Via Chairman Bruce comes news that various ongoing driverless car experiments are quietly leaving town while everyone’s busy worrying about other things. If such solutionisms are even a temporary casualty of the pandemic, then we’ve already found a silver lining to this particular cloud… as Sterling notes, it’s likely that the circumstances are providing a convenient excuse for pulling the plug on something that was massively overpromised in order to attract venture capital investment (and the innovation budgets of those cities lucky enough to actually have one). Might we see the “smart city” go the same way? We can but hope.

(Of course, there’s good odds that the same grifters behind driverless cars etc. will now pivot to pandemic “solutions”… but as already noted by people everywhere, individualist solutions look absurd against a pandemic backdrop, which inevitably highlights the necessity of collectivist systems.)