Utopia Is Creepy by Nicholas Carr

Author:Nicholas Carr
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

TWILIGHT OF THE IDYLLS

March 31, 2015

THE SILICON VALLEY GUYS have a new hobby: driving fast cars around private tracks. They love it. “When you’re really in the zone in a racecar, it’s almost meditative,” Google executive Jeff Huber tells Farhad Manjoo of the Times. Adds Yahoo senior vice president Jeff Bonforte, “Your brain is so happy that it washes over you.” The Valley guys are a little nervous about the optics of their pastime—“Try to tone down the rich guy hobby thing,” angel investor and ex-Googler Joshua Schachter instructs Manjoo—but the “visceral thrill” of driving has nevertheless made it “the Valley’s ‘it’ hobby.”

The Valley guys are rushing to rent out racetracks and strap themselves into Ferraris at the very moment that they’re telling the rest of us how miserable driving is, and how happy we’ll all feel when robots take the wheel. Jazzed by a Googler’s TED Talk on driverless cars, MIT automation expert Andrew McAfee says that the Googlemobile will “free us from a largely tedious task.” Writes 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”—in other words, they’ll be able to spend more time on their phones. When Astro Teller, head of the Google X lab, watches people drive by in their cars, all he hears is a giant sucking sound, as potentially productive minutes pour down the drain of a vast time sink: “There’s over a trillion dollars of wasted time per year we could collectively get back if we didn’t have to pay attention while the car took us from one place to another.”

Driving on a private track may be pleasantly meditative, even joy-inducing, but driving on public thoroughfares is just a drag.

What’s curious here is that the descriptions of everyday driving offered with such certainty by the champions of driverlessness are at odds with what we know about people’s attitudes toward and experience of driving. People like to drive. Surveys and other research consistently show that most of us enjoy being behind the wheel. We find driving relaxing and fun and even, yes, liberating—a respite from the demands of our workaday lives. Seeing driving as a “problem” because it prevents us from being productive gets the story backward. What’s freeing about driving is the very fact that it gives us a break from the pressure to be productive. Driving allows us to take pleasure from simply doing.

That doesn’t mean we’re blind to automotive miseries. When researchers talk to people about driving, they hear plenty of complaints about traffic jams and grinding commutes and bad roads and parking hassles and all the rest. Our attitudes toward driving are complicated, but on balance we like to have our hands on the wheel and our 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 to a 2006 Pew survey.

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