The Antisociety
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One of my more troubling predilections is for watching short-form videos of minor traffic collisions. Sometimes not even collisions, just bad road users, using the roads. Badly. I am clearly not alone: on TikTok and Instagram, such videos reach hundreds of thousands (if not millions of views). People love to see dash cam footage of British people saying “bloody hell mate!” after a Ford Focus emerges, blindly, on a country lane.
One of the things that watching such videos has offered me is an insight into the differences between the British and American driving cultures. I was struck by a TikTok series I watched a few months ago, where an American man “reacts” to videos of British traffic. There are things that boggle them — the density of roundabouts, say, or the 60mph speed limits on roads that can clearly only accommodate single-file traffic — but his dominant takeaway was different. People in the UK, he discovered, were largely willing to slow down or stop in order to let other drivers merge or turn-off. In America, he contrasted, a highly individualistic driving culture meant that these concessions were much more fraught. Slow me down at your peril.
Noting America’s obsession with the primacy of the individual — its preoccupation with autonomy — is not especially original. But it must always be pointed out as a failure. In driving situations, it is clear that there is a mutual advantage to be derived from being accommodating. If you accommodate others, they accommodate you. Negative driving situations — traffic or, worse, accidents — are far more frequently caused by selfishness than excessive deference. The road network, our driving infrastructure, is a perfect, live illustration of the simple reality that everyone moves faster (and further) if society moves in unison.
Once you start watching traffic videos on TikTok, you get served more and more traffic videos. Traffic begets traffic, on British roads and on social media. One video I saw this week involved a Tesco delivery lorry cutting across a cycle lane, knocking the cyclist clean off his bike. I went to the comments (glutton, meet punishment) expecting, finally, to see some rational reviews of the incident. The truck was clearly at fault for a dangerous manoeuvre, right? Apparently not. The comments were largely criticising the cyclist for attempting to “undertake” the lorry, or, otherwise, trying to deny my lived experience and suggest that the lorry was indicating (I could see brake lights; no turn signal). But this is a symptom of driving videos on the internet. They are consumed and amplified by radicalised drivers who hate — and I mean truly hate — cyclists. It has gotten to such a point where drivers, who would doubtless identify themselves as “good drivers” on a survey, would blithely defend and support actively bad drivers, rather than concede that sometimes cyclists are the victims of traffic incidents, rather than the perpetrators. It is tribalism at its most idiotic.
I was thinking of this clip as I Lime-biked around London earlier this week. I thought of it as I noticed a black cab move over, a yard or so, towards the pavement, in what I suspect was a deliberate attempt to block the space that I (a cyclist) would use to slip down the side of the queue, so as to wait in the cycle box at the traffic lights. The reason all this was sloshing around in my mind is pretty simple. If you are a driver in London, you must necessarily dislike traffic. It is the bane of your life. And nothing has reduced urban car traffic as successfully as increased cycling take-up. Sure, you might occasionally have to deal with an obnoxious cyclist. Yes, it can be annoying watching them squeeze down the side of a queue and then run a red light. Undoubtedly, there are incidents where their over-confidence causes collisions. But the fundamental point is still there: they reduce the amount of time you’re crawling along in traffic that’s backed-up into a different postcode.
So, from a societal read, inveterate drivers should love cyclists. But they don’t. They hate them.
Is this just a creeping Americanism, or a sign that the accepted social contract is fraying? I parked my Lime bike (sensibly, not blocking the pavement) and checked my phone. Donald Trump, the US President, had just staged a press conference with his grizzled secretary of health, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Their double-act involved the sketchy insinuation that Tylenol (a brand name for the product we sell here in the UK as paracetamol) causes autism in unborn children when taken by pregnant women. While they had this particularly slippery soapbox, Trump and RFK Jr also decided to weigh in on vaccines. “It seems to be that when you mix them, there could be a problem,” Trump said, of the combo-MMR vaccine which is given to kids. “It’s practically a known fact that if you break it up, you’re not going to have a problem…This is based on what I feel.”
I’m not a scientist (quite the opposite: to my shame, I didn’t even do triple science at GCSE) but I think I understand the place of vaccines in the social contract. Vaccines, it strikes me, have been a fairly unequivocal good. Smallpox was no fun; polio, not a walk in the park. Vaccines protect the individual, but they also protect the collective. With all my sympathies for libertarianism intact, it’s clear that anti-vaxx rhetoric impacts personal choices too. Don’t want measles? Tell that to the sputtering, polka-dot toddler on the bus. Public health campaigns — like our roads system — have to operate at maximised take-up, otherwise refuseniks have a disproportionate impact on the wider system. If I decided to ignore the speed limit in my local area (20mph) and drove, instead, at 40mph, I might personally get to work 5 minutes earlier (overall gain: 5 minutes of productivity) but I might, equally, rear-end a startled learner driver, causing a long queue behind me (delaying, say, 500 cars by 20 minutes) and requiring a temporary traffic lights system for a few hours (delaying, say, 5000 cars by 5 minutes). That’s a net productivity loss of 35,000 minutes. I would have to be 5 minutes early for work 7,000 times to make up for that (i.e. roughly every day for 27 working years). This is a consent-based system, but one that is clearly advantaged by co-operation.
The whole climate, currently, bothers me. Our politics and media is dogged by the concerns of the individual, people who feel like they are losers in globalisation’s pursuit of progress. This is a reasonable personal standpoint, but it is not a reasonable macro one. By plenty of metrics, things are getting better; by many metrics, things are stagnating; by some metrics, things are declining. But the broad narrative of loserdom elides all the good stuff. Since I was born, the average life expectancy in the US has risen by three years (three more years to hug your grandkids/watch Fox news and foam at immigrants, delete as applicable) while, this morning, researchers from across the UK, US and Netherlands successfully treated Huntington’s for the first time. Now, if you don’t have Huntington’s (or a family member with the condition, or the genetic predisposition) that might not excite you, might not make you feel like less of a loser. But, in reality, it is a significant, excellent reducer of net loserdom.
The broader problem with this insidious individualisation — antisocial stakeholders creating an antisociety — is where it leaves the biggest issues facing humanity. The climate crisis is the most vexed one, because it’s not simply ‘individual v collective’ but ‘a collective of individuals v future collectives of collective individuals’. It is a troubling, fraught calculation that even our greatest social actuaries can’t deal with. Is economic pain (read: poverty, illness, despair) in the medium term, preferable to a suspected long-term societal collapse? How can we possibly deal with a decision as massive and epoch defining as that, if we can’t even agree that cyclists reduce car traffic or vaccines increase longevity?
But trying to get people to buy into the social contract, once again, has its own challenges. The media has tended to fan the flames of individualism rather than dampen them. After all, there’s a reason why the comments on a video of a van colliding with a cyclist are largely “looool” rather than “oh no, poor guy!”, and its because empathy and compassion are less likely to generate traffic (and thus, revenue) than outrage and anger. Fact checking was a big part of the liberal media effort to push back against the first Trump premiership, but it was expensive and — let’s face it — boring. Making nuanced social good arguments is dull. It gets you disinvited from dinner parties, while rabid sloganeering gets you invited on a campus debate tour (where the counter-arguments are even less sophisticated). We’re always either driving too fast or driving too slow.
To summarise: drive safely. Let cyclists through. Don’t publicly defend bad drivers. Vaccinate your children. Take a sensitive approach to climate change. Don’t feel like a loser just because you’re poor and unsuccessful, because, hey, we can now treat Huntington’s. Be part of society, not antisociety. Chances are, if the average quality of life increases, then so will your quality of life. That’s how averages work. But we focus far too much on the counter-examples, the defiance of odds, because exceptionalism saunters hand-in-hand with individualism, here in the antisociety.
And — it’s not super related, but while I have a captive audience who’ve made it to the end of this piece — stop generating crappy videos using AI and maybe go to your local cinema and watch a (non-Marvel) movie. That will help, um, society.
N.B. I published this on my newsletter and someone immediately replied to say “Driving in the US is surprisingly much safer than in Europe.” And maybe you’re thinking that too. But, actually, the US has 110 traffic deaths per million; the EU average is 44 traffic deaths per million. The only metric by which the US might be safer than Europe is ‘deaths per mile’. Personally, I think this is an insane way of measuring safety. “You’re twice as likely to die, but you’ll get further in the process.”
