Kamal Ghorui
One can think of modernity as an eraser. We first classify nature as a form of friction. And then set about removing that friction. Hills, heat, crowds, waiting, bad roads, rain, bad air, noise. All the small resistances that once defined what it meant to move through a place are recast as defects in a system that ought to flow and are erased or made irrelevant. In doing so, we erase many other experiences.
As we examine the progress we have made, we find that what we have been doing, bit by bit, is to erase topography. We are levelling out experience, rounding off its rough edges, losing the texture and specificity of things that limit us, pushing back against the relentless human need to dominate. We are winning that battle, but there is a danger of losing another war.
Take distance. Distance has been one of nature’s great constraints. We have found various ways of dismantling this constraint, each with their own characteristics. The train swallows up distances but maintains contact with landscapes. It accepts the obligation of the in-between. The landscape becomes a form of cinema, with the window serving as a screen or perhaps a table on which the topography is served up to us, for visual consumption only.
The flight does something more ambitious. It abolishes the surface altogether. Distance survives only as a number on a screen. We no longer pass through space. We rise above it. The landscape gets re-oriented as a form of map rather than a tableau of places.
Highways still negotiate towns and villages. They are forced into compromise with traffic, pedestrians, shops, stray cattle and human unpredictability. They are threaded through the lives of people, sometimes in a messy way. Expressways, on the other hand, adopt a peremptory attitude of dismissiveness— nothing else matters except for the two places they want to connect. The intermediate becomes a form of empty space— distance without any shade of meaning. Only the significant matter—the two presumably large cities that need their own hotline, without acknowledging that others exist.
The other form of distancing happens in the way we travel. Air conditioning, now a standard feature in cars, shields us from the weather outside. We construct our own habitat and become impervious to what lies outside. As we climb the price ladder, outside sounds get muffled, the potholes on the road do not imprint themselves on our spines with quite the same authority, as we wrap our preferred ecology around ourselves. We erase friction, that experiencing of encountering things that our bodies have to adjust to. Instead, the world adjusts itself to our needs. The street is what happens to other people.
The same pattern can be seen, albeit in a different way, when it comes to quick delivery. The friction here is time— between our desire and its fulfilment. Here what we do is to outsource the friction to someone else who undergoes it in a concentrated way. The delivery agent fights through traffic, heat, pollution and rain to meet an arbitrary target that has become a measure of our need. Distance has not been eliminated, but tamed. The topography is someone else’s problem.
With pollution, we recede further into our little cocoons. The growing perceived hostility of the outside world contrasts with the ease of having everything come to us. We can do pretty much everything we want without moving out— work, get entertained, shop, connect with friends. The outside world pushes us inwards through fear, the virtual world keeps us in through seduction.
We consume topography and nature through simulated means. Screensavers are aglow with serene pictures of mountains, lakes and vistas of beaches and forests. Digital metaphors all take us back to places we have detached ourselves from. We stream, we use the cloud, we dip into data pools, we surf, we go viral. The digital becomes an extension of the natural, its first cousin. There is no user interface more comforting than nature.
The ordinary experience of being outside becomes unfamiliar. The outside world increasingly becomes either ordeal or adventure. Either you are out because you must, negotiating heat, pollution, traffic, crowds, broken pavements, unreliable transport and time stolen by waiting. Or you are out because you have chosen to curate it, as an experience, framed, filtered and priced. The everyday middle, the unthemed act of simply inhabiting the street, starts to hollow out.
This is where the social cost of frictionless living begins to show itself. The suffering of those without the privilege of escape becomes invisible. Overloaded trains and buses are erased from consciousness, not because they vanish, but because they stop belonging to our lived frame. They become a sign of elsewhereness. The privileged city learns to move above, around and through without contact. Once you are no longer forced to encounter a thing, you soon lose the ability to imagine it.
There is a deeper shift underneath all this. Google does not merely help us find places. It reorganises how space itself is understood. The neighbourhood was a world arranged by proximity, repetition and familiarity. Search rearranges the world by relevance, rating and keywords. You no longer move through space. You jump between intentions. Origin does not matter. Path does not matter. Only the destination does. Geography yields to desire.
Now with AI, the topography of the mind and the messiness of trying to extract coherent thought from within the tangled complexity of neurons are being bypassed. We arrive without travelling, become without striving.
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