City layer such that atomized vehicles (such as cars) would be agglomerated into larger urban, regional, and continental megavehicles (such as high-speed rail). The economies of scale that are possible by regularizing and extending itineraries might parallel those of regularizing and monetizing other kinds of social interaction online. Elon Musk ’ s perhaps real and perhaps speculative Hypertube project, which would send humans whooshing up and down California inside what is essentially a giant pneumatic tube, is exemplary, as is the tendency for cities to strategize economic growth through the enhancement of their airports (now “ aerotropoli ” ) ensuring their inhabitants easy access to the rest of the global urban grid. ⁵² Implementing such systems is obviously very expensive in both time and treasure. In addition, these existing car-based systems would also be consumed by The Stack and transformed into Cloudbased platforms that could provide many of the same advantages, and more besides, least in theory. Currently several at-least-partially autonomous unmanned ground vehicles are in regular operation; driverless mining trucks, for example, move millions of tons of dirt without a human behind the wheel, and driverless tractors plow fields controlled remotely by V2V (vehicle-to-vehicle) networks. ⁵³ Within cities, the implementation of automotive automation has proven more difficult, as evidenced by the retreat from initial designs for personal rapid transit transport in Masdar City, Abu Dhabi (as well as the ill-fated Aramis project in Paris, as chronicled by Bruno Latour — planned and re-planned, but never built). ⁵⁴ The best-known autonomous car project, as yet to launch services commercially, is of course that spearheaded by Google. It is not so uncommon to see Google ’ s prototype vehicles, decked out with telltale gear on the hood, pacing along particular streets in California. Much of the earlier work at Google on these technologies was done by Sebastian Thrun, who famously announced that a full-scale automobile automation system would save “ one million human lives per year ” by preventing accidents. ⁵⁵ As said, Google ’ s interest in mass transportation goes back further (at least Page ’ s Ann Arbor monorail.) ⁵⁶ It seems quite natural that someone with an interest in the engineering of global platforms would either begin or end up with transportation, but whether one sees the Internet as a “ superhighway ” or the hundreds of millions of cars in motion at any one time as very large “ data packets ” makes all the difference in how the issue is problematized and formulated. ⁵⁷

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