H ence the invention of this orthopaedic prosthesis ai med at the senio rs m arket, a m arket that wil l , tomo rrow, explode throughout the industrial ized wo rl d . That prospect fo r growth wil l be part and parcel of a vogue in stacks of very h igh buildings, these TOWERS that are al ready poking up in the tens of thousands in J apanese and Chinese cities, such as Chongqing, with i ts thirty million inhabitants. N icknamed FOG CITY, Chongqing is one of the most polluted cities on the planet. These days its ce ntre is cluttered with hundreds of wrecks of abandoned taxis.
D readed by men in perfect health , with the so aptly named i Real , the wheelchai r for cripples t u rn s into a som ewhat fatal sol ution to the wreck of the city to come and to the failure of tomo rrow's concentration camp-like world city.
With the recent p ro motion of th i s m isidentified travelling object, the fundamentally INCAPACITATING nature of the technical progress behind this 'p iece of furn iture on wheels' is o bvious and echoes the biblical fables of the blind man and the paralytic.
The i Real engi ne is actually driven by hand, thanks to two buttons like the ones used in video games: 'No reverse, you J USt turn hard left or righ t and swivel round o n the sp o t . I t ' s as simple as a video-game console and requires only small movements of the right o r left wrist . As fo r speed, that's lim ited to 6 km an hour, but a rap id-speed setting o f up to 3 0 km an hour i s available ! ' 1
THE GREAT ACCELERATOR
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