About this episode
This episode explores how urban transit systems in New York and Los Angeles influence individual autonomy and social behavior.
Hello Interactors, We like to think we choose our own paths, but our cities have already decided for us. New York and Los Angeles function as the extended phenotype of our species — a living circulatory system that subtly channels our collective behavior. This week, we explore the multi-generational biology of transit to see how modern infrastructure effectively dissolves what we perceive as individual autonomy. MANHATTAN MOBILITY AND THE MASSED MILIEU I recently flew from New York visiting my daughter, where large vessels moved massive numbers of people around, to Los Angeles visiting my son, where small vessels moved small numbers of people around. The transition was jarring. I went from being physically enmeshed in a dense social milieu to being systematically protected from it — from walking over 10,000 steps a day to barely 1,000. My daily cadence shifted from bobbing and weaving around persons I could see, hear, and smell, to maneuvering around what sociologist Mike Michael termed ‘carsons’ — persons fused with a car. This deep-seated desire for individual control over our own mobility is not unique to the modern driver. The instinct to leverage an external entity to…
People in this episode
Host: Brad Weed
Topics covered
- urban mobility
- individual autonomy
- transit infrastructure
- social behavior
- city dynamics
Keywords
- transit
- mobility
- New York
- Los Angeles
- social milieu
- individual autonomy
- infrastructure
Mentioned in this episode
Places: New York, Los Angeles
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