In Praise of Slow Motion
As technology evolves, the journey and the destination have converged
In 2019, a Japanese car-sharing service called Orix noticed that its customers were renting vehicles but not actually driving them, returning the rentals with zero additional miles traveled. A survey found that people were using the parked cars for activities ranging from naps to phone calls to personal storage, a subset of demand unmet by buildings and the real estate market, which weren’t flexible or modular enough to accommodate this need for small, temporary, convenient units of space at street level—which is basically what a car is when it’s not moving.
It’s well known that Americans spend a meaningful chunk of life behind the wheel (about an hour per day on average) but the amount of time spent in those cars while they’re parked would probably surprise us if we measured it. The unexpected usage of Orix vehicles suggests some sort of market failure but maybe cars are just better at providing certain types of space than buildings are.
This is not to say that cars are the best solution to problems like needing somewhere to take a nap while out and about (although it’s possible they are) but it does suggest a mismatch between the supply and demand for different kinds of space. As ZIRP recedes in the rear-view mirror, the economic distortions it enabled seem more absurd in hindsight (not to suggest that this explains the Orix situation). There was probably a moment when riding around in an UberPool all night was cheaper than booking a hotel room. That’s an exaggeration but not by much. The point is that certain products and services, largely in the “tech” category, arose less from real technological progress than from loose financial conditions, allowing those products to be offered at less than cost. The same easy money that funded the millennial lifestyle subsidy also inflated asset prices as the 2010s progressed, meanwhile, intensifying the contrast between frivolous luxuries that were artificially cheap and basic needs like housing that were getting more expensive—hinting at a condition that Bruce Sterling calls favela chic, in which “you have lost everything material but you’re still wired to the gills.”