Our Unpleasant Privatized Reality

Hamilton Nolan, Everyone Into The Grinder:

Rich kids should go to public schools. The mayor should ride the subway to work. When wealthy people get sick, they should be sent to public hospitals. Business executives should have to stand in the same airport security lines as everyone else. The very fact that people want to buy their way out of all of these experiences points to the reason why they shouldn’t be able to. Private schools and private limos and private doctors and private security are all pressure release valves that eliminate the friction that would cause powerful people to call for all of these bad things to get better. The degree to which we allow the rich to insulate themselves from the unpleasant reality that others are forced to experience is directly related to how long that reality is allowed to stay unpleasant. When they are left with no other option, rich people will force improvement in public systems. Their public spirit will be infinitely less urgent when they are contemplating these things from afar than when they are sitting in a hot ER waiting room for six hours themselves.

See also Ranjan Roy’s The Sweetgreen-ification of Society and Tom Junod’s The Water-Park Scandal and Two Americas in the Raw: Are We a Nation of Line-Cutters, or Are We the Line? about the introduction of a cut-the-line pass at a waterpark:

It wouldn’t be so bad, if the line still moved. But it doesn’t. It stops, every time a group of people with Flash Passes cut to the front. You used to be able to go on, say, three or four rides an hour, even on the most crowded days. Now you go on one or two. After four hours at Whitewater the other day, my daughter and I had gone on five. And so it’s not just that some people can afford to pay for an enhanced experience. It’s that your experience - what you’ve paid full price for - has been devalued. The experience of the line becomes an infernal humiliation; and the experience of avoiding the line becomes the only way to enjoy the water park.

And this quote from the former mayor of Bogotá, Enrique Peñalosa:

An advanced city is not one where even the poor use cars, but rather one where even the rich use public transport.

• Enrique Penalosa
• Hamilton Nolan
• politics
• Ranjan Roy
• Tom Junod

The Lost Common Spaces of Our Hyper-Segmented Lives

From Ranjan Roy, an essay called The Sweetgreen-ification of Society about how technology and customer segmentation are increasingly separating people into socioeconomic groups that don’t interact:

Just next time you get lunch, take a good look around you.

We are losing the spaces we share across socioeconomic strata. Slowly, but surely, we are building the means for an everyday urbanite to exist solely in their physical and digital class lanes. It used to be the rich, and then everyone else. Now in every realm of daily consumer life, we are able to efficiently separate ourselves into a publicly visible delineation of who belongs where.

We lost the lunch line. We lost the coffee cart. We’re losing the commute. Innovation has bestowed upon us an entire homescreen worth of transportation options that allow us to congest the roads and never brush elbows with those taking the subway. Meanwhile, the crumbling of the subways aren’t felt by an ever growing number of the somewhat well-to-do.

At a certain point, it becomes difficult to have a democracy on this basis. This reminds of a Tom Junod essay I think about often as I’m navigating daily life in the US: The Water-Park Scandal and Two Americas in the Raw: Are We a Nation of Line-Cutters, or Are We the Line? (via @naveen)

• Ranjan Roy
• Tom Junod