#60: The Revenge of Hardware
This recent interview (paywall warning) with the CEO of Bird, the electric scooter company, included a fascinating line that should have received more attention: "What we’re finding is a vast majority of people that ride Bird actually just do it by discovering Bird on the street. That triggers them to open the app. It's less about opening the app and trying to find one" (thanks to Reilly Brennan for pointing this out in his newsletter). It's not surprising that finding a scooter by looking for one might be easier than using an app—the latter is one of those things your grandpa would make fun of you for doing, after all—but it's still a radical statement coming from a tech company, as we've all assumed for at least a decade that apps will keep on mediating more of lived experience and doing more of pretty much everything for us. A Bird scooter is very much a digital creature, but the software is largely under the hood (you do still need the app to unlock the scooter once you find it). If we're allowed, or even expected, to just run up and grab the scooters like cavemen, what technological narrative does that fit into?
The first wave of what's now called shared mobility involved using an app like Uber or Lyft to hail a car. The app was the essential distinction; without it, you'd just be calling a taxi. Unless there were available cabs circulating every block, the way it is in Manhattan but few other American cities, there was no way to quickly match passengers with the drivers they had to physically flag down, and apps obviously solved that problem. In fact, apps helped us navigate much familiar physical territory more easily, from picking a restaurant to finding a date. But now, somehow, it's easier to just wander around hunting for scooters in meatspace, at least in dense urban areas. What happened? Well, scooters are cheap enough that companies can dump a bunch of them into a city and ensure there's always one close. Unlike app-based ridesharing, scooters represent the triumph of atoms, not bits, and the enabling factor is not code but Chinese manufacturing, which has been "steadily and rapidly introducing new physical products to the world, influencing our physical environments in much the same way that internet memes have influenced our digital ones: hoverboards, drones, fidget spinners, and cute phone cases.” Software has been eating the world for a while, but perhaps it has finally consumed so much of the low-hanging fruit that hardware is best equipped to take over from here.
David Graeber famously complained in 2012 that our societal failure to build flying cars or realize similarly romantic sci-fi visions of his youth means that our past few decades of technological progress have been an illusion. Now, Elon Musk is actually doing what Graeber wanted, and we hate him for it. Meanwhile, we've become much better at cheaply producing humble little gadgets that are almost certainly more useful than flying cars. It's true that superficial interventions like flooding cities with scooters are no substitute for the difficult, serious task of rebuilding those cities to favor humans rather than cars. But those scooters embody hardware's renewed ability to do things software can't accomplish alone, and if part of the reason is that the digital universe is finally getting too crowded, then perhaps we'll begin recovering other experiences that software ate. There was an experimental musician known as Moondog who spent much of the '50s and '60s in New York "on 6th Avenue, between 52nd and 55th Streets, wearing a cloak and a horned helmet sometimes busking or selling music, but often just standing silently on the sidewalk." Too early to be a meme, Moondog refused to scale; maybe we'll once again start to find his kind as we find the scooters, on the street instead of on the internet.
Reads:
Our homes don't need formal spaces: Researchers concluded that nobody spends much time in their house's formal living and dining rooms after analyzing usage patterns with cameras.
Geoff Manaugh on phantom islands that show up on maps due to data glitches and Null Island, a thousand miles off the coast of Africa, the "default destination for mistakes."
Scammers are using the virtual currency in "Clash of Clans" to launder money.