The War on Driving - a new piece at Compact

Reflections on Automation, Surveillance, and the works of Matthew Crawford and Karen Levy

My friends and collaborators at Compact Magazine asked for my thoughts on the looming automation of driving, and to bounce them off of the work of some academics I follow and will be familiar to readers of this Substack.

I’m extremely honored to receive top page billing on this one, even though the piece was edited down a bit; an industry practice I’m having to accept as a novice contributor to the online discourse. Perhaps I will expand on the piece further at a later time here on Substack.

Some pull quotes -

During Pride Week in San Francisco, technological progress came to a standstill. “RoboTaxis,” self-driving cars used by ride-hailing firms such as Waymo and Cruise, encountered parade roadblocks and stalled out, blocking emergency and other vehicles. This impasse revealed a basic truth: Automation, which has been promoted as a way to make driving safer, carries with it much in the way of unacknowledged risk.
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Crawford is also alert to the phenomenon of deskilling: the general trend of people becoming less competent at fairly basic tasks as new technology arrives on the market. Though driving is technically a privilege granted by the state, it is assumed and understood by most to be a God-given right. Learning to drive, for decades one of the signal marks of adulthood, is slowly being taken away or forgotten. There are costs to this loss.
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As Cornell sociologist Karen Levy notes in her book Data Driven: Truckers, Technology, and the New Workplace Surveillance, it is foolish to imagine that surveilling truckers will cause them to drive more responsibly: “Truckers weren’t tired because they were able to falsify their logbooks; they were tired because the industry is set up in ways that necessitated them breaking the rules.”

You can read the whole thing here, though it is paywalled, for now.

Compact is a reader supported publication, and much like this Substack, runs entirely on the generosity and interest of its readership. Perhaps you can spare a basic subscription package, and further support the work of people like me.

Speaking of “people like me”, Compact ought to be applauded for hosting this essay, the third I have published for them. Not many outlets discussing politics and culture are interested in hearing from nobodies of the working class like myself, and I would implore others in the game of publishing to follow the lead of Compact (and my friend Batya Ungar-Sargon at Newsweek) to seek out the voices of those of us that Do The Work of maintaining your material reality.

If you want to hear more, hit the subscribe button below - Matthew B Crawford has agreed to be a guest on my podcast, Voice Of GO(r)D, and with any luck, that episode will be released later in September.