The car is a vehicle for agency, an instrument for reaching opportunities elsewhere, where life might be self-determined and free.

The American repertoire is saturated with stories about transformation on the open road. In Thelma & Louise, the protagonists get into a turquoise 1966 Thunderbird convertible and do their best, together, to outrun the terms of patriarchy that constrain their lives. They can’t go home again. Maybe that’s the point. In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, the narrator takes a fast machine on a grand journey, tinkering towards enlightenment along the way. Tracy Chapman’s ballad, “Fast Car,” treats velocity as hope, a wager that mobility might overcome the gravity of shared circumstance.

The car is a theory of freedom.

And yet, the ordinary experience of car life cuts another way: long commutes, exhaust, traffic jams, accidents, and debt. The road fills with people who all want the same thing—to get from here to there—thus reliably vexing one another by getting in the way.

Traffic is other people.

Freedom has serious externalities. Motor vehicle accidents aren’t only a leading cause of death, they are the leading cause of death for teenagers, young people, and pregnant women. The largest category of non-housing consumer debt is auto loans, surpassing both credit cards and student debt. Roughly 28% of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions come from transportation, making it the single largest share.

Less than 5% of Americans commute by public transit. The majority of those who do live in just a handful of major metropolitan regions. There are other visions on offer: high-speed rail, mass transit, pedestrian villages, fifteen-minute cities, eVTOLs, and cablebuses. People want different choreographies of movement, denser patterns of encounter. Yet, over 90% of U.S. households own a car. More than 20% have two or more.

There is no getting around cars.

Cars are near-perfect objects for systems thinking. For the individual, they offer mobility on one’s own terms. A car of one’s own is a small, durable freedom. But when that choice is made at scale, it reorganizes the landscape in ways that produce congestion, isolation, and sprawl.

The car is a double-bind: they grant freedom that scales to constraint.

At the level of architecture, the effects are concrete. The average two-car garage adds more than 400 square feet to a home’s footprint. To keep proportions sensible, houses expand into inflated domestic volumes characteristic of suburban sprawl. Zoning laws imposing parking minimums reinforce the pattern while raising construction costs, thus disincentivizing density and mixed-use development.

Signage shifts. Oversized lettering, setback buildings, and big box stores are designed to be read by motorists traveling at speed. They have replaced the glass storefronts and detailed displays that once seduced the pedestrian slowly walking by.

Cars beget decentralization, decentralization begets cars.

Transportation shapes cultural geography. The built environment is shaped by choices that appear, at first glance, to have nothing to do with architecture at all.

We can also read the car through supply chains and political economies. Nearly half of U.S. oil consumption is transport-related, with gasoline for everyday vehicles (cars, trucks, and SUVs) dominating this category. The auto industry is the third-largest consumer of steel. So when tariff rates on raw steel are set to 50%, or Nippon Steel’s acquisition of U.S. Steel is approved, or the White House ballroom project sources Luxembourg rather than American steel, the lines of provisioning automobility are being adjusted.

Rubber tells a similar story. The U.S. tire industry is the largest consumer of natural rubber, most of it sourced from plantations in Southeast Asia. Experimental alternatives are under development, such as guayule, a shrub indigenous to parts of Texas and Mexico. But scaling them requires new processing infrastructure, major investment, and new alignments between agriculture, industry, and the state.

And then there is computing. Between entertainment systems, sensors, diagnostic and biometric data, and perceptual systems, a vehicle runs on about 100 million lines of code and generate terabytes of data daily. The ideal object of a Fordist economy—mass-produced, mechanical, standardized—has transformed into an ideal object for the information age: compute that moves.

Looking ahead, the transition to electric vehicles extends these pressures. The auto industry will play a key role in reorganizing the geopolitics of extraction as rare earth minerals and lithium for batteries become increasingly valuable worldwide. Welcome to the green fuel era. The mobility question is, what kinds of lives can intelligent-industrial systems support?

Category transformations are difficult to see in advance. They arrive unevenly, through partial innovations and unstable forms. Some of the most important inventions turn out to be intermediate, useful precisely because they do not last.

Elsewhere, I’ve written about these “lungfish of organizational evolution, awkward pioneers stepping boldly across the mud between epochs,” whose “very success ensures their disappearance.” The early automobile stepped awkwardly away from animal to machine power as a horseless carriage. Named by subtraction, it was defined by what it was not. It is entirely possible that the self-driving car is a horseless carriage—and we are the horse!

What comes next doesn’t yet have a stable name. But pressures on production systems and cultural styles are visible. When the terms of movement shift, other things shift with them: built environments, social arrangements, ways of being a self among others. If we are going to change how we get from here to there, what else might be open for experimentation? What is possible from here? Can self-driving cars be part of transitions to forms we have not yet seen?

A car without a driver is a carriage without a horse. Autonomous vehicles turn everyone back into a passenger—which is to say, a different kind of subject.

In one sense, the promise of self-driving cars is rather conservative. Transportation remains privatized and organized around individualized trips in sealed spaces. People can travel great distances, moving without mass encounters. Public life remains optional, and therefore avoidable. Freedom from sociality holds.

In another sense, something opens. Interior arrangements are amplified. Work, leisure, intimacy, boredom, entertainment, even sleep become possible for everyone in the moving frame. Perhaps it’s time to revisit the culture of carriage societies, not nostalgically but analytically. Will the car become a programmable room of one’s own?

For over a century, American automobility has organized subjectivity around the driver: the one who steers and chooses, escaping or assuming responsibility. Agency is directed control. Mobility is self-expression. The central drama is departure and arrival, or identity remade elsewhere. But the driver is receding and “riding in a fast self-driving car” doesn’t quite carry the charge.

When categories change, value transformations are underway. Technical transitions are also cultural ones, which is why storytelling about transportation futures matters so much.

So tell me a roadtrip story about what kind of passengers we could be.

Tell me a version of freedom that is encounter and coordination, not escape. Read the contradictions, pleasures, and travails of passage through a world structured by systems. Show me how to see supply chains, platforms, ecologies, and the multitudes of lives moving alongside one another. Give me dramas of energy and materials, infrastructure and architecture, of psychic transformation under new conditions of movement.

Tell me how to move with the freedom to help provision the worlds we pass through.

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In 1933, Richard Hollingshead of Camden, New Jersey, received a patent for his outdoor theater system. While not the first experiment with outdoor projections, his design introduced crucial architectural refinements: a semi-circular arrangement of inclined parking spots engineered to guarantee that everyone could enjoy the view—a democracy of sightlines.

The form caught. As many as fifteen drive-in theaters were in operation by the end of World War II. But in the postwar years, their popularity exploded. America’s romance with automobility was in full swing, and the passion for public cinema was transforming as neo-suburbanites domesticated leisure via television-watching in the single-family home.

Windshield cinema at the roadside theater was a kind of stopgap, an intermezzo between mass audiences packed into urban theaters and the new privated viewing of public culture alone at home. I have always loved interbetween forms. They are the lungfish of organizational evolution, awkward pioneers stepping boldly across the mud between epochs. Their very success ensures their disappearance. But here, at this threshold where public and private life are literally engineered into asphalt on an angle, we can pause long enough to watch a new social animal breathe the dynamics of change.

The photograph above was taken by Hiroshi Sugimoto. Sugimoto is renown for pointing his camera at movie screens and leaving the shutter open for the entire duration of a film. His works are a media philosophy in a thousand words: or, pictures. In each, the content dissolves into a white square of overexposure, a small artificial sun floating in the darkness.

A reversal of the mirro-facing-mirror mise-en-abyme, there is no infinite regress, no vertiginous casting the viewer into the recursive depths of frames within frames. Instead, the viewer meets conditions. Whatever the content was, it’s washed away. All that is left is architecture, darkness, and light. Call it the camera’s revenge on narrative.

Every Sugimoto photograph is different, yet every luminous rectangle looks the same. The difference that makes a difference is the theater itself, the very space that disappears during the show. Elsewhere, I have written about this darkness:

…No two darknesses are the same. Every interior has a distinctive shape, texture, and form.

Darkness is first encountered in childhood but the encounter repeats throughout one’s life. Plato tells us this darkness is allegorical. Metaphysically, we are living in a cave. To seek truth and understanding one must turn towards the light. Otherwise, all one will ever see are images of shadows of divine things. There are limits to identifying with projections on the walls…

Darkness is a metaphysical fort/da game, a play with intersubjectivity that persists until we die. In darkness we open and close ourselves to connection. We do our best to get our fears and desires in hand. In darkness psychic life is speculation – what was that sound? Where are you? Are you still here? Barthes continues, “the significance of darkness in the cinema...is not only the very essence of reverie…it is also the color of a very diffuse eroticism.”[15] Darkness is a libidinal economy…

Here, I turn to see the American collectivity.

In the foreground, brightly is, is a playground.

Because of course, the drive-in was many things, including a solution to the demographic shock of the Baby Boom. It allowed families to go out while staying in. Vehicular enclaves transported domestic life into public space. Whatever was playing on the screen, children were playing below it.

Drive-ins doubled as all kinds of thing: playgrounds, swap meets, picnic grounds, flea markets, impromptu town squares, churches, etc. Economically, this makes sense. The core business offering requires acres of infrastructure sitting idle until sunset. Socially, it was a zone of experimentation, where the intertidal alchemy allowed different publics and many privates to glimpse another possible suburbanity, one marked by heterogeneity and mixture in society.

These where the Jim Crow years. Indoor theaters across the South enforced racial segregation, relegating Black audiences to balconies, back rows, or late-night “midnight rambles.” Drive-ins had a more uneven history. Restrictions existed, but the automobile introduced a layer of abstraction. Inside the car, out in the dark, identities blurred. The car gave a little social mask and a touch of portable cave.

Moral reformers worried about the drive-in. Derided as a “passion pit,” the whole arrangement allowed too much privacy in public and too much darkness without supervision. In the dark, social relations improvise. Indeed, as mainstream popularity waned, some drive-ins embraced the contradiction and bifucated their screens: family films on one side, X-rated on the other, double-backed double-features in virtue and vice. I believe one such drive-in still operates—somewhere in Texas, if I recall.

These chemistries collective life in action. Seedlings of interpersonal freedom to mingle, to provision alliances, to flirt with difference were sprouting up all over under cover of night—

—which brings me to my gripe with Plato’s cave.

Cinema is a game of shadows projected on walls, the heir to magic lanterns and other light-in-darkness technologies. Cinephiles sink into that darkness willingly, suspending disbelief so the interior self can become absorbed with an unfolding worldview. The philosopher’s task, in Plato’s telling, is to turn away, exit the cave, and face the sun—to identify the source rather than the spectacle. The critical cultural theorist is supposed to notice the means of production, the projection from the back, and shout “Aha! I cannot be fooled by my desire!”

But Sugimoto’s images sugges that the shadows and the light are not the most important things after all. Look at the room. Look at the seating. Look at the arrangement of bodies in spaces! The medium is only half the message; the social architecture is the rest.

Plato’s allegory depends on individuation. The prisoners are chained up separately, positioned in place. The one liberated hero who returns with an unbearable truth is doomed to rejection. They will be a scapegoat. The allegory is ultimately one of solitary enlightenment and collective ignorance—a foreshadowing of the death of Socrates.

But where are the ensembles, the negotiations, the sideways glances, whispered commentary, shared snacks, tangled limbs, bored children, and coupling making love or breaking up in backseats? Where are the people moving about, trying things out, experimenting in pairs and ensembles and enclaves? Where is the furniture of the social? Where there is no play with collectivity—those middle strategies humans actually use to live together—there is no social or historical truth at all.

Super Bowl LX

Today, the Seattle Seahawks face off against the New England Patriots. At the end of the game, the team with the higher score will be declared this year’s unambiguous champions and fêted with golden rings.

But another game is afoot.

This game can’t be won in inches, and it requires a style of play wildly adept at moving goalposts. It happens in the interlude of the main event because, in the words of Nas, “…the real rap comes at halftime.”

This year’s halftime show features Boricua sensation Bad Bunny, the "King of Latin Trap.” In the hours and days following his performance, we’ll flood comments sections to weigh in: Was it good? Will the revolution be televised? Was it legible—and to whom? What does it all mean?

Culture-warring is an American pastime. It is so regularized that it has genre conventions, ritual features, and pre-boarded controversies waiting to anchor the felt grievances and real conditions of an endlessly recurring question: who are the we?

We’ll debate multiculturalism and monolingualism. Someone will remind us that English only became the official language of the nation last March, while others insist that we have always been proudly pluralistic polyglots. Fandoms and cultural analysts alike will read the performance as a text, parsing the layers of danceability and political significance. We’ll talk about territorial ambitions, sovereignty, and belonging. Haters will dismiss the whole thing as incomprehensible, a nothing-burger, a sham. Others will point to ratings and views, as if the attention economy can adjudicate, once and for all, which side of the cultural war objectively won.

A few earnest gridiron enthusiasts will scratch their heads and ask, “Aren’t football games supposed to be about football?”

Someone else will shrug and remark, “I just watch for the commercials.”

Deep Play

Games aren’t always about what they’re about.

Anthropologist Clifford Geertz wrote about this freighting of games with social and cosmic significance in The Interpretation of Cultures (1973). In a bit of disciplinary arbitrage, he borrows the term deep play from Jeremy Bentham’s Theory of Legislation. “By it,” Geertz writes, “[Bentham] means play in which stakes are so high that it is, from his utilitarian standpoint, irrational for men to engage in it at all.”

Bentham was building a case from first principles against letting people get in over their head. (In the age of sports betting scandals, there is plenty to say about the hazards of side action). Geertz, however, takes the cultural turn in observing that, ethical questions aside, deep play persists.

For Geertz, Balinese cockfighting wasn’t merely a typical, if illegal and brutal, pastime. True, these poor, beautiful birds were condemned to short, nasty, and brutish lives of violent contests to shallow ends—and where’s the utility in that? But the deepest matches were affaires d’honneurs, “dramatization[s] of status concerns” between rivaling patrilines that structured social orders. Onlookers, bettors, and bird-keepers were interpreting the stakes and outcomes as contests over what is really Real.

The fight is culture, staged.

Deep play is a concept that gives us permision to acknowledge that things really do stand in for things, that the rituals of reading, and fighting over the meaning of that reading, are themselves forms of belonging within a shared social frame. Cultural fluency is the ability to recognize when the game is deep.

But what happens when the game speaks back?

Serious Games

In 2016, during the NFL preseason, San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick sat during the national anthem. A silent one-person protest against racial injustice and police brutality, it disrupted the ritual conventions of the game as if to ask: “Seriously, what are we playing at?”

In that gesture, the connections between sport, nationalism, culture industries, and politics flashed into visibility. Look around! Wake up! What must we not notice in order to keep believing that this is just a game?

What happens when the man in the arena reframes the arena?

Kaepernick action can be read within a history of athletic protest. Literary scholar Kevin Quashie has written extensively this aesthetic language in The Sovereignty of Quiet: Beyond Resistance in Black Culture. Public resistance to the frame comes forth as an assertion of interiority. The player, the character, the performer suddenly insists that the deepest play and the biggest stakes are a recognition of humanity from within.

Otherwise, what is any of this for?

The “take a knee” movement spread. The NFL became a site of open cultural contestation. Kaepernick rose to the level of cultural icon. Resistance at the football game signified well beyond the sphere of sports, ultimately penetrating the political arena.

These were the early years of the first Trump presidency. The “Make America Great Again” movement, with its ubiquitous merch, was colliding with public cultures all over. Critics blamed Kaepernick for politicizing football. It’s probably more accurate to say that he was doing culture, and culture is deep play.

Ultimately, the rules of the game themselves became contested terrain. Protests were disallowed in an effort to close the frame (but end zone dances were finally allowed), to restore the illusion that nothing deep was at play. Kaepernick’s football career was over.

But what about that halftime show?

Cultural Interludes

The frame of the game already admits that other games are happening.

The halftime show is what I’ll call a cultural interlude: a sanctioned pause that openly confesses that the contest exceeds the frame. This is an intermission as theater, an aperture at the center of the sport that openly celebrates that football isn’t just about football. The arena becomes a stage. The interlude is a parallel sphere of social action where expresivity, aesthetics, and performativity are not distractions—they are the point. Here, we are invited to interpret.

Last year’s halftime show put the cultural interlude to exquisite use. Kendrick Lamar, the first solo rapper to headline, delivered a minimalist spectacle in red, white, and blue structured like a three-part dialogue. Fresh off a summer of epic beefing with Canadian rapper Drake, the Grammy and Pullitzer-Prize winning artist was poised to summit this stage to deliver the ultimate American diss track. The inimitable Samuel L. Jackson played the role of Uncle Sam; Grammy-winner SZA gave a lyrical interlude within the show; Serena Williams — tennis legend, first Black woman with a stake in an NFL team, wife of tech billionaire/Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian — crip walked into the frame. The text was so layered that it fueled weeks of discourse about color, form, poetics, and implication. With 133.5 million viewers, it surpassed Michael Jackson’s record to become the most-watched halftime show in history.

Kendrick Lamar is an American Great. He is the Bard you can dance to.

The game of cultural interlude intensifies as the boundaries between sport, entertainment, and politics blur into a single spectacle. Parlays and side games are everywhere.

Last year, Taylor Swift was in the stands, seated on the Kansas side. The Pennsylvania-born mega-ultra-popstar chose her man in the arena, Travis Kelce (a tight end on last year’s field), over her home state. The heart wants what the heart wants, but the camera wants what the camera wants even more. In the year since, she’s released an album, gotten engaged, and the smart money says her future halftime show is inevitable.

This is deep play with a love story.

It was also the first Super Bowl attended by a sitting U.S. President. A small detail, except it isn’t. The game is deep in the age of culture warring. Trump had already marked his return to office with a pilgrimage to Madison Square Garden for a UFC fight, flanked by Joe Rogan, Dana White, Tulsi Gabbard, Robert F. Kennedy Jr, Vivek Ramaswamy, and Elon Musk. The entourage of spectacle purveyors and would-be power brokers made it painfully clear that we would be dealing in ambiguities between the mediated and the real for the remainder of his time in office. A man who rose to the highest office by way of reality television, professional wrestling, real estate, and beauty pageants knows exactly how arenas work.

There are layers to this shit.

Moving Goalposts: American Performing Arts

In American life, the Super Bowl is not just a sporting event. It is a ceremonial gathering where kin and friends assemble to rehearse belonging through team allegiances and shared attention. It means something.

This morning, I woke to feeds filled with clips from the Winter Olympics: Vice President Vance being booed in the international arena, U.S. athletes publicly distancing themselves from immigration crackdowns at home, commentators debating what representatives of a democratic nation owe the public when the whole world is watching.

The arenas are talking back.

Last year, in the wake of the Super Bowl, President Trump installed himself as head of the Kennedy Performing Arts Center. To some, it seemed peripheral. What’s the big deal? What do the arts have to do with politics anyway? But then came the board firings, the resignations, the artists pulling out of contracts, unwilling to perform under a name stamped onto every wall.

Last month, the Center closed for “renovations.”

The President will not attend Super Bowl LX. The cultural interlude is a dangerous place for a sovereign because it invites interpretation. Instead, MAGA media will circulate an alternative halftime show featuring Kid Rock, Brantley Gilbert, Lee Brice, and Gabby Barnett. When you don’t like the message, you don’t give up on arenas, you build another arena. When you can’t control the reading, you try to control the stage. You attempt to make a world where the game can be just a game again. But the interlude remains.

Welcome to the show.

Once upon a time, it stretched across two miles of beach and held three massive amusement parks. For New Yorkers, it was perfectly positioned — just far enough away to feel like a vacation and just near enough to be accessible to working people with a day off and a little pocket money.

Coney Island, baby.

Today, it still has its Mermaid Parade, its Circus Sideshow, and The Cyclone roller coaster at Luna Park, not to mention a rotating roster of redevelopment projects aimed at modernizing the amusement district with new housing developments and municipal services. But in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it was something stranger and more ambitious—a testing ground for cultural innovations in what John Kasson terms “amusing the million.”

I’ve always loved Kasson’s book—it’s a gem.

It places Coney Island alongside two other public visions of mass uplift: New York’s Central Park and Chicago’s Columbian Exposition. In Central Park, nature promised refinement. In the White City, monumental architecture expressed the highest civic aspirations. Both invited industrial crowds to become civic-minded publics through exposure to beauty and restraint. But, as Kasson suggests—and as anyone who has ever sat politely on a park bench knows—respectability can be, well, dull.

Amusement parks, tourist zones, malls, cruise ships—all the middle-brow spaces of collective entertainment inspire ambivalence. It’s all too easy to critique them, or to adopt an ironic and cynical posture towards commercial kitsch for its mediocre cultural offerings and economies of cheap thrills. Yet, taking mass entertainment as urban development seriously can open us to learning from popular cultures as projects of experimentation with new configurations in civic life.

Turn-of-the-century American social order was undergoing urban and industrial transformations. As the city absorbed more than a million immigrants, the pursuit of pleasure became a profound exercise in contact. These spaces suspended the distinctions of neighborhood, language, and kinship, creating a conviviality that slipped in from the margins of public life. Amusement became a way for a new industrial society to experiment with togetherness.

As Victorian customs frayed and countercultural experiments bubbled, seekers of pleasure (licit and illicit) mingled. Swells of people arrived by trolley car, subway, hackney, ferry, elevated train, or bicycle. They promenaded down the boardwalk and gathered on the beach. In hotels and saloons, at circuses and vaudeville houses, at dance halls and in theaters, they experienced people they arrived with, as well as crowds of strangers. There is so much delight in the potentiality of mixture and mingling, in experiencing ourselves as part of eclectic collectivities.

Postcards captured this shift. People mailed images of bathers cavorting in the surf, flirting on promenades, stealing kisses, showing a daring amount of leg. These postcards subtly contested the moral uplift of the parks and the expos. They offered another model of solidarity: play as mutualism, leisure as collective force, the carnivalesque as democratic rehearsal.

Of course, zones of experimentation always skate along the edge of excess. Like late-twentieth-century Las Vegas or contemporary Burning Man, Coney Island pushed into zones of salaciousness and questionable activity. It is no surprise that figures like the showman and impresario P.T. Barnum drew crowds to attractions, such as the Feejee Mermaid, a hoax, obviously. Placed in broad view, the freak shows, buskers, and colossal amusement complexes composed fantastical façades for fabricated dreamworlds illuminated by strings of electric light. Even at night, crowds wandered between spectacles, marveling at a democratic splendor: the machine as entertainment, the crowd as art.

There was, of course, no shortage of cultural critics and American reformers fretting that the age of abundance would lead to moral depravity. James Gibbons Huneker, Jane Addams, and Bruce Bliven were at no shortage for words about the threat of debauchery disintegrating social mores, fraying kinship ties, and corroding community life. The very popularity of Coney Island seemed evidence that American culture was in danger of debasement and decline. Then, as now, there are public intellectuals who will caution that we are in danger of replacing civic virtue with artificial distraction. But these concerns, too, are part of American cultural innovation: each new collectivity generates its own anxieties.

Ultimately, what dimmed Coney Island’s radiance was not scandal or moral collapse but accessibility and ubiquity. The trip became too easy. The spectacle became familiar. As cinema and electric amusements and mass transit systems proliferated, the island’s singularity dissolved.

In Kasson’s closing words: “A harbinger of the new mass culture, Coney Island lost its distinctiveness by the very triumph of its values.” (112).

Nevertheless, give my love to the mermaids.

I write from the land of rugged individualism, a place where smartphone addicts are together apart. They say it’s getting worse faster and with more intensity than ever before. Given these conditions, what choice do we have but to be fatalistic and lonesome, or optimistic and cruel?

And yet…

I think we misread the situation, missing the ecosystem for the trees. Once you see it you can’t unsee it. There is no such thing but society. We are never bowling alone.

American Collectivity.