17 August 2022. Cars | Algorithms
The real cost of car ownership. // Reflecting ourselves in an online hall of mirrors
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1: The real cost of car ownership
The newsletter Dense Discovery has a short and noteworthy piece on the cost of car ownership. The figures are from Germany, but they’re likely to be similar anywhere in the rich world.
The piece is based on a video by a Berlin youtuber, Marton, who also provided a supporting spreadsheet. The youtube video is called ‘The insane cost of cars’.
In Germany, a Volkswagen Golf typically costs the owner €7,657 per year to own and run. This includes depreciation, petrol, taxes, maintenance and so on. Based on a conservative study from a few years ago, if you own and use a car of that size over 50 years, it comes to a total cost of €403,179. If we stretch that to 60 years and apply a more realistic inflation rate of 2.5%, that small Golf will incur a lifetime cost of €1,579,583! On a medium income, that’s 30-40% of every euro earned, ever.
(An English Volkswagen Golf. Photo by Vauxford via Wikipedia. CC BY-SA 4.0)
That’s the cost to the car owner, but there’s also a cost to the taxpayer as well:
(A) car of this size also costs German society €4,600–5,200 per year, because the owner’s taxes and fees don’t cover the cost for building and maintaining roads, parking, offsetting the cost of accidents, pollution, etc. So whether they own a car or not, every tax payer in Germany spends about €5,000 per year propping up a system of car dependency.
The opportunity cost of all this is also striking. Marton runs some numbers on the individual personal transport alternatives you get for all of those car costs, and they’re as dramatic as you’d expect, albeit in the context of Germany’s sensibly priced public transport.
But the city of Berlin could also afford some pretty dramatic transport options if it stopped the car subsidies:
Even the smallest vehicle class costs a resident of Berlin around four to five times as much as it would to make public transport completely free for everyone in the city. In fact, if you look at the subsidies the city of Berlin spends on free curbside parking (€1,005 per car per year), that money alone would cover the cost of completely free public transport in all of Berlin.
(Energy and Equity. Photo Andrew Curry. CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)
All of this sent me back to Ivan Illich’s book Energy and Equity, published in 1974, and a (gendered) passage about the the way all that cost worked out in terms of average speed for the American car owner:
The typical American male devotes more than 1,600 hours a year to his car... He spends four of his sixteen waking hours on the road or gathering the resources for it. And this figure does not take into account the other activities dictated by transport: time spent in hospitals, traffic courts, and garages... The model American puts in 1,600 hours to get 7,500 miles: less than five miles an hour.
Illich just uses that as a starting point for a long excursion into technology, mobility and freedom. Kai Brach, who writes Dense Discovery has a more straightforward conclusion:
that most of us vastly underestimate the true cost of car ownership – as individuals and as a society.
And the car industry still manages to tell us persuasive stories about ‘freedom’ and ‘empowerment’ while we “remain trapped in a system of dependency that delivers terrible outcomes for our health, our environment, and our cities.”
2: Reflecting ourselves in an online hall of mirrors
The researcher Laurence Scott has an intriguing essay in The New Atlantis on our relationship with algorithms—or perhaps our algorithms’ relationship with us. The theme is captured by the headline: ‘Hell is ourselves’.
It is quite a long piece, and carefully constructed, and this deconstruction is not quite going to match the original.
Scott had been researching the phenomenon of online targeted ads, where social media companies—well, Facebook—label around two-thirds of their users with tags that are not visible to their users but can be seen by businesses. A report he’d been reading noted that some users tagged as being interested in ads related to homosexuality lived in countries where homosexuality was punishable by death. The ads he was being sent changed:
The ads liberally scattered between the usual friend-content had taken on a new coquettish posture. A sleeveless, buff man crouched to touch the soil in an Italian winery, steamily meeting my eye as he did. He belonged in some way to Dolce & Gabbana... A vertical parade of male models exhibited swimwear, summer slacks, and jogging pants with the camera’s eye roving over their bodies with sensual languor. This was definitely not the “Dude, you gotta buy this!” mode of straight men targeting other straight men with the coolest new life-hacking commodities.
(Hall of Mirrors, Edinburgh Camera Obscura. Via Geograph.org. CC BY-SA 2.0)
These algorithms construct an online self-portrait, and then we collaborate in fleshing out that self-image. It becomes a self-fulfilling process: Netflix will send you the particular thumbnail for a show that it thinks will most appeal. And there’s a clue to all of this in the syntax: the algorithm simply loves talking to you in the second person:
The Internet adores this second-person voice. There it is, at every cyber–street corner: Recommended for You, Suggestions for You, Here Is Something You Might Like. Behind each of these You’s, an algorithm sits at an easel, squinting, trying to catch Your likeness.
And just at the point where we might feel uneasy about this, some sites, like Tik-Tok, tell us front and centre that this is good for us:
(B)efore you start asking questions, remember that you enjoy these systems: “They power many of the services we use and love every day.” As we hopscotch from video to video, TikTok categorizes the content we favor, noticing whether or not we watch a clip all the way to the end. Each choice we make “helps the system learn about your interests,” so that “each person’s feed is unique and tailored.”
Online or elsewhere, we never create our sense of ourselves in isolation. This is a fundamentally social process. The essay takes a meander through Hegel and Sartre, by way of a reminder that this social process is still social but now mediated by technology.
Unlike humans, algorithms often don’t withhold or disguise the conclusions they have drawn about us. Their judgments are unmasked, and yet they lack the x-ray’s objective gaze. They don’t serve us up an irrefutable row of our own clean, white ribs. Their assessments have commercial agendas. Their acuity is sometimes hilariously imperfect; they’re often pedantic and oafishly literal. In some contexts, they consolidate a self-image we are pleased to possess... But at other times the algorithms warp our reflection, as in a hall of mirrors, pulling our self-image into grotesque configurations.
To make this point, he goes off on an entertaining walk through the youtubes of Susan Sontag videos, with a bit of a distraction from Camille Paglia. It doesn’t end well:
In between Sontags, there appears a rogue evening with Camille Paglia on Shakespeare. She’s good on the Macbeth witches. But the slide continues, and soon the Sontags have morphed into a boorish crew of provocateurs. It’s like following someone you’ve just met at a party to a second party that is not your scene. There’s a sense of high-school vertigo, of an abortive week spent running with a scary new crowd.
A lot of the commentary on the algorithms deployed by social media companies has—rightly—focussed on the nature of the surveillance by the technologies companies: “the slurping up of our lucrative data in the name of, to take one profitable example, cross-marketing opportunities.” Scott is sympathetic to this critique, made by Zuboff and others.
But the other half of this is our own role in constructing ourselves on the internet:
In my 2015 book The Four-Dimensional Human, I describe a failed promise of the 1990s Internet: that it would free us from our earthly identities and let us move like quicksilver through cyberspace, inhabiting all kinds of experimental selves in gaudy, rackety chat rooms. Instead… (w)e developed what I called “chain-store selves” as we spread ourselves across the Internet with the trademarked consistency of a franchise.
But was that really our fault? My one reflection on this is that one of the problems with the century-long prevalence of advertising in media almost everywhere throughout our culture is that it becomes impossible to imagine what we would be like if we didn’t swim in a sea of advertising and brands.
This is one of the arguments for advertising-free media, such as the BBC or Wikipedia. There’s a counter-factual here, just at the edge of our view. Algorithms are probably essential to a sane online experience, and indeed Scott spends a moment as an unidentified person online and doesn’t enjoy the content he’s being offered. But how would the internet be—and how would we be—if the algorithms that were deployed online weren’t driving the commercial interests of platforms that profited from shopping and advertising?
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