Hyper-Mobility or the End of the Road?

The following is piece I wrote for Ceasefire magazine a while back, I'm posting it here because  I was pleased with how it came out, and because it serves to make this blog look less underpopulated than it currently is.

If there is anything you remember from school Physics lessons, there’s a good chance it’s the maxim speed = distance ÷ time. For most of us, this equation is no more useful in day to day life than Planck’s constant, or anything else we forgot in that class. It is, however, indicative of one of the most dominant trends in contemporary life, namely the pursuit of speed and the simultaneous destruction of its co-variables.

This trend is apparent in a recent Ceasefire piece lauding the future of the vacuum Mag-Lev train. Travelling through airless tunnels and supported on magnets, the dream being sold is that of travel at speeds of 4000mph, using only a quarter of the energy required by modern passenger jets.

As fantastical as this sounds, before jumping on board we must ask: is this is really desirable?

Our grinding daily commute is a marvel of the modern age, hard as that may be to believe. In 1800 America, the average daily commute was 50 metres – it’s now 50 kilometres. Globally, we now travel 23 billion kilometres a year; by 2050 it is predicted that that figure will have increased fourfold to 106 billion.

The systems of hyper-mobility have negated the cost of distance. Today one can travel from the UK as far as the Red Sea on low cost airlines. For those on middle incomes and above, almost any human settlement on Earth is reachable for the cost of a few days wages.

The logic of speed ensures that the journey – that is the experience of time through space – is itself ever diminished, as distance slips by 36,000ft below, or is smeared across the train window at 200mph (come 2035 and High Speed 2). The proposed maglev vacuum is surely the logical end-point of this process: hurtling through a black, airless void at multiples of the speed of sound.
There is undeniably something thrilling about disconnecting oneself from the contemporary world with its ever more invasive technologies and persistent networks; to arrive unencumbered in an unknown place; to take a breath that feels like it might be your first. In such moments it is not difficult to believe in a world of infinite possibilities, and a chance for reinvention (if only for 14 nights semi-catered).

The Price of a Ticket
Of course, the easier it becomes to reach a destination, the more that destination begins to resemble the point you started from. The economic value of meeting the dictates of the novelty-seeker, of selling exoticism to the jaded traveller, may ensure that traditional customs remain, but as performances for the dollar-carrying crowd, rather than expressions of cultural identity.

What was a way of life becomes a poolside bar design-theme. Inevitably, over time, the process of globalised tourism destroys the very thing it claims to be seeking. The adventurous have to push ever further off the beaten track, as the track becomes a road becomes a motorway.

Distant indigenous cultures are not the only human victims of this high mobility system. Out of town retail parks have seen our own high streets reduced to a spectacularly inane vision of dystopia, with an economy that revolves around The Big Issue; second-hand clothes that are more expensive than they were in Primark the first time around; and plywood, which has made great inroads into a market previously dominated by plate glass.

The high street does not suffer alone. A study in suburban Los Angeles, comparing the number of neighbours residents knew with the traffic on that street, found that an increase in the latter inflicted an equivalent decline in the former. Studies in London have found strong correlations between heart disease and noise pollution from air travel. Worldwide, over 1 million people a year die in car accidents, with 50 million injured.

Access to this world’s benefits is of course limited, yet the costs are not. As society adapts to the possibilities offered, those that cannot travel are abandoned by the roadside. The land use configurations created by the dominance of the car mean that those without one – the elderly, the young, and the poor – find their lives correspondingly more difficult. Whose houses hug the sides of busy carriage ways, and hunker under airport flight paths? Certainly not the same people who benefit most from these infrastructures. If the mag-lev vacuum train ever comes to pass, what do you suspect would be the socio-economic characteristics of the neighbourhoods that lie in the shadow of the raised 15m diameter concrete tube running over their heads?

The environmental cost of hyper-mobility is devastating. In the UK transport-related carbon emissions are second only to those from power stations. Attempts at ‘greening’ fuel by adding biofuels have led to deforestation to make way for plantations in the Global South, and been linked to price hikes in food. The recent Gulf oil spill is simply the most high profile of a century of such disasters, and tens of thousands of hectares of pristine Canadian wilderness are currently under threat from plans to expand oil sands extraction.

The destruction inherent in hyper-mobility is perfectly captured in a picture book I enjoyed as a child, called Dinosaurs and all that Rubbish. A man gazes up into the night sky at a distant star, dreaming of the wonders he might find there. Driven by wanderlust, he builds a rocket, destroying his home planet to feed the smoke-belching factories which churn out the rocket’s parts. His plan is successful, but on reaching the star he finds a barren wasteland. His eyes return to the sky, and spy a new star, with new possibilities. Once again he streaks into space, sure that this destination will be worthy of his dreams. On arrival however he discovers to his horror… You can guess the rest.

Well, actually you probably can’t, as this is a children’s story and prone to questionable leaps of logic. He does indeed wind up on the very planet he started from, the planet he destroyed, but in the meantime dinosaurs have emerged from the rubbish tips he left, and somewhat put out by what they find, have cleaned the whole place up. As Bertie the triceratops is unlikely to solve our current environmental troubles, I think we can disregard this element of the analogy.

Of course, there are also a great many positives to high mobility. Along with the opportunity to briefly escape our own lives, tourism offers us the chance of experiencing the lives of others. On a shrinking, interconnected planet, this can’t be a bad thing. More fundamentally, the West’s affluence is underpinned by high mobility. Kunstler’s The Long Emergency details how intrinsic it is to almost every aspect of contemporary society.

The defining characteristic of the 20th Century was the consumption of cheap oil – an unparalleled source of easily-accessible, concentrated energy – allowing the near frictionless movement of people and goods around the planet. This has allowed the creation of economies of scale that have washed away traditional forms of community. On the tidal wave of oil rides Walmart; Tesco; McDonalds, and the other poster boys of contemporary economic success.

The entwining of late-modern capitalism, mobility, and oil, reaches its apogee in places like Las Vegas and Dubai: what are known in the sociological literature as places of excess, though I prefer to refer to them as masturscapes. Masturscapes exist for the pursuit of fleeting pleasures and the theatrical squandering of resources; their unsustainability appears a badge of pride. How else to justify the construction of Dubai’s World Islands at a time of rising sea levels? With its vertiginous towers built on slave labour just as Egypt’s pyramids were, this desert monument appears to be putting its faith in Mammon to hold back the waves.

Their physical existence in such inhospitable locales is impossible without the easy fix of cheap energy, not only for lights and air con, but for water, food and freight too. It is this borderlands existence, beyond the reach of civilisation, which allows them to offer up a netherworld of unhindered desires. “What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas” goes the ad slogan, but of course only the most unfortunate stay in Vegas: the stripper, the croupier, the bellhop that – Groundhog Day like – are tasked with endlessly acting out the ephemeral fantasy. For the traveller its purpose is to exist momentarily, and to be departed from before the cost can be counted, as if one were some Air Miles collecting locust.

Rebalancing the Equation

Contemporary concerns ensure that techno-utopian dreams like that of the Mag-Lev vacuum train are sold to us as offering ever greater speeds but at decreasing environmental cost. It’s claimed that the train will travel eight times faster than planes, at a quarter of the environmental cost. So what’s the problem?

The problem is that the easier travel is, the more people travel. The ‘predict and provide’ model underpinned transport planning for the second half of the 20th century: figure out where a road would be beneficial, build it. Infrastructure does not simply respond to our needs however, it also shapes them. Motorways that began as gushing arteries of goods and people begin to clog up, even become blocked entirely, as society reconfigures itself around this new possibility.

New roads create new traffic, and for that reason the predict and provide approach has fallen from favour amongst policymakers. We don’t have the space or the cash to meet its demands indefinitely. Similarly, if people can get from London to New York or Moscow or Cairo in less than an hour, more people are going to do it. A lot more.

Of course this may provide an economic boost, and the other benefits that mobility brings, but the costs cannot be escaped from, and the world’s carrying capacity for such costs is at breaking point. It’s worth considering the UK Government’s own Foresight report entitled Intelligent Infrastructure Systems (2006). It puts forward four mobility-focused scenarios describing life in 2050. What is perhaps most striking is that not one of the scenarios tries to suggest a world in which we have managed to both address our environmental challenges and maintain hyper-mobility. It’s simply not plausible.

I do not mean for this excursion to resemble a train trip to Margate : I would like there to be some light at the end of the tunnel. For this we must return to where we started out from, that is speed = distance ÷ time. The alternative to our speed fixation is to reassert balance to the equation, to restore time and distance to their natural place.

We must start by asking what the purpose is of all this travel? At the danger of sounding like a Christian billboard – where are we rushing to all the time? The vacuum Mag-Lev train promises to render distance and time inconsequential, yet is there any intrinsic value in being able to physically move through space at such speeds (in an airless black tunnel)?

What happened to the pleasure of the journey? It was lost in the indignity of airport security’s molestations; in budget airline seats that would contravene livestock welfare guidelines; on groaning scruffy train carriages and in carbon monoxide infused traffic jams. Now we simply wish to get as far from where we started as possible, hoping that our iPads block out as much of the intervening period as possible.

Yet the system that offers this possibility of escape is the same one that kills it: with identikit high streets and homogenised cultures. If distance and time are allowed back into the picture, less (speed) can indeed be more. Those faraway places we value so highly might take longer to get to, but when you get there, you’ll actually be there.

The Conspiracy Conspiracy?

This is another piece I wrote for Ceasefire, this one back in 2009. Given the comments that followed its publication there, its probably worthwhile starting here with a disclaimer, namely that the conclusion was always intended to be very much tongue-in-cheek, a fact that some seemed to miss.

Away from the gaze of mainstream media and politics, there is a vibrant, growing subculture which holds both institutions responsible for the most heinous acts of brutality and deceit. It is political movement that, in size, dwarfs anything that might traditionally be labelled ‘radical’. The numbers in its ranks are impossible to know, but the youtube videos through which it channels its messages receive hits in the millions, as do the multitude of websites around which it is organised. The level of popular acceptance of some of its key tenets are known however, and they are striking. An Ohio University poll in 2006 found that a third of American’s believed the events of 9/11 were in some way abetted by the federal government, about the same percentage of American’s that voted Bush in for his second term two years earlier. Amongst young adults polled, those believing the official account of what happened on 11th September 2001 were actually in the minority. The ‘Truther’ movement, as they call themselves, is an elephant in the halls of power; a mainstream radical movement.

For those who are used to occupying the fringes of political thought, these are astonishing figures. Truther’s do not limit themselves solely to the events of one day in September either; under the New World Order (NWO) mantle they have assembled a dense scaffold of conspiracies encompassing all the major events of modern history, the current economic troubles included. The mainstream media’s unwillingness to report this phenomenon is perhaps understandable. Their discomfort in dealing with Truther groups should be no surprise, for Truthers hold dear assumptions that deny the media establishment its legitimacy. The reliance of the media on ‘official’ sources of information – politicians; security services; lobbyists; PR spokespersons – all are, by definition, rendered suspect by conspiracists. The media organisations themselves are too a part of this self-serving elite whose interest is not in justice or truth, but merely the promotion of the status quo.

In this, the Truther movement has much in common with other radical political movements, yet the radical should be careful of celebrating the success of it. Whenever one stops to consider the apparently concrete walls between the concepts by which we order society, one quickly finds the immutable to be nothing more solid than sand. Such is the case when separating the different systems thorough which we create, and act upon, knowledge. A religious church can quickly become a political movement; a political idea rapidly transformed into a scientific fact. Watching celebrity atheist Richard Dawkins, haranguing a Christian with fevered conviction as only a man witness to the One Truth can, one quickly beings to question who amongst the participants is the man of reason, and who the religious fanatic.

The appearance of the Truther cause as a political movement is similarly fluid. At the heart of all Truther accounts is, it seems, an overarching, invisible, omnipotent elite, engineering building collapses as easily as they engineer global economic collapse (of which they are also accused). These superhuman individuals appear to be gods in all but name. Truther’s readily engage in scientific analyses of the events of 9/11, yet such is the power and reach of the controlling elites, that any evidence contradictory to the Truther can be dismissed as lies, its proponents mere pawns of the powerful. In light of these characteristics, the Truther movements appears more as a secular, scientific religion.

We live in a time when mainstream political ideology encompasses nothing more inspirational than ‘triangulation’ and the race for the middle ground. Radical politics, meanwhile, is hamstrung by the complexities demanded by the numerous challenges it finds itself in opposition against. The difficulty of extracting a coherent message from the many actors which made up the recent G20 protests attests to this. The Truther movement is different however. The young, angry and inquisitive are easily drawn to revolutionary political movements, but here there is no abstract, nebulous ‘system’ tackle; no ghost to try and hurl one’s self against. Here, the bad guys are easily identifiable, for the secrecy in which they operate is paradoxically no barrier to their unmasking, whether it be the Bilderberg Group, Illuminati, Elders of Zion, or any of the other shadowy actors leading the march of the NWO.

For such individuals, the Truther movement offers the authority of science and the certainty of religion to create a compelling ideology, and so its success in drawing activists away from more traditional radical movements is unsurprising. It has no need for the difficult questions of what should come instead of the status quo, for it only exists in opposition to what is. To offer answers to such questions would seem impossible, for the political and economic landscape which the traditional radical seeks to challenge is here rendered nothing more than a puppet show, a shadow on the cave wall. The true power is unseen. Furthermore, and of particular worry to the radical, in its invocation of adversaries of supernatural ability, it serves only to entrench the established order. How does an individual even begin to challenge a group capable of orchestrating what these elites are accused of, a group which exists outside the reality of mainstream culture, and so beyond its reach?

Truther accounts of 9/11 feed on any perceived coincidence, mistake or unknown. Why was the US airforce running war games on the day of the attacks which confused efforts to respond to the hijacks? Why did the towers fall as they did, and when no skyscrapers have previously collapsed due to fire? Why was so little debris visible at the Pentagon crash site? The key assumption underpinning these questions, as one might expect from a religious account, is that complete knowledge of an event is possible, and that everything happens for a reason. There is little sign here of postmodernism; of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, or of Chaos Theory’s irreducible complexity. Instead we have only the ordered execution of labyrinthine plans. That many Truther explanations are in themselves more incredible than any official version seems to go unremarked. Is an account in which the towers were secretly wired with explosives really more plausible than the version which holds the impact of jumbo jets laden with fuel responsible for the collapses?

The actual specifics of Truther claims of 9/11 are so detailed, and various, that it is impossible to consider them in detail here. It is perhaps though worth acknowledging that, in the author’s own view, it is not impossible that elements of the US security services had some forewarning of the attacks, and either unwittingly or deliberately failed to act [Update: it seems there are indeed questions still to be answered about the official account]. This is, however, a world away from the idea of a fully orchestrated ‘inside job’, and the superhuman elite required to achieve such a feat. Regardless, I am more of the opinion stated by Chomsky: that in a sense it doesn’t really matter if 9/11 was an inside job. The conspiracy claims will never be satisfactorily answered, and merely distract from what we do know, which is that the Neo-Conservatives exploited the attacks to pursue their policies with lethal conviction for seven disastrous years, whilst a supine media did little more than flag-wave from the sidelines. More than enough still-unpunished criminal activity took place out in the open for us to obsess about what might have taken place in the shadows. Besides, as Richard Curtis’ Power of Nightmares shows so well, ultimately there is little more to separate Neo-Con statesman from Al-Qaeda operative than conventions of dress, and more comfortable living arrangements.

There is, however, one particular element of the 9/11 attacks that does stand out from all the smoke and debris of that day. Eight years after the attacks, we still await the release, by the US government, of footage showing the plane hitting the Pentagon. The decision to show the comically ambiguous two frames of footage from a nearby garage forecourt security camera, which may or may not show the nose of Flight 77, only adds to the confusion. It may be that this is evidence, as Truther’s state, that it was in fact a missile, not a plane, that struck the Pentagon. More likely, the US security establishment is unsold on the idea of showing the world its most potent symbol being struck a fearsome blow by a group of Muslim fanatics armed with Stanley knives.

There is a third explanation for the non-appearance of these tapes, which brings us conveniently full circle. That some clear sighted individuals in the halls of power recognise that the Truther movement is a dead end, a useful sideshow with which to distract those most sure to be its critics. Truther’s are of course no homogeneous entity – there is no single Truther account, and there is no archetypical adherent. The Ohio University poll found though that “Members of racial and ethnic minorities, people with only a high school education and Democrats were especially likely to suspect federal involvement in 9/11.” One more easily associates these groups with radical than Republican politics, so why not allow the disaffected to disenfranchise themselves? Hand them the means to convince themselves of the unerring control with which you orchestrate events, whilst you in truth ham-fistedly bumble from one crisis to the next.

We have then a conspiracy conspiracy, designed to rob radical politics of foot soldiers by sowing distraction and apathy.


Hey, its more plausible than the missile theory.