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AI and the End of the Flâneur
What has become of wandering?
The word flâneur was coined by the writer Charles Baudelaire in the 19th century. Baudelaire came up with the word to express direct opposition to capitalism’s encroachment on humanity’s spare time and space. To wander aimlessly, to stumble upon random encounters, to improvise upon those encounters is the real stuff of life, Baudelaire reasoned; properly executed, a flâneur’s days should be lived as notes are played in a jazz ensemble. Industrial capitalism is the opposite: a defined work space, structured day parts, a day that is seldom surprising and always inevitable.
If the iPhone undercuts the wanderer’s physical means to wander, Artificial Intelligence destroys the financial side.
Marx and the 19th century socialists who shared Baudelaire’s point of view believed that it was capitalism that limited our potential and made us hoe our narrow row. “As soon as the distribution of labor comes into being,” Marx wrote in The German Ideology, “each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a herdsman, or a critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood.” Meanwhile, Marx continued, a society…
