Road to Nowhere (Marx, Paris)
- Your Highlight on page 11 | Location 63-64 | Added on Monday, January 20, 2025 3:36:59 PM

The corporations didn’t predict a car-centric, consumerist future—they made it a reality.
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Road to Nowhere (Marx, Paris)
- Your Highlight on page 11 | Location 71-75 | Added on Monday, January 20, 2025 3:38:03 PM

Our dependence on automobiles causes us to waste long periods of time in traffic, which also brings the risk of a whole host of adverse health conditions. All those vehicles, the inefficient nature of suburban living, and the mass consumption of goods have significantly contributed to the greenhouse gas emissions that threaten the future of every being on the planet. And as we quickly cycled through low-quality goods, we also littered the lands and oceans with our trash. But it is not just the environment that has been affected.
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Road to Nowhere (Marx, Paris)
- Your Highlight on page 14 | Location 110-112 | Added on Monday, January 20, 2025 3:40:20 PM

Not only are visions of electric, hailed, autonomous, or even flying cars not new, but, rather than addressing the problems that have arisen from mass use of the automobile, tech’s purported solutions serve only to entrench them.
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Road to Nowhere (Marx, Paris)
- Your Highlight on page 14 | Location 112-117 | Added on Monday, January 20, 2025 3:40:43 PM

In the coming chapters, I will make the case that we need a better transportation system and by extension better cities—but that Silicon Valley and its various global permutations will not deliver an equitable version of automobility simply by upgrading it with new technologies. Rather, improving our mobility systems requires going deeper to address the inherently political questions that the tech industry prefers to avoid about the way we build those systems in the first place. Technology alone cannot resolve the inequities of the existing transport system, especially when the visions in question are constrained by the elite perspectives of the people dreaming them up.
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Road to Nowhere (Marx, Paris)
- Your Highlight on page 17 | Location 144-146 | Added on Tuesday, January 21, 2025 9:06:49 AM

In the postwar era, especially in the West, cities sprawled with low-density housing, making it increasingly difficult to get anywhere without owning a vehicle of one’s own. Now, after successive generations reinforcing that process, many people struggle to even imagine an alternative to the auto-oriented
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Road to Nowhere (Marx, Paris)
- Your Highlight on page 17 | Location 144-147 | Added on Tuesday, January 21, 2025 9:06:54 AM

In the postwar era, especially in the West, cities sprawled with low-density housing, making it increasingly difficult to get anywhere without owning a vehicle of one’s own. Now, after successive generations reinforcing that process, many people struggle to even imagine an alternative to the auto-oriented city. Owning
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Road to Nowhere (Marx, Paris)
- Your Highlight on page 17 | Location 144-146 | Added on Tuesday, January 21, 2025 9:07:06 AM

In the postwar era, especially in the West, cities sprawled with low-density housing, making it increasingly difficult to get anywhere without owning a vehicle of one’s own. Now, after successive generations reinforcing that process, many people struggle to even imagine an alternative to the auto-oriented city.
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Road to Nowhere (Marx, Paris)
- Your Highlight on page 20 | Location 189-191 | Added on Tuesday, January 21, 2025 9:10:41 AM

Transport researchers John Falcocchio and Herbert Levinson wrote that every time a new transport technology has taken hold, it has tended to increase travel speeds, “and each time travel speed has increased, the amount of land used for urban growth has increased and population density has decreased.”
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Road to Nowhere (Marx, Paris)
- Your Highlight on page 24 | Location 239-240 | Added on Tuesday, January 21, 2025 9:51:33 AM

Some capitalists “hoped that auto ownership would overcome class tensions by turning workers into ‘property owners,’ thus giving them a stake in capitalism.”
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Road to Nowhere (Marx, Paris)
- Your Highlight on page 24 | Location 247-249 | Added on Tuesday, January 21, 2025 9:52:31 AM

The problem that became quickly apparent as automobile numbers grew was that their size and speed were a deadly combination that did not fit within existing norms of the street as a shared space where all users moved relatively slowly.
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Road to Nowhere (Marx, Paris)
- Your Highlight on page 25 | Location 267-269 | Added on Tuesday, January 21, 2025 9:54:34 AM

There was a moral clarity in the recognition that when a driver killed a pedestrian in the 1920s, they were seen as a murderer. Today, if a pedestrian dies when venturing onto the street, people often respond by questioning why they had been there in the first place.
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Road to Nowhere (Marx, Paris)
- Your Highlight on page 26 | Location 280-281 | Added on Tuesday, January 21, 2025 9:55:58 AM

if cities successfully limited motor vehicle speeds, the main selling point of the automobile would be negated.
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Road to Nowhere (Marx, Paris)
- Your Highlight on page 28 | Location 304-308 | Added on Tuesday, January 21, 2025 10:01:11 AM

The automobile provided few benefits to the average city dweller, yet their children and family members were being killed in the street, their access was being revoked, and the benefits of this dangerous new technology were almost exclusively captured by the wealthiest residents—both in the sense of their personal ownership of automobiles, and in how they were often reaping profits from associated industries. Residents had no power to shut down the companies, so
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Road to Nowhere (Marx, Paris)
- Your Highlight on page 28 | Location 304-307 | Added on Tuesday, January 21, 2025 10:01:20 AM

The automobile provided few benefits to the average city dweller, yet their children and family members were being killed in the street, their access was being revoked, and the benefits of this dangerous new technology were almost exclusively captured by the wealthiest residents—both in the sense of their personal ownership of automobiles, and in how they were often reaping profits from associated industries.
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Road to Nowhere (Marx, Paris)
- Your Highlight on page 30 | Location 327-329 | Added on Tuesday, January 21, 2025 10:02:46 AM

General Motors, Standard Oil of California, and Firestone Tire Company formed a bus company called National City Lines in the 1930s to buy up streetcar networks around the country, dismantle them, and replace them with buses. The consortium was convicted of conspiracy under US antitrust laws in 1949, but it was too late; by the late 1950s, nearly all the streetcars across the country had been dismantled.
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Road to Nowhere (Marx, Paris)
- Your Highlight on page 34 | Location 388-390 | Added on Tuesday, January 21, 2025 10:06:40 AM

In April 1972, an article in the New York Times declared that “since World War II, few special interests have been so spectacularly successful, few pressure groups have had such a secure half nelson on Government expenditures, as the collection of businesses and officials that make up the highway lobby.”
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Road to Nowhere (Marx, Paris)
- Your Highlight on page 38 | Location 455-460 | Added on Tuesday, January 21, 2025 10:11:10 AM

Zoning policies that were originally embraced because they were perceived to be good for business homogenized different areas of cities, regulated the built environment as a means of excluding undesirable people from certain neighborhoods, and were ultimately justified in the name of increasing property values. They had the effect of breaking the city up into distinct zones designed for specific uses, such as separating residential neighborhoods from where people worked and where they engaged in leisure activities. In pulling apart aspects of urban life that were once integrated, the city was sanitized. It became difficult to get anywhere without a car, and a side effect of that was the severing of social and community bonds that were much more common before the entrenchment of suburban living.
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Road to Nowhere (Marx, Paris)
- Your Highlight on page 41 | Location 500-500 | Added on Tuesday, January 21, 2025 10:13:26 AM

have been cause for protest. But
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Road to Nowhere (Marx, Paris)
- Your Highlight on page 41 | Location 500-503 | Added on Tuesday, January 21, 2025 10:13:34 AM

In the early twentieth century, traffic deaths might have been cause for protest. But after a century, our values have changed to make us less concerned about the other people in our communities and more focused on what is best for us as individuals. In 2019, researchers in Australia found that 55 percent of non-cyclists perceived cyclists as “less than human,”41 which justified the aggressive actions taken by drivers when they encounter cyclists on the road.
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Road to Nowhere (Marx, Paris)
- Your Highlight on page 42 | Location 509-514 | Added on Tuesday, January 21, 2025 10:14:13 AM

Gorz’s observation is connected to sociologist John Urry’s claim that the automobile was the “‘iron cage’ of modernity” in both a literal sense due to how it enclosed the driver, turning people into “anonymized flows of faceless ghostly machines,” but also because of how it constrained people “to live their lives in spatially stretched and time-compressed ways.”43 The truth was that, far from offering individual freedom, the automobile made drivers incredibly dependent on a whole host of commercial interests.
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Road to Nowhere (Marx, Paris)
- Your Highlight on page 47 | Location 569-574 | Added on Tuesday, January 21, 2025 12:17:20 PM

In these few sentences, Jobs linked the personal computer to the most important ideological aspect of the automobile: its association with individual freedom. The personal computer was being positioned as a device that “offers its power to the individual.” In the same way that the automobile could take the driver anywhere they wanted to go, the personal computer would put its “electronic intelligence” at the disposal of its individual owner to help them “deal with the complexities of modern society.” These new machines were “tools, not toys,” and would “do as much for the individual as the big computers did for the corporation in the 60s and 70s.”
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Road to Nowhere (Marx, Paris)
- Your Highlight on page 54 | Location 681-688 | Added on Friday, January 24, 2025 3:52:29 PM

Critical scholars Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron dubbed the ideology that grew out of this movement, especially as it found common cause with the neoliberal policies of the 1980s, the “Californian Ideology.” The way of thinking it embodied “simultaneously reflects the disciplines of market economics and the freedoms of hippie artisanship. This bizarre hybrid is only made possible through a nearly universal belief in technological determinism.”10 The counterculture’s aversion to politics was central to the Californian Ideology. Its adherents believed social change would happen by engaging in the market and trusting in the process of technological development to empower not only the individual, but also the wider world. The path to a better world was no longer in retreating from society or simply engaging with corporate America, but faith was also put in technology itself as the means to address social and economic challenges.
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Road to Nowhere (Marx, Paris)
- Your Highlight on page 59 | Location 752-753 | Added on Friday, January 24, 2025 3:58:39 PM

“our lives rest precariously on systems that have become so complex, and we have yielded so much of it to technologies and autonomous actors that no one totally comprehends it all.”
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Road to Nowhere (Marx, Paris)
- Your Highlight on page 59 | Location 751-753 | Added on Friday, January 24, 2025 3:59:51 PM

over functions that previously had at least some human role. “From social media to the global economy to supply chains,” Maughan explained, “our lives rest precariously on systems that have become so complex, and we have yielded so much of it to technologies and autonomous actors that no one totally comprehends it all.”
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Road to Nowhere (Marx, Paris)
- Your Highlight on page 59 | Location 751-753 | Added on Friday, January 24, 2025 4:00:00 PM

“From social media to the global economy to supply chains,” Maughan explained, “our lives rest precariously on systems that have become so complex, and we have yielded so much of it to technologies and autonomous actors that no one totally comprehends it all.”
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Road to Nowhere (Marx, Paris)
- Your Highlight on page 59 | Location 751-758 | Added on Friday, January 24, 2025 4:00:17 PM

“From social media to the global economy to supply chains,” Maughan explained, “our lives rest precariously on systems that have become so complex, and we have yielded so much of it to technologies and autonomous actors that no one totally comprehends it all.”18 These systems are designed to speed up transactions and interactions in service of efficiency, but, in the process, we have given up a lot of democratic power over them, even as we have failed to equip those systems with “an ability to make ethical decisions and moral judgments.”19 The stock market, where automation has increased both the speed and quantity of trades, is an example of this, but the best one is the system of logistics and global supply chains that has been built out over the past fifty years.
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Road to Nowhere (Marx, Paris)
- Your Highlight on page 64 | Location 826-827 | Added on Friday, January 24, 2025 4:06:33 PM

Wired’s pages served as a meeting place for the tech industry and the socially conservative Republicans who shared their desire for an internet free of government control or regulation. After it was founded in 1993,
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Road to Nowhere (Marx, Paris)
- Your Highlight on page 64 | Location 826-831 | Added on Friday, January 24, 2025 4:06:51 PM

Wired’s pages served as a meeting place for the tech industry and the socially conservative Republicans who shared their desire for an internet free of government control or regulation. After it was founded in 1993, the magazine engaged in “a cycle of mutual legitimation” with the ascendant Christian right wing, placing figures such as Newt Gingrich and anti-evolution telecommunications analyst George Gilder on its cover.26 As it declared Gingrich a “wired” politician, it also helped to legitimize calls for tax cuts, deregulation, and an embrace of a more “flexible” work culture, while imbuing the so-called “New Right” of the Republican Party with the countercultural ethos.
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Road to Nowhere (Marx, Paris)
- Your Highlight on page 65 | Location 833-835 | Added on Friday, January 24, 2025 4:07:18 PM

Instead of being an employee with security, benefits, and a union, a worker would be a self-employed agent that joined a company for a particular project, then went back to searching for their next one. This was embraced by Whole Earth’s adherents.
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Road to Nowhere (Marx, Paris)
- Your Highlight on page 65 | Location 839-845 | Added on Friday, January 24, 2025 4:08:08 PM

From its privileged position, the tech industry’s embrace of right-wing economic policies failed to consider how lower working standards would affect workers who did not share their privilege—the outcomes of which are arguably most visible through the app-based gig work that grew in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis and subsequent recession. But, even more than that, the new narratives they embraced about the power of technology to promote economic growth and market-based innovation downplayed the role of government in enabling the development of most of the technologies that they profited from in the first place, and even how many of the businesses that now dominate the Valley received public support.
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Road to Nowhere (Marx, Paris)
- Your Highlight on page 66 | Location 852-855 | Added on Friday, January 24, 2025 4:09:12 PM

Economist Mariana Mazzucato has outlined how many of the technologies necessary for the iPod, and later the iPhone, were simply the commercialization of research that was done within or funded by public bodies over the course of decades, including everything from touchscreens and gesture control to batteries and displays.
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Road to Nowhere (Marx, Paris)
- Your Highlight on page 68 | Location 875-880 | Added on Friday, January 24, 2025 4:11:03 PM

was happening in discourse around the internet. The optimistic language used to “portray cyberspace as a new frontier, a melting pot, and as democratic public space where anyone can talk to anyone else and all are created equal” was inspiring, but it was not accurate. Echoing Hermosillo, Light explained that when virtual communities are under private ownership, “these agora function only in their commercial sense; the sense of the market space as site for civic life is subject to strict controls.”31 These early critical accounts of the nature of digital communities on a privatized network subject to commercial pressures were a warning of what was to come.
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Road to Nowhere (Marx, Paris)
- Your Highlight on page 69 | Location 893-901 | Added on Friday, January 24, 2025 4:12:20 PM

Security Agency. The degree of surveillance, enclosure, and commercialization on the internet was normalized over the course of several decades as narratives about the emancipatory potential of technology and the power of free markets were embraced by powerful interest groups that have no wish to see the status quo disrupted. Silicon Valley capitalists who have benefited from the commercialization of all this public research and the deregulation of the economy are able to influence the public—through tech publications and tech verticals at major media organizations—to think that the digital ecosystem we have today is the natural result of innovation and that technological progress can only take the form that serves their bottom line. Meanwhile, politicians from both major political parties in the United States developed financial ties to the tech industry and fear negative economic impacts from disrupting its monopolies. But this narrow perspective not only affects the way they see the future; it also risks extending these technologies more extensively into physical space as the new dominant industry seeks to reshape the physical environment to suit its interests.
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Road to Nowhere (Marx, Paris)
- Your Highlight on page 70 | Location 909-919 | Added on Friday, January 24, 2025 4:13:42 PM

benefits wealthy executives of any background. Tech critic Evgeny Morozov argued that the approach of these powerful figures creates a quest for technofixes that do not address the real problems we face. He called this “technological solutionism” and defined it as “an unhealthy preoccupation with sexy, monumental, and narrow-minded solutions—the kind of stuff that wows audiences at TED Conferences—to problems that are extremely complex, fluid, and contentious.”34 Part of the problem is that the executives, venture capitalists, and other important figures associated with the tech industry do not take the time to understand the real problems they claim to seek to solve, and instead make assumptions about serious issues and their root causes to legitimize preconceived technological solutions. As Morozov put it: what many solutionists presume to be “problems” in need of solving are not problems at all; a deeper investigation into the very nature of these “problems” would reveal that the inefficiency, ambiguity, and opacity—whether in politics or everyday life—that the newly empowered geeks and solutionists are rallying against are not in any sense problematic.
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Road to Nowhere (Marx, Paris)
- Your Highlight on page 70 | Location 909-919 | Added on Friday, January 24, 2025 4:13:51 PM

Tech critic Evgeny Morozov argued that the approach of these powerful figures creates a quest for technofixes that do not address the real problems we face. He called this “technological solutionism” and defined it as “an unhealthy preoccupation with sexy, monumental, and narrow-minded solutions—the kind of stuff that wows audiences at TED Conferences—to problems that are extremely complex, fluid, and contentious.”34 Part of the problem is that the executives, venture capitalists, and other important figures associated with the tech industry do not take the time to understand the real problems they claim to seek to solve, and instead make assumptions about serious issues and their root causes to legitimize preconceived technological solutions. As Morozov put it: what many solutionists presume to be “problems” in need of solving are not problems at all; a deeper investigation into the very nature of these “problems” would reveal that the inefficiency, ambiguity, and opacity—whether in politics or everyday life—that the newly empowered geeks and solutionists are rallying against are not in any sense problematic.
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Road to Nowhere (Marx, Paris)
- Your Highlight on page 73 | Location 954-961 | Added on Friday, January 24, 2025 4:16:25 PM

Social media can be compared to automobility, but not in the way Mosseri chose to frame it. Instead, we should recognize how Facebook, Instagram, and other social media platforms have reshaped our communications networks and how we use them to serve their business interests. The negative consequences generated by that transformation—whether it is the harmful influence on teenagers, broader political questions about the kind of information they choose to amplify, or any number of other concerns that people have—are not mistakes that have arisen in a benevolent campaign to connect the world, but the product of placing growth, profits, and power ahead of the common good. As tech companies seek to extend their footprint into the physical world, those same forces are driving them, and that influences how they believe future cities should look—and, by extension, who they should serve.
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Road to Nowhere (Marx, Paris)
- Your Highlight on page 84 | Location 1084-1091 | Added on Saturday, January 25, 2025 6:51:18 AM

Indeed, Kirsch has argued that the focus on the internal combustion engine misses the bigger picture about automobiles: there is no such thing as an environmentally friendly automotive technology … The social, financial, and environmental threats we now face as a result of our reliance on refined petroleum are not the fault of internal combustion technology per se but of the massive expansion of the automobile transport system.3 In other words, the problem with automobility is not solely the fuel that powers it, but the way that companies and governments have successfully reoriented our entire lives around automobiles and, in many cases, have decimated more efficient alternatives.
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Road to Nowhere (Marx, Paris)
- Your Highlight on page 84 | Location 1093-1098 | Added on Saturday, January 25, 2025 6:52:48 AM

The truth is that the electric vehicle, whether produced by Tesla, General Motors, or any other company, will not address the fundamental problems with a transportation system built around automobiles. In the same way that the fossil fuel infrastructure that spans the globe has been recognized as a threat to the climate and to human life itself, especially the people who live near the sites where it is extracted and refined, the mining industry has begun a significant expansion to support the mass production of electric vehicles, and it too will create mass suffering and environmental damage unless we address the role of passenger vehicles in our transportation system and prioritize mobility that is more efficient, both in its resource use and in the way it operates.
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Road to Nowhere (Marx, Paris)
- Your Highlight on page 92 | Location 1209-1215 | Added on Saturday, January 25, 2025 7:12:41 AM

But the United States is also looking to its north for significant mineral imports. A US government source told Reuters that it sees Canada as “a kind of ‘51st State’ for mineral supply purposes,”16 and, given the continental integration of automotive manufacturing, it is no surprise to see Canada embracing a similar plan. In September 2020, the Canadian government announced its intention to become a world leader in battery manufacturing for electric vehicles by expanding domestic mining operations. That plan was affirmed when Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau met virtually with President Biden in February 2021 and agreed to work collaboratively “to build the necessary supply chains to make Canada and the United States global leaders in all aspects of battery development and production.”
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Road to Nowhere (Marx, Paris)
- Your Highlight on page 97 | Location 1285-1288 | Added on Saturday, January 25, 2025 7:19:40 AM

The particulate matter remains in the vicinity of where the vehicle is driven, but there is a final environmental and social justice concern that accompanies the adoption of electric vehicles. In a similar way to how extraction is outsourced to areas where most drivers will not see it, the emissions for the electricity that powers the vehicles could also be disproportionately shifted to poorer and rural communities where power plants are more likely to be located.
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Road to Nowhere (Marx, Paris)
- Your Highlight on page 97 | Location 1285-1292 | Added on Saturday, January 25, 2025 7:20:09 AM

The particulate matter remains in the vicinity of where the vehicle is driven, but there is a final environmental and social justice concern that accompanies the adoption of electric vehicles. In a similar way to how extraction is outsourced to areas where most drivers will not see it, the emissions for the electricity that powers the vehicles could also be disproportionately shifted to poorer and rural communities where power plants are more likely to be located. That means that wealthier communities that are more likely to adopt electric vehicles will have less pollution from vehicle tailpipes, but the pollution produced from charging their vehicles every night will be breathed in by people who are more likely to be living close to the facilities that generate the power, and when those processes uses fossil fuels, the nearby residents—who are more likely to have lower incomes, be racial minorities, and still be driving vehicles with internal combustion engines—will shoulder the burden of the air pollution.
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Road to Nowhere (Marx, Paris)
- Your Highlight on page 98 | Location 1297-1300 | Added on Saturday, January 25, 2025 7:20:40 AM

A more equitable, environmentally conscious transportation system will ultimately require reducing the use of automobiles, regardless of what powers them, and embracing other forms of mobility that not only produce fewer emission per person but offer a path to reimagining our communities in a way that does not need to make room for cars.
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Road to Nowhere (Marx, Paris)
- Your Highlight on page 99 | Location 1310-1311 | Added on Saturday, January 25, 2025 7:21:38 AM

Anyone who sees the transition through a lens of social and environmental justice, instead of just an opportunity to extract economic gains, must recognize that it offers a rare chance to rethink how these systems are organized.
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Road to Nowhere (Marx, Paris)
- Your Highlight on page 99 | Location 1310-1315 | Added on Saturday, January 25, 2025 7:21:52 AM

Anyone who sees the transition through a lens of social and environmental justice, instead of just an opportunity to extract economic gains, must recognize that it offers a rare chance to rethink how these systems are organized. As Kirsch has noted, the core problem with the mass adoption of personal vehicles is not that they use fossil fuels, but that they are inherently unsustainable because of the sprawling communities they require and how inefficiently they use resources. We must avoid making the mistake of ignoring the global environmental footprint of building more than a billion electric vehicles to replace all the personal vehicles on the world’s roads simply because the serious harms that will be produced by such an endeavor will be out of sight of most consumers.
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Road to Nowhere (Marx, Paris)
- Your Highlight on page 101 | Location 1331-1335 | Added on Saturday, January 25, 2025 7:22:56 AM

Instead of trying to have personal electric vehicles match the scale of personal gas or diesel vehicles, the emphasis should instead be on getting people to shift from driving to taking transit and cycling, while building more walkable communities where necessities are closer to home. For example, electric buses and bikes use far fewer minerals per person than personal vehicles, and the size of batteries in buses can be further reduced if there are overhead wires from which they can charge en route, instead of just while parked at the depot.
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Road to Nowhere (Marx, Paris)
- Your Highlight on page 112 | Location 1487-1488 | Added on Saturday, January 25, 2025 2:37:47 PM

every mile of a trip completed with a personal vehicle would require 2.8 miles of driving in a private hailed trip or 2.6 miles in a pooled trip—
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Road to Nowhere (Marx, Paris)
- Your Highlight on page 112 | Location 1495-1496 | Added on Saturday, January 25, 2025 2:38:31 PM

Multiple studies have found that Uber not only induces more travel, but encourages people who would otherwise take transit, cycle, or walk to their destination to instead get in a hailed vehicle.
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Road to Nowhere (Marx, Paris)
- Your Highlight on page 113 | Location 1501-1502 | Added on Saturday, January 25, 2025 2:39:20 PM

people using Uber were very unlikely to get rid of their personal vehicles.
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Road to Nowhere (Marx, Paris)
- Your Highlight on page 116 | Location 1551-1554 | Added on Saturday, January 25, 2025 2:43:13 PM

The Uber model built on the leasing model of the 1970s by ensuring drivers were independent contractors that the company had no obligations toward. Only now, instead of providing vehicles and insurance as taxi companies do under the leasing model, all those costs and the associated risks were outsourced to drivers.
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Road to Nowhere (Marx, Paris)
- Your Highlight on page 122 | Location 1634-1635 | Added on Saturday, January 25, 2025 2:49:19 PM

Uber could not fulfill its promises to reduce congestion and solve other urban problems, nor could it give drivers a good living with a stable income.
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Road to Nowhere (Marx, Paris)
- Your Highlight on page 124 | Location 1656-1657 | Added on Saturday, January 25, 2025 2:50:41 PM

By operating on a national and then a global scale, Uber could draw on many more resources in its fight against the taxi companies and drivers who operated in just a single city or region.
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Road to Nowhere (Marx, Paris)
- Your Highlight on page 127 | Location 1697-1699 | Added on Saturday, January 25, 2025 2:54:00 PM

Dubal called Proposition 22 “the most radical undoing of labor legislation since Taft-Hartley in 1947,”28 a federal bill that restricted the activities and power of unions, and its full effects remain to be seen.
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Road to Nowhere (Marx, Paris)
- Your Highlight on page 128 | Location 1710-1711 | Added on Saturday, January 25, 2025 2:54:51 PM

More technology and regulatory rollbacks do not solve fundamentally political problems; they just allow wealthy, powerful people to impose their will on everyone else.
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Road to Nowhere (Marx, Paris)
- Your Highlight on page 143 | Location 1923-1929 | Added on Sunday, January 26, 2025 10:26:57 AM

The assumption of many autonomous vehicle boosters is that they will reduce the number of necessary parking spaces, which will free up space for development, increase urban density, and reduce suburban sprawl—but that is not guaranteed. Depending on how autonomous vehicles are priced, they could incentivize longer commutes, especially if riders see them as more comfortable because they will not have to drive, allowing them to use their phones, watch videos, sleep, or do any number of other things. For a company like Google, whose primary source of revenue is advertising, having a large captive audience to which it can serve ads throughout their journeys could be an attractive expansion of that segment of its business. But other capitalist dynamics may also push people farther out from the urban core rather than bringing them in.
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Road to Nowhere (Marx, Paris)
- Your Highlight on page 145 | Location 1945-1946 | Added on Sunday, January 26, 2025 10:33:00 AM

Infinite Detail, Tim Maughan
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Road to Nowhere (Marx, Paris)
- Your Highlight on page 147 | Location 1978-1984 | Added on Sunday, January 26, 2025 10:35:01 AM

Further, placing so much of the transportation system under the control of algorithmic planners creates risks similar to those that exist in shipping networks: not only can everything be tracked, but they are also vulnerable to cyberattack and other means of failure. The argument for autonomous vehicles suggests that the only way to rectify the serious problems that exist in transportation systems is to heavily digitize their operation and ensure every aspect is constantly tracked and managed—yet that does not guarantee that any of the problems we are grappling with will be effectively addressed. Over many decades, racist and discriminatory policies have shaped cities and their social fabrics, and automated driving systems could simply entrench those patterns.
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Road to Nowhere (Marx, Paris)
- Your Highlight on page 153 | Location 2056-2059 | Added on Sunday, January 26, 2025 10:41:09 AM

technologies developed within the context of a transportation system designed to serve automobiles before pedestrians will replicate the problems with those systems; they will not solve them. Anyone hoping to fix the problems with the existing transportation system and the broader urban landscape that has evolved out of it must dig deeper into the roots of those problems instead of mistakenly believing that adding new technological solutions will address them.
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Road to Nowhere (Marx, Paris)
- Your Highlight on page 159 | Location 2135-2139 | Added on Monday, January 27, 2025 4:09:46 PM

As more space was made for cars on existing streets, new roads built for them, and eventually freeway systems that cemented their supremacy, each of those actions was not just responding to demand but inducing greater demand for automobiles and places to drive them. As traffic got worse, those demands increased, and the additional roads built as a result only served to make the problem worse again: not only were people incentivized to drive more, but communities were constructed with the assumption that everyone would drive, thereby closing off access to alternatives.
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Road to Nowhere (Marx, Paris)
- Your Highlight on page 168 | Location 2264-2270 | Added on Monday, January 27, 2025 4:21:46 PM

After reviewing how the system developed, it is impossible to conclude anything other than its plan was never to solve congestion for everyone, but for one person in particular: Elon Musk. The Boring Company was yet another case of elite projection, where Musk framed a tunnel that would be personally convenient as something that could work for everyone. In fact, the first tunnel that Musk proposed was supposed to run along Interstate 405—the same one that Los Angeles had widened to try to reduce traffic congestion—from an area near Musk’s then-residence in Bel Air to SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne where he usually worked. It was a tunnel to allow him to evade traffic on his daily commute that he built a larger vision around—one that allowed him to sell it not just to the public and the media, but to the lawmakers whose approvals he would need to make it a reality.
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Road to Nowhere (Marx, Paris)
- Your Highlight on page 175 | Location 2370-2374 | Added on Monday, January 27, 2025 4:28:57 PM

In 1973, as André Gorz wrote about the automobile as a luxury object, he also observed that it “has made the big city uninhabitable.” It has made it stinking, noisy, suffocating, dusty, so congested that nobody wants to go out in the evening anymore. Thus, since cars have killed the city, we need faster cars to escape on superhighways to suburbs that are even farther away. What an impeccable circular argument: give us more cars so that we can escape the destruction caused by cars.
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Road to Nowhere (Marx, Paris)
- Your Highlight on page 186 | Location 2513-2515 | Added on Tuesday, January 28, 2025 4:50:13 PM

As one former employee told Gordon, not having to lock the bikes and scooters at the end of the ride “turns the vehicles into trash and blocks the sidewalk, which is both bad for business and bad for cities.”
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Road to Nowhere (Marx, Paris)
- Your Highlight on page 197 | Location 2671-2677 | Added on Tuesday, January 28, 2025 5:00:33 PM

Too often, governments stand back and allow the tech industry to roll out whatever ideas its executives and engineers can dream up. There is an assumption that whatever tech companies want is inevitable—it is the future—and that neither governments, traditional companies, nor even the public should stand in their way. But after more than a decade of their push into urban space, we need to reset our assumptions. Their ideas of the future are not the only path forward, and they often benefit people like themselves at the expense of low-income and marginalized residents. That is not the way to create more equitable communities; instead it allows the tech sector to shape our existence to serve their narrow interests.
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Road to Nowhere (Marx, Paris)
- Your Highlight on page 198 | Location 2690-2693 | Added on Tuesday, January 28, 2025 5:01:32 PM

The technologies unleashed by Silicon Valley are not neutral. They contain within them the worldviews of the people who develop them; and when they go unquestioned, we allow those very people to make important decisions about how and for whom our society should operate without any democratic deliberation. When we assume that technology can only develop in one way, we accept the power of the people who control that process, but there is no guarantee that their ideal world is one that truly works for everyone.
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Road to Nowhere (Marx, Paris)
- Your Highlight on page 198 | Location 2690-2697 | Added on Tuesday, January 28, 2025 5:01:47 PM

The technologies unleashed by Silicon Valley are not neutral. They contain within them the worldviews of the people who develop them; and when they go unquestioned, we allow those very people to make important decisions about how and for whom our society should operate without any democratic deliberation. When we assume that technology can only develop in one way, we accept the power of the people who control that process, but there is no guarantee that their ideal world is one that truly works for everyone. They champion ideas that would ensure that automobiles continue to dominate our transportation system, that active mobility becomes a rentier service as its adoption grows, and that sidewalks are converted into a space for robots instead of people. Such a future would be hostile to the goal of more egalitarian cities and would make us more dependent on commercial interests rather than trying to free us from their control. The futures suggested by the technologies profiled so far are not the kind of world we should be striving toward.
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Road to Nowhere (Marx, Paris)
- Your Highlight on page 207 | Location 2812-2815 | Added on Wednesday, January 29, 2025 5:48:09 PM

In the pages that follow, I will outline three future scenarios that are far more realistic and illustrate the world that is being created: first, it is even more segregated based on income; second, it is even more hostile to pedestrians; and third, it wants to use unaccountable technological systems to control even more aspects of our lives.
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Road to Nowhere (Marx, Paris)
- Your Highlight on page 210 | Location 2857-2858 | Added on Wednesday, January 29, 2025 5:51:08 PM

Elon Musk’s future cities and transport networks are not for us.
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Road to Nowhere (Marx, Paris)
- Your Highlight on page 213 | Location 2899-2903 | Added on Wednesday, January 29, 2025 5:53:20 PM

In the same way that the urban landscape was sanitized to make way for the automobile, a similar process will be necessary to make way for the frictionless world of technologically mediated consumption that tech companies desire to usher in. There are benefits to some forms of on-demand services and ecommerce, but the way they are designed and implemented under capitalism does not enrich communities, nor make them more equitable. Rather, they take away the human elements that are perceived as friction and hollow out our social existence.
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Road to Nowhere (Marx, Paris)
- Your Highlight on page 216 | Location 2935-2937 | Added on Wednesday, January 29, 2025 5:55:14 PM

In 2015, journalist Lauren Smiley described the growing on-demand, app-based economy as the shut-in economy, where “you’re either pampered, isolated royalty—or you’re a 21st century servant.”
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Road to Nowhere (Marx, Paris)
- Your Highlight on page 216 | Location 2935-2941 | Added on Wednesday, January 29, 2025 5:55:42 PM

In 2015, journalist Lauren Smiley described the growing on-demand, app-based economy as the shut-in economy, where “you’re either pampered, isolated royalty—or you’re a 21st century servant.”10 Smiley observed that San Francisco was increasingly divided into two groups. On one side were the tech workers and a broader group of “knowledge” workers who earned high salaries, worked long hours, and used the gig apps to get everything from food delivery and laundry services to house cleaning, dog walking, and childcare. On the other was the contract labor force that delivered those services with few protections, no benefits, and precariously low pay. But the apps allowed the served to ignore the conditions of their app-based servants. They could even avoid seeing them altogether.
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Road to Nowhere (Marx, Paris)
- Your Highlight on page 218 | Location 2973-2977 | Added on Wednesday, January 29, 2025 5:57:41 PM

There is a direct transfer of power from residents to the tech companies in the app-based city, and as control over interactions and transactions shifts to vast technological systems, there is also a loss of accountability. In exchange for frictionlessness for people who have reaped the benefits of the modern economy, there are growing barriers for those who have not—barriers that can quickly appear where they did not previously exist, and which cannot easily be resolved because they are controlled by algorithms instead of human beings.
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Road to Nowhere (Marx, Paris)
- Your Highlight on page 227 | Location 3089-3089 | Added on Thursday, January 30, 2025 9:20:44 AM

Le Guin
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Road to Nowhere (Marx, Paris)
- Your Highlight on page 234 | Location 3201-3201 | Added on Thursday, January 30, 2025 9:29:00 AM

they can extract from society. If there was ever a time when companies paid heed to the well-being of communities, it is long past. Modern
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Road to Nowhere (Marx, Paris)
- Your Highlight on page 234 | Location 3201-3204 | Added on Thursday, January 30, 2025 9:29:33 AM

If there was ever a time when companies paid heed to the well-being of communities, it is long past. Modern corporate culture is a parasitic force, and one that only gets worse as digital rentier services are rolled out in more aspects of our lives. Building better cities requires taking housing, transport, and other essential services out of the market altogether, and running them as public services with democratic accountability.
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Road to Nowhere (Marx, Paris)
- Your Highlight on page 242 | Location 3312-3316 | Added on Thursday, January 30, 2025 9:41:58 AM

The shift to suburban living in the postwar period and the mass consumption that accompanied it also contributed to the erosion of community spaces. As distances got longer and people were pushed to individually build private wealth, there was less incentive to maintain the public sphere. Wealthy and even middle-class residents had their own lawns, so they no longer went to public parks, and they got their own swimming pools to avoid community pools. They built in-home gyms to avoid public gyms, and even in-home cinema rooms are becoming a more popular alternative to visiting the movie theater.
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Road to Nowhere (Marx, Paris)
- Your Highlight on page 246 | Location 3369-3372 | Added on Thursday, January 30, 2025 9:47:11 AM

Better futures are possible, but they will not be delivered through technological advancement alone. They require engaging with the problems of our time and recognizing that they do not exist simply because we do not have the requisite technology to solve them. Addressing the inequities and harms of our world does not require the invention of new technologies; it requires a new politics that recognizes economic growth and technological innovation do not guarantee social progress.
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Road to Nowhere (Marx, Paris)
- Your Highlight on page 254 | Location 3475-3479 | Added on Thursday, January 30, 2025 9:51:22 AM

Ultimately, building better cities and improving people’s lives requires challenging the very structures of capitalism itself, structures that are designed to serve profit before people. We can build transportation systems that empower people, facilitate social connections, and reduce the environmental footprint of mobility. But that requires altering social and economic relations to ensure the planning of those systems is based in community needs, not delivering financial returns.
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