As
more and more cars hit the roads, and there is an ever increasing amount of
urban congestion, people are trying to think of new ways to deal effectively
with the problem. One way is to
literally rise above the problem by developing flying taxis. There was a cartoon series in my childhood about
a futuristic family called the Jetsons who flew around in such vehicles, but it
is only now that such vehicles are being turned into a reality. Two kinds of vehicles are being considered:
helicopters and passenger drones.
Supposedly the country of Dubai is going to start to use passenger
drones in July of this year. By the way,
these vehicles are self-driving.
They
will supposedly supply a way for people accustomed to bumper-to-bumper traffic
and bottlenecks to rise above them and go quickly from point a to point b. Not only does a person not waste so much time
in his travels, but he no longer has to experience the abrasively
overstimulating tension-pocket that comes from being stuck in mounds of cars
that are barely moving. Instead, he gets
to rise above the tension-pocket into the vast emptiness, the experiential
vacuum that is the sky. One goes from
overstimulation into numbing understimulation, flying free from gravity, free
from the full effect of one’s weight.
One goes from one kind of sensory distortion to another kind, each of
which has harmful effects on the way a person experiences the world. The bottlenecks and heavy traffic lead to
burn-out and jadedness. Flying in the
sky leads to numbness. Modern
technology, as it has increasingly superimposed its own environments over more
traditional organic environments, has increasingly moved people away from the
spectrum of stimuli of natural environments that they are most capable of
absorbing. And alternately experiencing
understimulation and overstimulation, numbness and burn-out, leads to the
pathological behaviors that are exhibited in modern technological society. In my more recent articles, I have focused
more on the understimulation, because it is so much less focused on by most
modern social scientists. Everyone talks
about the overstimulation of crowding from overpopulation, noise pollution, air
pollution, etc.
At
any rate, once spaces have lost their organic grounding, they are susceptible
to moving between the two extremes of sensory distortion. Take shopping centers that at one point were
very popular and had parking lots that were clogged with cars. Their popularity leads them to become
enormously overstimulating tension-pockets.
Lately, because of online shopping, more and more people no longer want
to go to brick and mortar stores. And
these shopping centers that were incredibly congested, become ghost towns,
enormous empty vacuum spaces. Customers
stop coming, store owners lose their leases.
And the tension-pocket turns into a vacuum. Empty buildings and open empty asphalt and
concrete parking lots. Until some new
use is found for the facility or the center is torn down and a whole new
structure is built. In either case, the
new use of the property becomes popular and it becomes a tension-pocket again.
I discuss this in relation to the notion of
the flying taxis, because the people who have come up with this idea for
transportation assume that by raising people above the tension-pockets of
bumper-to-bumper traffic, traffic jams and bottlenecks into the relative vacuum
of the sky, that they will solve the traffic problem for a long time. Perhaps at first, flying taxis will be
relatively expensive, so that the market will tend to be limited to more financially
comfortable people. But then, just like
with commercial air flights, some companies will find ways of cutting costs and
making flying taxi service available to a lot more people. And as demand goes up, so will the number of
flying taxis. And the number of flying
taxis will be far greater than the number of commercial air planes. And this will turn the sky into another
enormous noisy crowded tension-pocket.
And although the sky occupies a more three-dimensional area than the
surface of the earth, it can still become an uncomfortable space with all the
flying taxis and delivery drones that could be present in the not-so-distant
future.
And
the experience of a tension-pocket sky will apply not only to the taxi
passenger, who will find his trip slowed down by all the other small flying
transport vehicles that will increasingly fill the air spaces surrounding his
flying taxi. It will also apply to
people on the ground. People looking up
into the sky will no longer be able to use it as an experiential refuge against
the crowds and the traffic jams that surround them on the ground. They will no longer be able to get the
balance of understimulation from the relative emptiness above them. They will no longer have a place to rest
themselves experientially from all the abrasive cacophonous stimuli that
surround them. Urban, suburban, even
exurban areas will be filled with the stimuli of objects taking off and objects
landing, not just in airports, but almost everywhere. This will create a tension-pocket unlike any
that people have experienced before.
Stress levels will rise. People
will search for experiential balance with more yoga, meditation, and drugs –
anything that can effectively numb them in the face of the onslaught of
abrasive stimuli. Even at night, the
sky, the moon and the stars will no longer be a source of romantic tranquility.
Yes,
even now, the sky is populated with commercial airlines and satellites. But, unless one lives near an airport, one is
not usually very aware of them.
Satellites don’t often come down to earth. When they do make it to the surface, it is
usually over the ocean. And commercial
airlines fly too high to be experienced directly by people on the ground, and
when they land, they cluster near airports.
But passenger drones and helicopters aren’t going to fly so high for
short excursions. We will become
inundated with all the commotion and noise they create.
It is
bad enough that we have skyscrapers blocking the sky in cities like New York
and Chicago. Now we will have a lot of
flying objects disturbing the sky even in many areas away from the
skyscrapers. The real answer to urban
crowding and traffic jams is to encourage people to move away from them as well
as to have smaller families. Fewer and more
dispersed people is a healthier answer than flying taxis.
© 2018 Laurence Mesirow
No comments:
Post a Comment