#thoughtsonthepresent — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #thoughtsonthepresent, aggregated by home.social.
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For those of you unfamiliar with it, the term Jaywalking [1] has its roots in a campaign by automobile manufacturers in the 1920s to combat a perceived notion that cars were unsafe for use in peopled areas. Through an aggressive campaign around the operation of multi-ton metal death machines, shifting the blame for accidents from motorists to pedestrians, automobile companies were able to normalize the externalities of cars.
The resulting urban sprawl has plagued major cities for generations, with major European cities (e.g., Amsterdam) only managing to dig themselves out over the past few decades. Most American cities continue to optimize around residents shackled to car ownership.
However, all this is in the past. The work to dig us out of that hole continues, well over a century later. I would hope that we would learn something from the experience.
I would hope that we would reject any other corporate campaign to normalize a popularly disliked technology, perhaps with a very similar vibe of pollution and social disruption. I would hope that we would keep similar [adjective] [noun] constructs pejoratively focused on the purveyors of such slop.
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For those of you unfamiliar with it, the term Jaywalking [1] has its roots in a campaign by automobile manufacturers in the 1920s to combat a perceived notion that cars were unsafe for use in peopled areas. Through an aggressive campaign around the operation of multi-ton metal death machines, shifting the blame for accidents from motorists to pedestrians, automobile companies were able to normalize the externalities of cars.
The resulting urban sprawl has plagued major cities for generations, with major European cities (e.g., Amsterdam) only managing to dig themselves out over the past few decades. Most American cities continue to optimize around residents shackled to car ownership.
However, all this is in the past. The work to dig us out of that hole continues, well over a century later. I would hope that we would learn something from the experience.
I would hope that we would reject any other corporate campaign to normalize a popularly disliked technology, perhaps with a very similar vibe of pollution and social disruption. I would hope that we would keep similar [adjective] [noun] constructs pejoratively focused on the purveyors of such slop.