How the iPhone Ruins Walking
Tech’s war against the flâneur
My father-in-law used to like to come into the City to take pictures of people’s faces. He doesn’t come in much any more. Everyone is looking down at their phones.
This raises a critical point: the loss of random encounters that are the basis of being what the French call a flâneur. What is a flâneur and where did this kind of person come from? Simply put the flâneur is a wanderer. Human identity has always been intertwined with flâneurism. We were born wanderers. Our prehistorical ancestors covered dozens of miles a day, sometimes in search of game. Sometimes looking for a warm place to sleep. But sometimes just simply to move across territory and observe. To be in motion, head up, eyes and ears attuned to serendipity, was, and should be, our natural state of being.
To wander aimlessly, to stumble upon random encounters, to improvise upon those encounters is the real stuff of life; properly executed, a flâneur’s days should be lived as notes are played in a jazz ensemble.
Indeed, when the term flâneur was coined by Charles Baudelaire in the 19th century, it was done so in direct opposition to capitalism’s encroachment on…
