The phone is a car: a symbol of freedom and convenience that transforms into an inescapable burden
To be sure, real estate speculation was at the heart of streetcar development too, not just the automobile. Financiers and local officials recognized that easy transportation between nearby towns could easily turn the landscape into a single bustling metropolis, and the land next to these lines would be very lucrative. When San Francisco’s famous streetcars first went online, according to John Anderson Miller in Fares Please!, the property values of Nob Hill and the Embarcadero doubled overnight. But the priority of speculation over social efficiency also paved the way to the streetcar’s obsolescence.
Now the pattern is recurring again. Only this time, the technological change triggering new speculative possibilities is not a matter of engineering refinements in how people get from here to there, but the opportunistic application of intrusive tracking devices and opaque algorithms to century-old car designs. The U.S. transportation system is being “updated to stay the same” (to borrow a phrase from Wendy H.K. Chun) so that it confirms old prerogatives and protects the same interests and ideological investments in suburbia. But it dictates more than just a land use pattern: Our individualistic transportation network reflects American capitalism’s fundamental and perpetually renewed dependence on speculation, financialization, and rapacious consumerism.
Paris Marx’s Road to Nowhere: Silicon Valley and the Future of Mobility traces the historical echo between automakers’ takeover of the North American continent and the present monopolistic powers of the tech industry that “want to make us dependent on their products, not just when we browse the web but when we are in our communities too.” Part of this is through a direct adoption of the earlier pattern in transportation: Through both monitoring and controlling transportation systems, companies like Alphabet subsidiary Waymo, Tesla, and Uber can insinuate themselves as data brokers for real estate developers, home buyers, and anyone else that wants to know more about or control who goes where and for what. That information can feed into new methods of extraction (e.g. dynamic pricing, access controls, subscription requirements for auto functionality, etc.) as well as new systems of real estate speculation and manipulation (e.g. automated housing markets) that can adapt more quickly and precisely to changing conditions. Everything from how you get to work to how much your housing costs can be perpetually adjusted to maximize return on investment, not human needs or collective well-being.
But tech didn’t merely intervene in the transportation sector; it also borrowed its underlying innovation: path dependency as a business model. The first half of Marx’s book offers a rundown of how car companies managed to create car culture in the 20th century, as was detailed above. In spite of the massive grassroots backlash, U.S. automakers managed to convince the government to outlay unprecedented sums to expand roads, build highways, and ensure for ample parking. These arguments should sound familiar, because their highlighting the overriding value of personal consumer convenience over collective welfare has recurred over and over with each new “disruption” of established social patterns.
