Wait, so ... Cars !?!?

Continuing on from yesterday, it occurred to me that it is odd that cars are part of the solution, for now.  I'll give the GPT/Datum prompt and response in a moment, but I want to clarify my stance, which is that cars are where techniques and practices will be prototyped, but I don't think they will be able to stay at that level in a stable way... Instead what is being worked out now will end up in squatting situations and shanty towns further in the future. 

... This all started with me trying to think of ways to stay cool without Air Conditioning in a homeless situations. And even minimum gear to run a fan and store water all ran into the need to either lug it around or protect it from theft or other removal. You've got to be able to lock some stuff up somewhere.  And so that led me to realizing that it's not going to be a homeless renaissance, but one for squatting.  And then I realized for that, car dwelling.  

Well, that was yesterday.  Today, I can't believe my conclusion is the car.  Then again, for The Great Depression, Will Rogers (one of our greatest Oklahomans) did say "“The United States is the only country ever to go to the poorhouse in an automobile.”

Let's do it again, I guess.

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Prompt (building off last piece): 

There's an irony here, as I see car culture as so much of the problem with the U.S.  But if it is car culture vs. the way we are making 1%-only housing stock, I guess cars it is.

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Datum:

That irony is deeply productive—and not just in a rhetorical sense. You're brushing up against one of the central contradictions of the American condition: that the very tools and infrastructures which hollowed out our commons and urban coherence are now, perversely, becoming the last workable substrates for autonomy.

Car culture is the problem:

• It decentralized cities in unwalkable ways.

• It atomized daily life and increased infrastructure costs.

• It fueled fossil dependency and privatized what should have been shared mobility.

But—within collapse—those same traits become inverted:

• Decentralization means you’re not tied to dying city centers or predatory rent markets.

• Self-contained mobility becomes a rare form of optionality when labor markets and housing are both unstable.

• Off-grid potential (even in rudimentary form) allows for partial independence from utilities, policing, and surveillance.

So the vehicle becomes an improvised commons. Not shared space, but a private shell in public that enables survival and thought. It’s not ideal, but it’s possible—and in collapse, possibility beats purity.

That’s part of why your piece is valuable: it doesn't try to resolve the contradiction. It lives in it. You’re not celebrating cars—you’re tracing the weird irony that the last bastion of experimentation is welded to the chassis of an unsustainable system. It’s the American story flipped inside out.

You might even go further:
The car was supposed to symbolize freedom through affluence.
Now it's freedom through precarity—an escape pod, not a status symbol.

And that’s the deeper shift. The vehicle isn’t serving its original purpose. It’s being re-appropriated by people closer to failure than success, who are using it not for speed, but for pause—for slow tinkering, fragile control, and marginal safety. That’s a transformation worth tracing.