by Jason Snell
‘Cruising toward oblivion’
Via Ben Thompson, this fascinating story from the Washington Post about the decline of car culture—and the rise of smartphone culture:
For nearly all of the first century of automobile travel, getting your license meant liberation from parental control, a passport to the open road. Today, only half of millennials bother to get their driver’s licenses by age 18. Car culture, the 20th-century engine of the American Dream, is an old guy’s game.
“The automobile just isn’t that important to people’s lives anymore,” says Mike Berger, a historian who studies the social effect of the car. “The automobile provided the means for teenagers to live their own lives. Social media blows any limits out of the water. You don’t need the car to go find friends.”
Much of the emotional meaning of the car, especially to young adults, has transferred to the smartphone, says Mark Lizewskie, executive director of the Antique Automobile Club of America Museum in Hershey, Pa. “Instead of Ford versus Chevy, it’s Apple versus Android, and instead of customizing their ride, they customize their phones with covers and apps,” he says. “You express yourself through your phone, whereas lately, cars have become more like appliances, with 100,000-mile warranties.”
Those of us who grew up in the 20th Century see cars as being a huge part of culture and identity, but that may have been a one-century-only proposition.
[Update: Unsurprisingly, car-enthusiast blog Jalopnik thinks this story sucks. I don’t know if it sucks or not—I imagine there will always be gearheads and racers and the like even after they enact the Motor Law—but it seems to me that this was once our culture, and it’s now a subculture.]