Musings on the ‘EV Revolution’ and Machine Time
Tom Roud takes aim at hireable eScooters and their impact on urban life. This article first appeared in the fifth edition of The Commonweal in May 2024.
The following article is the first from the fifth edition of The Commonweal which was released in May 2024. We print it here alongside the cover and contents page of the sixth edition of The Commonweal. We hope readers will consider subscribing to the physical edition by visiting our website, and be able to read edition six when it becomes available physically this Labour Weekend
Walking home recently through a warehousing and distribution part of central Christchurch I noticed something through an open roller door. Row after row, layered vertically too, of bright orange hireable e-scooters. Though it lacked the identifiable smell of a mammalian corpse, I was reminded immediately of hanging pig carcasses.
I despise these things, there’s no way around it. Faux-convenient urban litter.
Nonetheless, there is something to be teased out from a close consideration of this particular commodity-cum-service. What does it say about how we currently live? What assumptions are baked into the very existence of the App-accessible hireable by-the-minute e-scooter that, at best, sits awkwardly in the way of pedestrians trying to get about their day or accidentally runs them over? At worst they tend to end up clogging the already polluted urban waterway generously referred to as a river.
Machine Time
I am not some caricature of a Luddite. Frothing at the mouth in disdain for complex machinery, swinging a bone-club like an Age of Empires villager, incandescent with rage at the march of progress. The development of machinery, the improvement upon nature through the ingenuity of the human race and human intellect is an incredible thing. Its capacity to alleviate drudgery has realised merely a fraction of the potential contained in even current technological advancements - let alone the possibilities of future innovations. The misapplication, however, or the maladaptive application of machine-thinking, of machine-time, due to the usefulness of the machine is something that deserves derision.
In a seminal article in the year 2000, almost a quarter of a century ago, Wendell Berry (that perennial irritant of both the left and right) wrote powerfully about the way the application of machinery can assert itself over the labourer in a way that makes labour intolerable. The machine can operate at a pace, a scale, an accuracy that is impossible for a human being to achieve. A machine does not need to sleep (charging docks excluded). To allow this incessant thrum to determine the pace of life for human beings, mere creatures that we are, is a miserable prospect.
To draw from an entirely different source, Dick Gaughan’s recording of Ed Pickford’s Workers Song articulates the idea quite well:
In the factories and mills, in the shipyards and mines
We've often been told to keep up with the times
For our skills are not needed, they've streamlined the job
And with slide rule and stopwatch our pride they have robbed.
While we have spent some centuries debating over the length of the working day, the pace of work within that working day, most of human existence has not been so constrained. Instead, for the vast majority of recorded history labour was determined by necessity in the first instance with extraction of surplus being separate - and surprisingly transparent - with corvée and similar systems. Machine efficiency, speed, and accuracy may result in a consistency of outputs - but the unintended alienation of toil from anything like meaningful and useful work that both Karl Marx and William Morris have expounded upon does not need repeating.
Elemental Marxism posits that the development of machinery is a constitutive part of the struggle between classes under capitalism. The working class seek to have their labour power compensated for the best possible price, while capitalists seek to reduce overall costs in order to maintain rates of profit when the commodities produced in their industries are sold on the market. One avenue for the capitalist to reduce costs is through the innovation of machinery, mechanisation of labour, and automation in some cases. This ‘fixed capital’ may contribute to this goal in a variety of ways - reducing labour costs, increasing output through speed or intensity of work, and occasionally by turning the complex work of a craftsperson into discrete and repetitive tasks that could be performed by largely untrained and cheaper labour.
While the application of machinery may be used to undermine the immediate interests of workers, and increase their rate of exploitation, it also elevates the class struggle in general as workers respond by organising themselves to protect their interests on a now adjusted terrain. In this sense, for Marxism, the development of technology in the productive forces plays a progressive role towards the eventual emancipation of labour, though this is cold comfort to workers tossed out of employment in the meantime.
What is less clear to me is whether this principle holds generally, or in perpetuity, so long as capitalism survives. Does every innovation in technology proceed in this arguably progressive dynamic? Plenty of socialist thinkers have considered capitalism overripe for replacement for over a century - some even striking a fairly distinct periodisation and identifying the end of capitalism’s progressive historic role as coinciding with the First World War. Whether or not such definite claims are accurate there is a poetry to it - capitalism bled out at the Somme, and we live in its steadily decaying corpse. The development of the e-scooter does not seem like evidence against this proposition.
E-Scooter Delenda Est
Researchers have estimated that the impact of a hireable e-scooter is, mile for mile, the equivalent of a hybrid car.
Assuming a total e-scooter lifespan of two years, the carbon impact of the manufacture and use of an e-scooter is worse than a privately owned fully electric automobile, as the latter has a significantly longer lifespan. Reports from our own country had the lifespan at more like six months, and anyone paying attention to a city where the powers that be have allowed these pointless devices to proliferate will be well aware that we are long past the first or second generation of units.
The logistical absurdity of these e-scooters becomes obvious if we take a moment to consider it. Every night, in a relatively small city like Christchurch, a couple of thousand e-scooters are collected in cars and trucks and taken to charge. Then, early in the morning, they’re delivered all over the city ready for another trip. This process, the very pleasant sounding ‘share providing’ proves to be extraordinarily wasteful.
The optimistic techno-urbanist liberal might protest now: what about the car trips saved? Alas they will be disappointed. Further studies indicate that only a minority of trips on e-scooters replace motor vehicle trips. More often they provide an alternative to a completely different social ill, a malignancy in our culture that plunders the environment and our health - walking. Yes, it’s the humble stumble, bumble, ramble, and amble that is being so futuristically abolished with the advent of a precision, share-provided, lithium and lead-acid powered alternative. In a society that worries itself about sedentarism we’ve developed a marvellous way for you to pay for the pleasure of avoiding activity.
The electrification of vehicles has been heralded as a way to reduce carbon emissions and mitigate the worst of the climate chaos on the horizon. This is not entirely convincing, given that the same rare earth materials are used and the environmental damage caused by the batteries is similar, but there is at least some argument for it as an improvement when comparing apples to apples - like an electric car against an internal combustion personal vehicle. This is because what is being replaced is comparable, or near equivalent. E-bikes are perhaps more similar to e-scooters in that they replace extremely low carbon activity with something much more resource intensive. E-bikes do, however, massively increase the usefulness and distance of travel for many who may use them - either by assisting with a longer commute than one would take on a regular bike, or allowing for considerably larger weight loads to be transported than on a conventional bike.
Compare the e-scooter again - what vehicle is it replacing? The ubiquity of adult- sized push scooters? No such situation existed. The e-scooter has induced its own demand in a way that can only be seen as increasing the use of resources. They are, in fact, so impractical that The Spinoff in 2023 published an article with advice on how to not come careening off them - after a short spate of MPs looking quite foolish. Unlike the author of that piece, however, I do not have any longing for a world where e-scooters are even more prevalent.
The Efficiency Cult
Teasing out why the e-scooter has drawn my ire has taken a bit of rumination. The final piece in this bitter puzzle comes down to the contemporary obsession with efficiency. I do not mean to sound contradictory here - I’ve already mentioned how the efficiency of this particular e-vehicle is largely illusory. What I mean is the obsession with optimising the use of people’s time. The e-scooter contains a promise that it can help you fit ‘more’ into a day. By reducing the time it takes to walk from one place to another an urban office worker may be able to get to even more supposedly important meetings in a day. Not only that, you can squeeze in a coffee with a friend, nip down to the gym before having to head home and take care of domestic tasks, in short - you can be incredibly efficient.
What is lost here is that this optimisation of an individual’s time is a salve that mitigates the way in which the expectation of increased leisure time for working people has been abandoned. You’ve got to fit things in because, no matter what extraordinary machinery is invented to multiply the forces of production, we simply cannot have that translate into more free time. Rather than having time to take it easy, to pursue whatever activity outside the workplace that you see fit, you’ve got to squeeze it in - and these convenient and quick pieces of soon-to-be-garbage are here to help.
Writing in the online blog The Real Movement a thinker with the nom de plume Jehu presented their main claim quite simply: ‘Communism is free time and nothing else!’. For Jehu the demand for the transition from capitalism to communism could be made quite simply - we will reduce the working week by one day each year, for five years. Perhaps Jehu is being a bit optimistic about a timeline - but they do have a point. The fight to reduce the working day has basically been abandoned, and instead we live with a cult of speed. This frenetic way of being is sold as freedom, but ties us to a system of permanent domination by machine time on the one hand, and the needs of a capitalist market on the other.
One may, perhaps rightly, consider this characterisation of the e-scooter as a harbinger/representative of everything wrong with modern society a little strained. Nonetheless, when considering the deleterious ecological impact of this largely frivolous technology I wonder if it might be simpler for those considering hiring them to just cut out the middleman - take the scooter on a short trip to the seaside and beat an endangered seabird to death.