the geography of the way a majority of people in america live as facilitated by cheap gas and car loans. to paraphrase someone whose name i’ve forgotten the reason americans fetishize college life is that it’s the only time many americans have a chance to live, work, and build relationships in a dense and walkable community. after that you have to go into the real world in which all social interaction is mediated by intentional car journeys that are costly in time and stress because someone who lived and died long before you were born decided that you would be happier living outside society, not in it. want to hang out with other people? well, before they invented cars they structured adult social life around consuming an intoxicant that renders you unable to drive safely, so naturally we’ve made those largely only accessible by car. want to opt out of this system? well, who wouldn’t? so naturally it’s a luxury whose supply is closely controlled. you can only get there if you’re rich or desperate enough to knowingly pay your landlord more for less.
it’s also the tendency as partially fuelled by this to withdraw into consumption and entertainment rather than to seek out new ideas and concepts and people and places. the tendency to seek out comforting rather than challenging media and to consume as a hobby rather than create. the reason i think it’s fuelled by suburbanization (in conjunction w/ unrelated media industrialization + centralization) is that people have a need for a low level of acceptable novelty in their life. in a city that’s seeing a weird guy on the bus or a parade or a street festival - something out of the ordinary but easily categorizable. netflix originals and car accidents and murder podcasts fulfill the same role for the american suburbanite.
this is why Crash is the only novel from the 20th century that can comment meaningfully on the 21st. and that’s something it’s taken me a long time to realize, that people text and drive out of love. of course people know it’s wrong and dangerous but what it really is is a desperate sublimated revolt against the system we’ve set up. what the texting driver is saying is that i’m going to reach out and make a human connection to you and that is so incredibly important, more important than piloting my automobile, that i’m willing to die and maim and get maimed and kill to do it. what we’ve got to do is set up a world where people aren’t pushed to this point, or at least get people to realize how deeply insane we’ve all been for a very long time so that we can start stepping back from the edge and start thinking about how we really want to live. that’s what this post is about btw
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