"FIAT according to Gauguin"

The Earth viewed from space, from a handy crater on the moon, from one of Jupiter’s moons, as it has become in the last 100 years, one frame after another, would appear as a set of people possessed by the devil, in a state of acceleration. A nest of maddened ants rushing in every direction after the destruction of their ant hill. A fact that is incomprehensible to a being from Jupiter, but even for any old person with a modicum of common sense.
If once upon a time, the questions about our destiny were: “Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?” (*), now, at the time of Obligatory Transport of goods and human beings, the question has become the single one of: “Why are we on the move?” The time and the money spent for the transfers are the main investments, but also the riskiest ones, risking our lives. Driving a car is like going off to war with your wife waving a hanky at the door of your house. A million deaths every year in the world. 120,000 in Europe. We are like an aeroplane en route for God’s house with the automatic pilot set by petrol moguls, automobile manufacturers and bankers. You no longer live in order to work, but to transport. The WTO has created an infernal mechanism with goods that fly, go by sea, travel like obsessed things around the planet. The Chinese tomato, the Mexican basket, the Belgian pig, the Scottish shrimp will be the new astronauts when in the future we use immense cargo aircraft to transport them in the stratosphere.
There must be a profound reason, superior to the economic one, for this biblical self-destruction in movement, a furnace, a modern Moloch to which we sacrifice the Earth and our time. A problem more for Sigmund Freud than Adam Smith. We are investing in roads and not in connectivity. The industrial organisations have the same structure as in the nineteenth century. Teleworking via the internet has been possible for some time. But it’s always put off until tomorrow. Internet is work at kilometre zero. Companies should get incentives to decentralize. Tele-transport is no longer science fiction. You can create objects at a distance, directly in your living room at home. Internet is the new transport, of ideas, and not of merchandise. An alternative to movement exists. It’s called thought.

(*) quote comes from the painting of that name by Paul Gauguin