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Road to Nowhere:What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong about the Future of Transportation
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Why Elon Musk, and the Silicon Valley visionaries, has the future of transport so wrong.
Silicon Valley wants us to believe that technology will revolutionize our cities and the ways we move around. Autonomous vehicles will make us safer, greener, and more efficient. On-demand services like Uber and Lyft will eliminate car ownership. Micromobility devices like electric scooters will be at every corner, and drones will deliver goods and services. Meanwhile visionaries like Elon Musk promise to eliminate congestion with tunnels, and Uber help with flying cars. The future of transport is frictionless, sustainable, and according to Paris Marx, a threat to our ideas of what a society should be.
Road to Nowhere exposes the problems with tech’s visions of the future and argues that we cannot allow ourselves to be continually distracted by technological fantasies that delay the collective solutions we already know are effective. Technological solutions to social problems and the people who propose them must be challenged if we are to build cities and transportation systems which serve the public good.
In response, Paris Marx offers a vision for a more collective way of organizing transportation systems which considers the needs of poor, marginalized, and vulnerable peoples. The book also argues that rethinking mobility can be the first step in a broader reimagining of how we organize our social, economic, and political systems to serve the many, not the few.
Reviews
The last decade has been a trainwreck for Silicon Valley's dreams of mobility. Paris Marx's invaluable new book explains how and why big tech's utopian transit projects crashed and burned, why these disasters will keep finding funding if they are not opposed, and what the alternative might look like. The path to a better, more equitable future of transit begins with the Road to Nowhere.
A lively summary of the ways Big Tech has distracted us from the urgent task of making our cities work for everyone.
An astute and engaging critique of Silicon Valley’s visions for transportation, Marx highlights the problems of technology being driven by the needs of capital and crafts a compelling vision of a world where technology is instead used to deliver social good
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Draws a compelling picture of the evolution of the Western vision of mobility.
, Green European Journal -
I recommend Road to Nowhere not only for what it says about transport, but for its approach to technologies more generally ... [it] is far ahead of the depressing pile of texts that put a 'left' gloss on techno-optimism
, Ecologist -
I know it is heresy, but electric cars are still cars and they won't save us. Marx has written a wonderful book that explains why, and is persuasive about that better, more equitable future we could all have if we looked to Main Street instead of Sand Hill Road.
, Treehugger -
Road to Nowhere is a sharply rendered, compelling, and illuminating text that combines diffuse histories and complex processes into a clear narrative. Marx's work helps us better understand the past and contemplate the kind of futures we might bring about.
, Protean Magazine -
As greenhouse gas emissions ramp up, housing prices reach astronomical heights, and we all stay stuck in traffic, Paris Marx's new book Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong about the Future of Transportation looks at how the quest for market share got us to this point and why visions of the future from California tech billionaires cannot solve these problems.
, Broadbent Institute -
[Road to Nowhere] traces the historical echo between automakers' takeover of the North American continent and the present monopolistic powers of the tech industry.
, Real Life Magazine -
You may find yourself driven to drink by the events recounted in this book, but Marx is a designated driver you can count on.
, Jacobin -
Road to Nowhere stands as an intervention into broad discussions about the future of mobility, particularly those currently taking place on the political left.
, Boundary2 -
The most concise, well-reasoned critique of that corner of the tech industry that most directly affects cities: transportation.
, Planetizen