31 August 2009: "Will alternative people stop ‘driving hybrids’/'riding bikes’ and start ‘horseback riding’?"

This post is about path dependency. Because of the massive amount of investment and coordination required, societies tend to lock into the transport systems they develop collectively regardless of their future inefficiency. Would a return to a prior paradigm -- the use of domesticated horses as a primary mode of transport -- be anything but atavism, Carles wonders. Can outdated technologies be relegitimated as fashion, can they serve a symbolic use when their material use is exhausted? "It seems like owning a horse might declare 2 the world that u r an individual who ‘truly understands’ that the world is an ecosystem, and we need to start relying more on other humans and animals." Or would this willed reliance be a disruptive contradiction, further confusing the destiny of the species in history. But since "Truly alternative people will find a way to break free from society" a purposeful return to prior modes of living that are no longer supported by infrastructure seems on the face of it a mode of escape, an instantiation of resistance. "Not sure what sort of facilities you need to own a horse, or if there are any ‘traffic laws’ for horseback riding within the city."

The move backward into history already passed does not allow for a blithe reenactment of moral dilemmas that seem to have been solved, making for a shelter from ethical quandaries necessarily generated by the contemporary order. Instead it fosters anarchy, as incompatible stages of development collide in real time. By forcing the base and the superstructure to misalign, "alts" would perform a radical intervention into the quotidian as such and elevate it to the level of a problematic. While this confrontational mise-en-scene would allow us to prevent the dangerous iteration in which commuting transmogrifies into communing, in which it "degenerates into a celebration of ‘being stuck in ur life,’" it does not solve the contradictions of positing ahistorical solutions to the problem of history, that is, the problem of social classes -- alts and mainstreamers, if you will -- and the dilectical progression of their struggles. Horses wouldn't be able to drag us back to a moment in time in which we are innocent of history, innocent of our own self-knowledge as belonging to a social stereotype.

In the end, Carles notes, the horse as transport mode will meet the same fate of the culture industry as beast of escapist burden: "Still kinda sad that Barbaro was executed. Miss him like I miss Heath."