Friday 6 November 2015

Overadministration of everything just got worse

The city of Liverpool in the UK has just started a trial "fast track" walking lane system in a pedestrian mall. The trial is being sponsored by Argos, a local store. Lanes marked on the pavement are for slow and fast walkers, respectively. It's just another example of overadministration, a curse in modern cities where more people than ever before are expected to rub together in peace.

There are signs everywhere these days telling you not to ride skateboards, not to smoke, not to eat or drink, not to stand or presumably breathe. Go somewhere else and breathe, the message is. In Sydney, they have stationed police on a busy corner of Market Street day after day so they can prevent jay-walking by busy pedestrians. It seems that self-regulation is out the door. Self-control doesn't work any more so you have to do what you're told.

The overadministration of everything is taking the humanity away from everyone and turning everyone into a potential offender. You just can't do what you want any more, you have to obey the signs and keep to the left, walk straight ahead and don't bump into the person in front of you. It's just like a futuristic dystopia such as Stanislav Lem might have invented, a place where the government uses aromas to perform crowd control. In supermarkets these days they influence your mood by playing different music at different times of the day. In the future you'll be conditioned into obeying orders by special chemicals released into the air above the throng by automated robots.

There's nowhere to go to avoid the enveloping spray. Just stay in line, walk at the required pace and do not talk to the person next to you. You'll throw a spanner in the entire works.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I am finding that with this creeping overadministration I am becoming quite rebellious! I am now deliberately doing what I never thought of on my own initiative because "they" told me pointedly NOT to. "Please wash containers before placing in the recycling bin"- blowed if I'm going to clean it when they are just going to dispose of it discreetly because there is no re-processing plant for the metal in my can! I feel like telling the police patrolling the shopping mall to go out to certain suburbs where the shopkeepers don't have spare money to pay for security and prevent a few arson attacks. Its so obvious that there are too many administrators and not enough real workers when people have to spend half their CentreLink benefit on transport to the office only to wait in line half a day to see someone who is never going to find them a job because jobs don't exist for retrenched production-line workers. Grrr.