{"id":5813,"date":"2015-03-31T10:28:19","date_gmt":"2015-03-31T16:28:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=5813"},"modified":"2015-04-20T23:11:48","modified_gmt":"2015-04-21T05:11:48","slug":"twilight-of-the-idylls","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=5813","title":{"rendered":"Twilight of the idylls"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"bandit\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The Silicon Valley guys have a new hobby: driving fast cars around private tracks. They love it.\u00a0\u201cWhen you\u2019re really in the zone in a racecar, it\u2019s almost meditative,\u201d Google executive Jeff Huber tells<\/a> the Times’s\u00a0<\/em>Farhad Manjoo. Adds\u00a0Yahoo\u00a0senior vice president\u00a0Jeff Bonforte, “Your brain is so happy that it washes over you.” The Valley guys are a little nervous about the optics of their pastime \u2014\u00a0\u201cTry to tone down the rich guy hobby thing,\u201d angel investor and ex-Googler Joshua Schachter instructs\u00a0Manjoo \u2014 but the “visceral thrill” of driving has nevertheless made it “the Valley’s ‘it’ hobby.”<\/p>\n

The Valley guys are rushing to rent out\u00a0racetracks and strap themselves into Ferraris at the very moment\u00a0that they’re telling the rest of us how miserable driving is, and how liberated we’ll all feel when robots take\u00a0the wheel. Jazzed by a Googler’s Ted Talk on driverless cars, MIT automation expert Andrew McAfee says<\/a> that the Googlemobile will “free us from a largely tedious task.” Writes<\/a> Wired transport reporter Alex Davies, “Liberated from the need to keep our hands on the wheel and eyes on the road, drivers will become riders with more time for working, leisure, and staying in touch with loved ones.” When\u00a0Astro Teller, head of Google X, watches\u00a0people drive by in their cars, all he hears is a giant sucking sound, as potentially productive minutes pour\u00a0down the drain of a vast\u00a0timesink.\u00a0“There\u2019s over a trillion dollars of wasted time per year we could collectively get back if we didn\u2019t have to pay attention while the car took us from one place to another,” he said<\/a> in a South by Southwest keynote this month.<\/p>\n

Driving on a private track may be pleasantly meditative, even joy-inducing, but driving on public thoroughfares is just a drag.<\/p>\n

What’s curious\u00a0here is that the descriptions of everyday driving offered with such confidence by the avatars of driverlessness are at odds with what we know about people’s actual attitudes toward and experience of driving. People\u00a0like to drive. Surveys and other research consistently show\u00a0that most of us enjoy being behind the wheel. We find driving relaxing and\u00a0fun and\u00a0even, yes, liberating \u2014 a respite from the demands of our workaday lives. Seeing driving as a\u00a0“problem” because it\u00a0prevents us from being productive gets the story\u00a0backwards. What’s freeing about driving is the very fact that it gives us a break from the pressure\u00a0to be productive.<\/p>\n

That doesn’t mean we’re blind to automotive\u00a0miseries. When researchers talk to people about driving, they hear plenty of\u00a0complaints about traffic jams and grinding commutes and bad roads and parking hassles and all the rest. Our attitudes toward driving are complex, always have been, but on balance we like to have our hands on the wheel\u00a0and\u00a0our eyes on the road, not to mention our foot on the gas. About 70 percent of Americans say they “like to drive,” while only about 30 percent consider it “a chore,” according<\/a> to a 2006 Pew survey. A survey<\/a> of millennials, released earlier this year by MTV, found that, contrary to common wisdom, most young people enjoy\u00a0cars and driving, too. Seventy\u00a0percent of Americans between the ages of 18 and 34\u00a0say they like to drive, and\u00a072 percent of them\u00a0say they’d rather\u00a0give up texting for a week than give up\u00a0their car for the same period.\u00a0The percentage of people\u00a0who like to drive has fallen a bit in recent years as traffic has worsened\u00a0\u2014 80 percent said they liked to drive in a 1991 Pew survey \u2014 but it’s still very high, and it belies the dreary picture of driving painted by\u00a0Silicon Valley.\u00a0You don’t have to be wealthy enough to buy a Porsche\u00a0or to rent out a racetrack to enjoy the meditative and active pleasures of driving. They can be\u00a0felt on the open road as well as the closed track.<\/p>\n

In suggesting that driving is no more than\u00a0a boring, productivity-sapping waste of time, the Valley guys are mistaking a personal bias for a universal truth. And they’re blinding themselves to the social and cultural challenges they’re going to face as they try to convince people to be passengers rather than drivers.\u00a0Even if\u00a0all the technical hurdles to achieving perfect vehicular automation are\u00a0overcome \u2014 and despite rosy predictions, that\u00a0remains<\/a> a sizable\u00a0if<\/em> \u2014 the developers and promoters of autonomous cars are going to discover that the psychology of driving is\u00a0far more complicated than they assume and far different from the psychology of being a passenger. Back in the 1970s, the public rebelled, en masse, when the federal government, for seemingly solid safety and fuel-economy reasons, imposed a national 55-mile-per-hour speed limit. The limit was repealed. If you think that everyone’s going to happily\u00a0hand the steering wheel over to a robot, you’re probably delusional.<\/p>\n

There’s something bigger going on here, and I confess that I’m still a little fuzzy about it. Silicon Valley seems to have a good deal of trouble appreciating, or even understanding, what I’ll term informal experience.\u00a0It’s only when driving is formalized \u2014 removed from everyday life, transferred to a specialized facility, performed\u00a0under\u00a0a strict set of rules, and understood as a self-contained recreational event \u2014 that it can be conceived of as being pleasurable. When it’s not a recreational routine, when it’s performed out in the world, as part of everyday life, then driving, in the Valley view, can only be understood\u00a0within the context of another formalized realm of experience: that of productive busyness. Every experience has to be cleanly defined, has to be categorized. There’s a place and a time for recreation, and there’s a place and a time for productivity.<\/p>\n

This discomfort with the informal, with experience that is psychologically unbounded, that flits between and beyond categories, can be felt in\u00a0a lot of the Valley’s consumer goods and services. Many personal apps and gadgets have the effect, or at least\u00a0the intended\u00a0effect,\u00a0of formalizing informal activities. Once you strap on a Fitbit, you transform what might have been a pleasant walk in the park into a program of physical therapy. A passing observation\u00a0that once might have earned a few fleeting smiles or shrugs before disappearing into the ether is now, thanks to the distribution systems of Facebook and Twitter, encapsulated as a product and\u00a0subjected to formal measurement; every remark\u00a0gets its own Nielsen rating.<\/p>\n

What’s the source of this crabbed view of experience? I’m not sure. It may be an expression of a certain personality type. It may be a sign\u00a0of the market’s continuing colonization of the quotidian. I’d guess it also has\u00a0something to do with the rigorously formal qualities of programming itself. The universality of the digital computer ends \u2014 comes to a crashing halt, in fact \u2014 where informality begins.<\/p>\n

Image: Burt and Sally mix their pleasures\u00a0in “Smokey and the Bandit.”<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Silicon Valley guys have a new hobby: driving fast cars around private tracks. They love it.\u00a0\u201cWhen you\u2019re really in the zone in a racecar, it\u2019s almost meditative,\u201d Google executive Jeff Huber tells the Times’s\u00a0Farhad Manjoo. Adds\u00a0Yahoo\u00a0senior vice president\u00a0Jeff Bonforte, “Your brain is so happy that it washes over you.” The Valley guys are a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5813","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5813","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5813"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5813\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5954,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5813\/revisions\/5954"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5813"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5813"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5813"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}