What if nobody is at the wheel?

Heading over a cliff in a driverless car

Last week, I interviewed James Schneider on the Green Democratic Revolution and the deep failures of the ruling class to govern at scale. During the interview, James used the metaphor of a car heading for a cliff-edge at high speed: We, the people, are held hostage, gagged and bound in the boot of the car, and need to help one another get out of our bonds, burst out of the boot, wrench open the front door and pull the ruling class out of the driver’s seat. 

An excellent metaphor, for sure. Labour has long been held hostage by capital’s power, and the cliff edge is nothing less than total systems collapse, as MIT scientists calculated in 1972 in their report, Limits To Growth. The path ahead is terrifyingly clear if we continue careering along the coast in a fossil fuel engine—very soon, there will be nothing under our wheels to support us. 

So, yes, we must organise and collaborate to undo the bonds and remove our gags and break out of the boot of the car. We must—at all costs—exit this moving vehicle, this economic machine of exploitation, extraction and inequality. We must wrestle with the driver to gain control over the direction and speed we are heading to stop humanity going over a cliff and taking many other species with it. 

But here’s the thing—what if we open the driver’s door and the seat is empty? 

What if we’re heading for the cliff in a driverless car?

What if we rip open that door and find there is no one person, nor group, of human beings to wrestle with in order to save humanity from itself? What if there is no thinking behind the decisions made every day, but merely momentum of a moving vehicle which first rolled forward thousands of years ago? 

Caitlin Johnstone wrote an astute essay on the phenomenon of the society as a driverless car (although her metaphor of choice was “the man behind the curtain”.) Somehow, nobody is in control. We search and search for the people to blame, these supposed evil networks, these spiders at the centre of the web, the ones in control. Yet, in searching, we discover that these people are merely behaving as they are expected to, that the system rewards them for their good behaviour, behaviour which is very bad for the rest of us. You discover that, in fact, far from being evil geniuses, these people are deeply weak and fragile because the most they can do with their lives is swim with the tide—the most they can do is be a passenger in a driverless car, playing with a toy steering wheel to turn corners as they themselves are steered towards the cliff. 

So what to do? How to stop the damn thing from going off the cliff? 

First, we need to ask: Do we need to stop it from going off the cliff? If we get all the bodies out of the boot and backseat and passenger seats (although they will put up a fight to be parted from their toy steering wheel) do we need to salvage the machine itself? Or can we let it go? Let the economic machine spin out, crash, accept turmoil, as long as communities have the provisions to feed, water, house and care for themselves during that time?

Then: Say we do want to stop the car from going off the cliff because of the mess it would make—Do we need to bother opening the front door? Without any humans to fight for control over the wheel, surely a much better strategy would be to puncture its tyres? Why not take out the very mechanisms which facilitate its forward movement? Why not let it skid to a halt (the passenger at this moment will begin to realise his toy steering wheel is, in fact, not working) and salvage the pieces for the much gentler economic vehicle we’re building the future with?

You can’t bargain with a driverless car. It is so much more difficult to revolt against a system rather than our fellow humans because there is nothing to be in relationship with. The driverless car doesn’t care who’s trussed up in the boot—it’s going in the direction of the exponential growth it was accidentally programmed for when combined with the accidental discovery of fossil fuels. The driverless car doesn’t have a goal, doesn’t have a purpose, doesn’t have a nature against which we can take up arms or with which we can negotiate. It will do as it does until its fuel source is taken away. It’s that simple. Its very lack of relationship is what sees it careen blindly towards its own demise, pulling the rest of the world along with it. 

We are not bigger than the things we have made; we are definitively smaller, dragged along in their wake. The ruling class exploit and extract, they punish and they conquer, they threaten and they kill. But they are merely passengers holding onto a piece of plastic pretending to turn corners. Why battle with them to change course when their greatest power is their self-trickery?

The cliff is in sight. Aim for the tyres.

© Rachel Donald