Licensed activity

The car, the house, the job, the phone, the telly, the bank and the supermarket or mall are our architecture of recordation and social control. Each gives us an illusion of freedom and individuality. Each serves, rather, to individuate, identify, monitor, track and regulate our behaviour. This is why I value my bicycles so highly.

The automobile is usually thought of and experienced as an instrument of individual freedom. However it is at least arguably an important instrument of state control. Each automobile is registered, regularly re-registered, taxed and insured. Its location in governed space triangulated. If it is taken out of use, it is subject to a statutory off-road notice (SORN).

Each driver of a car is licensed and through the insurance system the number of cars that any one person can operate is, to a great extent controlled: most cars are insured for only one or a few drivers. Put in GPS and the car knows where it is. Tie that to a location-aware information service: pizza just around the corner, and anyone can know where that car is. The agents of the state (the police) can be reasonably confident that by far the majority of people moving about in cars are recorded, their identity checked and double checked, their behaviour regulated: their location in governed space triangulated

The home is one's "castle"? Well, except for the liens upon it: mortgage or rental contract recorded, bank details shared; insurance, council tax, energy and phone bills paid, credit agencies informed.

The job, or our employment status, again, is one of the principal garments of out habitus. What are you? I am a lecturer, plumber, chef, nurse, doctor. Whatever, our trade or our profession is felt to be the easiest and most ready to hand identifier of our selves. But again, as much as identifying and individualising us, our job regulates us, schedules us, entitles us and governs us.

The phone, especially the mobile phone, again triangulates its user both in governed and in physical space. It is experienced as in instrument of liberation from the tyranny of distance: I can call my sister 7,000 miles away at will, but like the car, the house, the job, far more than liberating us it has come to be one further anchor into the architecture of our control.

The television: increasingly promising us the freedom to watch what we want when we want. But, first of all the set is licensed and those vans just might sniff out your unlicensed status. And, even more, as the supposed freedom to watch what we want when we want grows so, too, does the two-way communication technology that records what we are watching and when.

The bank, and especially the debit/credit card gives is freedom to spend: with retailers who take plastic. You can't buy dodgy videos at a car boot sale with a debit card. The bank triangulates our home with our job and manages the funnelling of balances between various regulatory agencies, ensuring most of us hover around the zero point, most of the time.

The supermarkets and shopping malls complete the architecture of control and recordation. The illusion of choice is shattered as we go from town to town seeing the same high streets. We have the freedom to consume, as long as we dress appropriately (no hoodies in Bluewater). And, everything we buy and when we bought it and what we bought at near the same time is known.

To this sad list I should add my beloved Internet.

The preferred mode of activity for the regulation of society has a person either at home preferably watching a digital channel on telly, at work, on the phone (or Web), or in the car travelling between the home and the job or the shops, or shopping at a supermarket or a mall using an electronic payment instrument. Step outside that mode of activity and you are a potential dangerous deviant, who needs to be "manually" monitored.

The bicycle allows us, briefly to step out of the architecture of control and to travel along side it, not in it. Especially if we leave our phone at home and trade with cash.