It took two years of heavy use for the Capitol Hill Station to start crumbling. The screens that announce train arrivals are dying, one by one. And when they work, the information is often baffling or wrong. The sound of the wind in the tunnels often provides better information about trains than the hanging monitors, which run on Microsoft’s software—something I discovered when one was rebooting after a crash. And let’s not get into the escalators. That’s another long story. But what does it mean that an important node in Seattle’s transportation system (it is Link’s third-busiest station) is already falling apart, already becoming a ruin? Before I answer that, I want to turn your attention to Mayor Jenny Durkan.
We have never seen so much fire in this otherwise insipid personality, than in its mounting attacks on shared e-scooters. Now she is alive. They are really dangerous, she warns. A bunch of doctors say so. Trauma! How can we stop the e-scooter mania!? You will not find such passion in the search for a new director of the important and crucial SDOT. No. Nor is there any passion for expanding and improving the city’s primitive bike infrastructure. The thrill is gone for the Streetcar. But all of this adds up. This deterioration of the new Link stations, this passion against scooters, the retardation or elimination of future plans for protected bike lanes—this is systemic. There is real political, structural, and economic pressure to make alternatives to cars sub-par or non-existent. That’s what the dead screen at the Capitol Hill Station is all about.
The cultural philosopher Slavoj Žižek has an idea that is interesting. He is fascinated by recent scientific experiments that have successfully controlled the movements of mice remotely. It “requires the implantation of specially built DNA strands and nanoparticles which attach to specific neurons” that “can be remotely controlled via an alternating magnetic field.” (Žižek discusses the social, political, and philosophical consequences of this nightmarish research in his new and wonderfully messy book, Like a Thief in Broad Daylight.)
The main philosophical question is: Does the remotely controlled mouse consider its movements as self-willed or willed by an external force? It might be hard to tell. There is a murky area between conscious and unconscious actions. There is an even more murky area between self and not-self. How can one determine, with certainty, if the source of a command is from within or from outside the body? Indeed, many of the things we say or believe do not directly come from inside of us, but have in fact been implanted there, not physically but culturally. An example of this is none other than Jenny Durkan’s passionate attack of e-scooters.
Is she really speaking for herself? There is good reason to believe she is not. Why? It only takes the most basic examination of her reasoning to see its disconnections and contradictions. She is not really thinking about what she is saying because it is plain to see that cars, not scooters, are a much, much greater danger to human life and limbs in this and all other cities in the US. As Doug Trumm of the Urbanist pointed out recently: “…the mayor signaled out e-scooters as the safety menace on our streets in a nation where 37,000 people die annually in car crashes.” Is this really a person talking through their own person? Are we hearing the real Jenny or is an external power forcing these strong words through her mouth and exciting this passion in her eyes?
Durkan has the appearance of a remotely controlled mouse, but without the implants. General Motors, Chrysler, Ford, Toyota, and so on use social engineering (or, better yet, cultural engineering) to remotely control the mouths of voters and news commentators and mayors.
“No helmet, no experience; it goes 18 miles per hour… I think they can be fun for people, but for the City to say ‘we’re going to put them in our right-of-way’ and have people use them knowing they’re going to get hurt, I don’t think that’s responsible.” Who really said this?
