Ancestors

Written by Ali Alkhatib on 2025-01-20 at 15:36

I'm reading Imagination: A Manifesto by

@ruha9 and discussing it with a reading group spanning a few platforms.

I'm going to post a few quotes and start some conversations here and there about it. Hope you'll bear with me (and maybe better yet, join us)

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Written by Ali Alkhatib on 2025-01-20 at 15:37

(you can just reply if you want, but if you want to keep up with reading group stuff, you can join https://buttondown.com/al2)

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Written by Ali Alkhatib on 2025-01-20 at 15:38

When I lived in SF, I became increasingly sensitive to a specific feeling that self-driving cars were literally taking up and occupying our public spaces. Roads, street parking that might have otherwise been transformed into parklets, cross-walks...

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Written by Ali Alkhatib on 2025-01-20 at 15:42

... and the time these cars spend constantly circling blocks and homes for "training". I didn't really have much more to say about it at the time, or even since then, because other people have written much more persuasively than me about self-driving cars.

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Written by Ali Alkhatib on 2025-01-20 at 15:42

But as I got to this passage - that they're occupying the imaginative space to which the rest of us have a right - I acutely remembered how frustrated I was, how robbed I felt the people of SF (and, increasingly, a lot of cities) were, of literal as well as imaginative space.

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Written by Ali Alkhatib on 2025-01-20 at 15:42

What we're robbed of, imaginative space, is impossible to quantify and maybe even impossible to estimate. Self-driving cars are just one (microcosmic) example of tech billionaires experimenting and thus depriving us of space to experiment and imagine things ourselves.

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Toot

Written by Ali Alkhatib on 2025-01-20 at 15:42

But I felt (and now, again, feel) acutely robbed of something unfathomable. I shudder to think about all the spaces where we are denied space to imagine, but I can't help but feel like it's pervasive, and as much as I don't want to think about it... I feel like I need to identify it now.

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Descendants

Written by Misuse Case on 2025-01-20 at 16:35

@ali I think there’s something to this because a century ago, the dominance of automobiles in urban spaces was not a settled thing and people actively fought against it. People walked and did things in the street. Jaywalking didn’t exist as a concept. We can’t imagine it now. Automobiles dominating our streets and shaping the way we build our infrastructure feels normal.

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