I’ll note this every time this kind of story comes up: it’s good and correct to direct ire at the police here, but it’s also not the end of the story. The story also continues through America’s isolationist and atavistic car culture: you simply don’t see this kind of bloodthirst for “protecting children” in countries (or even areas within the US) with sensible urban design and correspondingly shifted expectations about the public.
This should not be read as an excuse, but as an analysis of how we prevent these kinds of absurd individual violations at their root: the police in so many parts of the US derive power from the latent fear of strangers that comes with car-dependent living. Remove that source of fear and power, and the public becomes less tolerant of state kidnappings.
It's not just a matter of car-dependent living. Suburbs have been around since the 50s and yet, 20-30 years ago, we didn't live in this constant fear of danger lurking on every suburb sidewalk. Media (regular media and social media) amplification of every single tragedy that ever happens to anyone anywhere has created this culture of fear. When I was a kid, we walked or rode our bike to school, or to the ice cream shop, without everyone being up in arms about it. It's no more dangerous now than it was then -- in fact, it's probably safer -- but our perception of society as a dangerous place has grown tremendously. It's a horrible way to live. I want my kids to be smart street and not naive, but I don't want them to live in fear.
I'd go a step further, which technologists will fail to accept, since it's essentially an animistic argument. Cars, very specifically, the actual physical _thing_ are evil technology. In absolute terms, in absence of their application.
Americans don't recognize it as such. We see it just as a tool. It is not. Cars have their own force field and it has changed our minds, our bodies, our relationships to other, our dispositions.
Once americans recognize it as such, we can see change. It's not impossible. From my visits to Europe, the difference is already night and day in so many places compared to just 10-15 years ago. If they can, we can. But it will be such a hard slog.
I've been reading a collection of Tom Wolfe's journalism from the 1960s[1], and it's fascinating to see how the car has warped from a liberating force (in the sense of propelling countercultures and shrinking the rural divide) to a domineering one (in terms of suburban fear culture and dependence).
These phenomena could be seen as incompatible on face value, but they're really just two phases in the same arc: the children of these articles' subjects grew up in a culture that confuses the mechanism of liberation (the car) with liberation itself, and built systems to enshrine it.
Thank you for the recommendation. Looking forward to read it!
> in a culture that confuses the mechanism of liberation (the car) with liberation itself,
It's essentially reification. I often think modernity is fully characterized by it. The inability to divorce aspirational visions from its material implementation. It's essentially the disappearance of imagination. We no longer can imagine because we are tethered to a material anchors. This is why something like a flying car can be imagined, but not something vague like virtuous personal mobility. The first is tangible, the latter is a diffuse constellation of technologies, mindset, systems, behaviors.
Pulling down that threat, (just going down the rabbit hole here), but this process has been playing out for 150 years now. Commoditization of everything. Making tangible the wealth of human experience. If it cannot be made as a marketable object, it cannot exist, cannot be imagined.
This is a fascinating discussion. Maybe something to consider is that American society is a lot more individualistic than other cultures. And that individualism is facilitated by distance - after all, proximity forces interaction: even if no on talks or communicates your brain is still processing the other presence(s), it's a cognitive load.
And the car is a consequence of that culture, not the cause. In present day and age, that tension between less and more interaction doesn't go away - it simply precipitates into cities and rural areas. The car may be unsuitable in the former, and a necessity in the latter. Tier 3 and 4 cities or communities, like the one in question, are in a constant tug of war between these opposing forces. Sure, the car itself, like any other tool, may change the society it operates within in fundamental ways, but when has that not been true for any society anywhere in place and time? And at the end of the day, has any society, of significant size, been able to eliminate a significant tool altogether from use?
Even European cities don't ban vehicles, they disincentivize their use through a combination of factors, starting with making them unnecessary. The only time a significant tool has been eliminated from use is when it has been supplanted by another - horse & buggy comes to mind.
So it goes with cars. Maybe those will be supplanted by public self-driving/flying on-demand transport in both urban and rural areas. But that won't change the tension between less and more interaction that determines how people spread out - that comes from a more fundamental property of living beings interacting with one another and the natural variation in biology/brains of people.
That brings us around to the original point - the root cause of "bloodthirst for protecting children". As many other commenters have noted - this lack of kids roaming is a recent phenomenon in the US over the past 2-3 decades, while cars have been around for 10 or so, and in widespread use for 7 or more. And the pendulum appears to be swinging in the other direction with many legislatures taking up the right to let kids roam.
Looking at the combination of those 2 factors - cars' lengthy history at the interplay of human interaction, and kids not roaming' being a transitory phenomenon, I'm having a really hard time drawing a connection between the "latent fear of strangers" coming from "car-dependent living". In fact, I would argue that the fear of losing a child in an urban setting with more strangers around would be far stronger than a stranger driving in from outside and making off with a child.
And police brutality has also been around much longer than has the lack of kids roaming. In fact, kids roaming is just another in a long litany of excuses for projection of power from police or any kind of uniformed service.
This makes me think that the connections between "bloodthirst for protecting children" and "latent fear of strangers" coming from "car-dependent living" might be a bit tenous. I would like to see more actual evidence for that before accepting it at face value.
I could even argue that the bloodthirst for protecting children is likely more related to the declining birth rate - fewer children means each individual one is valued more in nuclear families - split attention is a real phenomenon. Another factor could be greater awareness and depiction in popular US media of crime and the horrors that taken children undergo.
While we’re on the topic, I would add TVs to the list of evil objects. With a book, if you don’t like the content, you can stop reading at any time. But with a TV, anyone in the vicinity is coerced into keep listening and turning the TV off, even when the content is extremely disturbing, while others are watching is considered faux pas.
kind of agree, but there are ways to improve it. Public transit can be an example where it (in some places and countries) mixes socio economic classes, maybe save for the highest wealth...
Additionally things like Cruise's driverless car can make driving more social again. Imagine being able to play a game or have a casual cup of coffee with a friend over a commute.
I think you missed the point: the claim was that the obsession over safety (partially the kind that manifests in cases like this) is the culmination of a robust car culture. Things like this obviously don't happen overnight; they require decades of normalization (and, for car culture in particular, alienation).
This is exactly my point: "drug dealers and sex offenders" are on your mind, despite the US being an overwhelmingly safe and criminally uneventful place. Car culture encourages fixation on crime and risk, even when all available evidence points to the US being a radically safer place than it was even 30 years ago[1].
We're still not a safe country on an absolute scale (relative to our economic and social peers), but our cultural histrionics around crime are unsupported by the actual trendline.
The two are intertwined! "If it bleeds, it leads" works especially well on low-trust societies, and car culture enables and enforces low-trust social growth.
Put another way: the media might be a primary driver of the problem, but American culture is uniquely susceptible to it because of car dependence and the cultural/demographic structures that dependence incentivizes.
So can I, but I can't think of many that share the magnitude and ubiquity of cars!
(You shouldn't read this as a fixation or totem: there are plenty of other problems in this country. But it isn't a coincidence that aggressive deurbanization/suburbanization is closely tracked by increases in isolation, which in turn is tracked by a decline in personal trust[1].)
I can: the destruction of religion as a civic activity in the US. I'm not even religious but that's a huge one.
Another is the effort (by HUD and others) to eliminate regions of ethno-cultural homogeneity.
Both of these are A) much more numerically significant (on a per-capita basis) than changes in vehicle use since, say, 1950 and B) well-understood to reduce social factors like trust and cohesion.
This was my first thought. Didn't even think about the cops, they do what they do, but they're operating in a culture, not that they're not wrong, but it's stupid all the way down. If I lived in Berlin and my kid wanted to ride their bike to the Dunkin Doughnuts in fucking Amsterdam, I'd tell them to update me every so often over the next couple days, and let me know if you quit and need to get the train home, but I'd wish them well and send them on their way.
That's also not to say that there's no car dependency there, but it's not as ruthless and overbearing.
I live in rural/small town area in Japan that is not designed well and most adults have a car, but children go elementary school by walking. This is standard here. Sensible urban design isn't minimum requirement.
uhh no the blatant problem here is american mentality where everything is illegal by default including breathing and walking. breathing is only legal because it's necessary to survive. walking is legal but only on certain areas of land. you HNers display this mentality every single day with your latest "oh cookies should be illegal" and "oh AI should be illegal" nonsense. your narrative about car culture (the first time i heard this one) is insane and probably some left wing talking point or something, i don't read the news. normies have that pathetic mentality you describe regardless of cars. call it american mentality, not car mentality, although it's actually the same in all countries (including whatever "well designed" city like oslo or whatever you have in mind), but america invented it. tl;dr the disease is statism, not car culture.
Leaving aside the parts of this argument not worth dealing with (that is, most of them), you make the fundamental carbrain error. How do you think interstates, suburban development, and countless square miles of public roads and public parking came to be? The answer (and it's an extremely easy one to find because it's less than a hundred years old) is massive amounts of public investment. There's no universe in which virtuously libertarian (TM) private money would have done the same thing. So while the midwit impulse is to bifurcate "statism" and "car culture" and call one a "left wing talking point", they are at the very least not exclusive. There's mutual causation, of course, but I have no desire to open that chapter under this comment.
i didn't say the car culture cause is mutually exclusive to statism. the problem is statism, regardless of car culture. the thread does bring up a good point about the average idiot who will fall over and die the moment his company stops paying him enough for his car, but that's not the issue. the main problem here is statism, and not just statism, but extreme statism. every country today follows an extreme form of statism, not just some reasonable moderate version. this is why a cop in america has to have a gun, for instance.
and you display it perfectly, i reject the mentality where breathing has to be illegal and we all suffocate until someone makes an exception for it to be legal, and in return you use "libertarian" as an insult, like a typical wingnut. whatever, you guys can enjoy your pointless 4chan teenager tier pontificating over the connection of car culture to what will end as police cameras being installed in our homes, while i sit back and read another article about how i'm right where a 15 year old goes to jail for "misusing a computer" because computers have to be used correctly or else its illegal due to the fact that you don't live in an enlightened state like you think you do but you just look to me the same way you think some reactionary hell in the middle east looks.
actually, here's a better way to put it. the average person is a coward and will instantly agree with any law that purports to fight some problem that looks legit. he's also a consumer, and will buy any law that alleges to make his life more convenient. that is how law is treated today, and why we pay for way more police than necessary as well as why they think they can go make up new problems to fight. it really is that simple, after all, you either believe covid is a hoax or you believe that elementary school children need to learn that two males can have sex. none of you deserve to be taken seriously like the adults you think you are. this is a forum of webdevs who have an inflated sense of intellect due to their wage who can program as good as a 15 year old PHP hacker, after all.
People already install police cameras in their home. They have a corporate logo on them and are sold as a product with certain benefits. Of course, since we live in a world of nation states, there's some point at which Amazon interacts with them...
This should not be read as an excuse, but as an analysis of how we prevent these kinds of absurd individual violations at their root: the police in so many parts of the US derive power from the latent fear of strangers that comes with car-dependent living. Remove that source of fear and power, and the public becomes less tolerant of state kidnappings.