Better Thinkers,
I lived in Northern California for three years, hanging out on the manicured lawns of Palo Alto and drinking very expensive coffee looking at the sparkling blue of San Francisco Bay. There are parts of the world that will always be known by the conjunction of time, place, and people: the avant-garde writers lounging around the Left Bank and Harlem in the 1920s, Virgil and Ovid slinging verse at the court of Cesar Augustus in Rome two millennia ago, Talmudic sages questioning and answering in Babylon and Wall Street traders growing rich off the junk bond business in downtown Manhattan in the 80’s.
If the internet was invented in government laboratories and military bases, our internet came of age in the Silicon Valley I made home: Twitter, Meta (née Facebook), Google, Instagram, Uber and Lyft were all neighbors. Engineers were everywhere, chugging coffee and slurping ramen. I remember being at a party at a hotel bar in Menlo Park (there are really very few good places to go out) talking to a group of guys who were “trading the (bit)coin.” I wish I would have taken them more seriously.
This wasn’t the messy decadent bohemia that usually accompanied people who felt like they were living in the future, the grime through which the vision appears especially incandescent. The Capitol of Tech is neat, clean, and distinctly suburban. It closes early and wakes up early, drinks Soylent, and goes for hikes on the weekends.
It is also distinctly lacking in public transportation: everyone drives. For someone from the Northeast, this is perhaps the biggest adjustment upon arriving in California. Like Alice tumbling down the rabbit hole, everything feels farther away. Distances stretch into the distance. Harvard Square barely had space for bikes. Stanford had parking garages on campus. You could take the Caltrain to San Francisco but forget about public transportation once you got there- the train deposits you close to where Barry Bonds used to launch baseballs, but not really close to anything else.
All of this meant that ride hailing apps were basically infrastructure. They were how you got around: imagine New York but infinitely spread out, with no subway system. In New York, the crucial transportation question is what route to take; the N-L-F or the R-1-B subway lines. If you make the alphabet soup just right, you get where you are going, more or less.
On the other hand, let’s say you wanted to get to San Francisco from Stanford. The challenge was what means of transportation to take. Each of the methods suggested by Google Maps was vaguely dissatisfying. ‘Walking’ was 28 minutes; just long enough to seem excessive. The Marguerite, Stanford’s free shuttle, sometimes seemed like it ran with the same frequency as the Trans-Siberian railroad. Biking might have been a reasonable option, except I didn’t know how to ride a bike. There wasn’t any great explanation; I simply had never learned. One time in New York a girl had promised to teach me in Prospect Park, but I’d never made it to the second lesson, or date.
After about a half second of hesitation over the moral implications of the sharing/ gig economy, I would usually order the now-extinct Uber Pool. I had a particular Uber persona; friendly but world-weary, as if I had spent the last 8 hour circling San Mateo in a Toyota Corolla. The Pool presented a social dynamic whose triangulation challenge excited me; it was a shared ride that gravitated with the extreme ends of the risk/reward spectrum.
The jackpot was paying a discounted rate and not picking up any other passengers. Sometimes you’d pick up other people, but if their destination was more or less en route, it was hard to complain. Occasional, disaster would strike: annoying ride mates, carpool excursions to other cities, drop off routes that resembled Jackson Pollock drip paintings. Taking a date in an Uber Pool meant less flirting and more flirting with disaster.
Still, there was a strange camaraderie to those shared rides. It was intimacy with strangers, overheard secrets, a larger audience for outrage or joy. Sharing a car is fundamentally different than riding a train car, piling into a bus, or boarding an airplane. It is encountering the public in a private space, jostling with people never to be seen again. Anyone who has rode a Via in New York or a Sherut in Tel Aviv or an Uber Pool in Chicago knows this feeling, and I can’t help but feel that this squishy awkward proximity is the catalyst for what we call citizenship.
Needless to say, these shared rides all ceased in March 2020. People no longer felt comfortable sharing a street with other people, let alone the back seat. Reports this fall have indicated that in the face of rising ride prices Uber is considering bringing back Pools. Thank goodness. We need to relearn how to be close to people we aren’t close to, how to navigate the awkwardness that can only come from sharing space. Much lies ahead to be rediscovered: the fact that another person can be a site of revelation and not just danger, comfort and not just contagion.
Even as nearly every single one of my friends has become acquainted with Omicron, we must not retreat to the place of fear from which we have so recently and precariously emerged. There is a difference between taking precautions and capitulating to the comforting purity of high walls and FaceTime intimacy.
This is the reason to try to celebrate the new year, to spend money or your time finding strangers or friends. To recover the joys of sharing the back seat.
Happy 2022, everyone-
A