You are reading a single comment by @hippy and its replies.
Click here to read the full conversation.
London Fixed Gear and Single-Speed is a community of predominantly fixed gear and single-speed cyclists in and around London, UK.
This site is supported almost exclusively by donations. Please consider donating a small amount regularly.
hippy
Fixed.
I agree with the general thrust of what you say, of course, but to make some pedantic points--I don't think trains should be completely free, but that there should not be an expectation to make any kind of profit from them, keeping the amount that needs to be invested every year at a manageable level, of course.
Also, some people rely on cars for quite legitimate reasons, e.g. people with mobility difficulties, and for them driving certainly shouldn't cost a fortune.
Motorised transport is a good thing but we have absolutely no idea how to use it properly. I always think some of that comes from all the bullshit spewed by 'science fiction' writers largely in the 20th century, although most were, of course taking their cue from Jules Verne.
In Verne's work, the machines were always a tool to explore a then largely unknown (-feeling) vast world of huge complexity, whether going to the 'centre of the Earth' (obviously not), travelling 20,000 leagues under the sea, travelling around the world in 80 days, etc. Obviously, Verne also wrote very different books, but these are among his most famous.
However, he and his successors established a deep-seated cultural core in which the use of machines (as opposed to, say, hand tools) is a superior way of living to not using them. Most people, when asked, will give some specific reason for why they use a car or a plane or whatever, but that conditions have become such that these reasons exist in the first place is a product of said culture alone.
Fascination with machines isn't as new as that, of course, and you could probably go back much further than Albertus Magnus to detect it if written records existed. Nor are machines all bad. Still, if we're ever going to get back to some situation in which we think more carefully of which part of our identities we transfer into machines ('saving' work, 'AI' and all that), that culture of machine modernism, whose roots in turn lie in the nonsensical pseudo-philosophy of René Descartes, has to be tackled at the root.
* Heavy hippy Vehicle