I’ve told this story before but I sat at a transportation conference in DC where the subject at the table was how great it will be when we can make cars unaffordable to operate and everyone has to use public transportation. One guy was quick to point out an added benefit. People would have to have transit ID cards and he said that those cards would allow authorities to track your movements everywhere you go. He truly believed this was a good thing. Now after the failure of bicycle sharing, they’re trying scooter sharing, only its the private sector providers like Uber and Lyft looking to get into that. So, apparently the cities have decided they need to track these scooters everywhere they go (and who is using them most likely). Orwell was right!
They were also talking about building walls around the cities to keep folks from trapsing around the countryside without permission. You know maybe that wouldn’t be a bad thing for those of us living outside the walled cities. Maybe it would keep the crime and perversion in. I doubt it though. Most likely they’d go around picking up rural dwellers and pitching them inside the wall where they could watch them and track their movements with their transit cards. I fully expect them to start a study to see how they can track sneakers and dress shoes, heels and sandals. You know. For our own good, of course.
If it moves regulate it. If it doesn’t move tax it.
2 replies on “Big Brother Hitches a Ride on Your Scooter”
Asimov wrote “The Caves of Steel” in the early 50s and “Naked Sun” and talked in those how one could get around the city and never go “Outside” and people became afraid to do so.
I could ad a couple from Heinlein for good measure:
“Animals can be driven crazy by placing too many in too small a pen. Homo sapiens is the only animal that voluntarily does this to himself.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Time Enough for Love
“When a place gets crowded enough to require ID’s, social collapse is not far away. It is time to go elsewhere. The best thing about space travel is that it made it possible to go elsewhere.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, The Notebooks of Lazarus Long
“No one is trying to take your cars!”
But of course they are. Of course they are, because they despise independence, autonomy, and anything they can’t control and herd into their master plans for humanity. Bill is right: The world is run by terrified control freaks. When not enough people choose their mediocre product voluntarily, their answer is to force it on us.