I’m not trying to persuade you to love or loathe the stand-up two wheelers. I bring them up to consider what the visceral hatred of rented scooters says about our snap judgments of new technology.
If we want technology to best serve us, we need to try to understand why we do or don’t want it — and when those reactions might be misplaced.
That goes for electric scooters, driverless cars, TikTok, computers for our faces, and artificial intelligence that’s helping people write emails or create holiday snapshots from thin air.
You probably have opinions about all those technologies. That’s natural.
I’m asking for humility from myself and you. That starts with two questions: What’s behind your like or dislike? And could you be wrong?
Scooter backlash, then a truce and now doom
I’m writing about scooters now because of the implosion of Bird.
It was one of the first start-ups that rushed into San Francisco, Atlanta and D.C. about six years ago with electric scooters that you could rent by the minute using an app.
Hardly anyone who saw or rode one was neutral on the experience.
To some people, the scooters meant freedom or a necessary alternative to the cars polluting our air and endangering lives. To others, the scooters were dangerous playthings that enabled jerks to mow down pedestrians. There was truth to all of that.
Some cities partly or entirely banned rental e-scooters. In other places, city officials approved the scooters, with restrictions such as built-in speed limits or caps on the number available.
But one pandemic and a start-up recession later, the debate might be moot.
Despite filing for bankruptcy protection in the United States, Bird said that it is operating as usual and that its European and Canadian businesses are not in bankruptcy protection. The company is trying to sell itself.
There are a zillion reasons for the rented-scooter meltdown. Scooter start-ups did dumb things, as did some scooter riders and cities. Money dried up for start-ups in the past year or two. Renting scooters might be an unworkable business idea.
Also, almost no form of transportation — including the car you own — is financially viable without taxpayer-funded subsidies or resources. Scooters didn’t have that support.
David Zipper, a specialist in transportation and technology with Harvard Kennedy School’s Taubman Center for State and Local Government, also told me that scooter hate might have been inevitable because few people felt deeply attached to them.
If you drive, walk, take the bus or ride a bicycle, it’s easy identify with others who do the same. Zipper said few identified as people who scoot.
Our beliefs are facts mixed with feelings
Making snap judgments about technology is kind of my job. But I now believe my 2010s scooter revulsion was mostly a misjudgment.
I badly want more affordable, pleasant and safe alternatives to cars. Rented e-scooters could be a useful part of the mix. I confess, though, that I’m still scared to ride an electric scooter myself.
My hatred was a reaction to something that felt new and weird — and it fit with my intense dislike of anything that smells like Silicon Valley bro culture. (I still hate fleece vests, and I’m not changing my mind there.)
Scooter start-ups and riders did a lot of reckless stuff, but the widespread mocking of scooters may have been less fact than feelings. And how we feel about the new and novel can become fact.
Scooters also remind me of something that people who love or hate a new technology don’t tend to admit: Change is hard. And someone almost always loses.
Even if we think it’s good to build more homes, switch to solar and wind power, or use AI cameras to spot crime, doing something different is scary and disruptive. It inevitably hurts some people.
The twinned benefits and downsides of change mean you’re not a clueless Luddite if you’re afraid of driverless cars or if you worry that AI will wipe out your job. You’re also not a human-hating clod if you can’t wait for all that stuff to become widespread.
Almost everything new, whether it’s fancy AI or scooters, has a shred of something useful and the potential for harm. It’s up to us to shape technology to maximize the good and minimize the bad — and try to understand what our feelings are really about.
I know how it goes this time of year. You’re with your family. Your cousin or your sister-in-law grumbles about some technology headache such as WiFi dead zones at home.
Check out my colleagues’ (singing!) video with a free and easy fix to try: Move the WiFi router — a.k.a. the ugly box that beams internet through your home — somewhere out in the open.
WiFi works best if your router is not shoved behind the TV, parked next to a fish tank or stuck under a stack of books.
Read more: On the tech days of Christmas, my true love gave to me: less crummy WiFi … and a plan for digital accounts when I die. (This is the worst song lyric ever. Sorry.)
