Clarissa's Blog

The EU today introduced the new requirement for all new cars registered in Europe to have installed cameras filming the driver’s face.

The system is called Advanced Driver Distraction Warning, ADDW, and is part of the EU’s General Safety Regulation.

The camera tracks the driver’s gaze, head movements and attention.

According to the regulations, the system must be active from 20 kilometers per hour. At lower speeds, it should be able to warn if the driver looks away for too long, while the requirements become stricter at higher speeds.

Chirbes explains in his diaries that all these measures are aimed at infantilizing people. And the purpose of doing that is economic. People who are infantilized are likelier to accept the childish lifestyles that they are offered. Living in rented apartments with roommates instead of owning. Serial dating and situationships instead of marriage and children. A succession of crappy part-time gigs instead of a career. Adults are habituated to seeing themselves as eternal children so that they would accept the economy which deprives them of every marker of adulthood. This is achieved through the concept of safety. What always was a normal adult life is perceived as unsafe.

The social contract between an individual and the state is transformed. The state no longer has to guarantee an acceptable standard of living and maintain a social structure in which one can transition through the appropriate stages of life. Now, the state’s role becomes limited to creating an illusion of safety through a succession of fussy, infantilizing control measures.

Chirbes would say that what is being announced in this safe driving measure is yet another drop in the standard of living for which this is in preparation. Something is going on economically behind the scenes. Back in the day, Chirbes became famous in Spain for predicting the collapse of the real estate market and the incoming crisis of 2008, at a time when everybody else in the country thought that the economy was doing great. His instinct was always to look at the economic causes of things. I think that that instinct is what is missing from a lot of our analysis of everything we observe.