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Central Paris. Daytime. A bicycle lane. The yellow stone of the Haussmannian apartment blocks greedily swallows the sunshine, while the ground is covered in the usual thin green carpet of

bird droppings. A cyclist dismounts behind a small van, veins in his neck and forehead throbbing as he screams at a workman. “Get your ******* van out of the way! You’re blocking the cycle

lane! I’m trying to get to work! What the **** do you think you’re doing!” “I’m working,” says the workman, as he lifts some discarded piece of tubular detritus from the pavement and puts it

into the back of his van. Such was the scene in the French capital one day, the day when everyday conflict expressed itself in the form of a bicyclist, purple-faced with rage, ranting at a

glum-faced, insecurely employed worker who made his living clearing up the mess left behind by others like monsieur bicycle ranter. Call it the Parisian versus the _Banlieusard_. And the

mess discarded on the pavement? An electric scooter. E-scooters, the pox of the modern city. I’m sorry to bring up such antediluvian times, back when people could freely roll around on the

streets of major cities without fear of being arrested, accosted by busybody freelance epidemiologists leaning out of windows, or of catching a terrible disease. The coronavirus crisis has

spread into our work, our economy, our politics, our social lives and even our private lives. And as the weeks drag on, I am beginning to wonder if we even know what the world will look like

after the coronavirus crisis ends — whenever that happens to be. What started out as a bad but fundamentally business-as-usual pandemic is rapidly taking on the appearance of

business-never-again. Let’s hope I’m wrong and that I’m just losing my sense of perspective. Still, perhaps there is something useful to contribute. Writing in TheArticle in February, Jason

Reed argued that the British government needs to legalise e-scooters, because at present they are technically against the law in the UK. Doubtlessly he is right, and legalisation may result

in the much-needed regulation of rental e-scooters. They are a motor vehicle, of sorts anyway, and often ridden with wild abandon by unlicensed, unskilled and unthinking users. Some

regulation might, as they say, put some manners on riders. In any case regulation is called for because, like the coronavirus, e-scooters are here to stay. Frankly, though, back here in

Paris I’d rather someone took the lot of them and threw them into a landfill. E-scooters are banned from pavements in France, though you’d never know that if you were to judge by the piles

of them discarded randomly around the place. The elderly, the disabled, parents with prams and anyone trudging home with the shopping forced to weave around them. Nor would you know it as

one hurtled down the pavement toward you at twenty kilometres an hour. Not long ago, residents of several Parisian social housing blocks discovered that they were paying to recharge the

things. Like so many businesses beloved of Silicon Valley, the e-scooter racket thrives on externalising costs. You don’t get to be lean and agile, after all, by building infrastructure. As

a result, gangs had somehow taken charge of recharging duties and were doing it by tapping into other people’s mains supply. There is a deeper problem, though. A philosophical one. My

objection is not primarily aesthetic, nor is it that grown adults are zipping around on children’s toys, though both of those factors do come into it. No, it is semiotic: the e-scooter, or

_trottinette_ as they are called in French, would be bad enough if it merely symbolised another extension of adolescence, but it symbolises co much more. The rental e-scooter is a sign of

the growing divide in society between the digital leisure classes and those who silently toil to support the world on which these sybarites depend. Call it Twitter on wheels, a kind of

hellish Disneyland for grown-ups, where people roll from the start-up accelerator (perhaps a converted train station or warehouse; never, sadly a deep mine) to the WeWork offices so that

they can spend the day changing the colour of cells in a cloud-based spreadsheet. The less fortunate members of the gig economy, can clear them up and ensure they are charged in advance of

tomorrow’s transport beano. Worse still, e-scooters are representative of a narrow, inhuman vision of the future. So-called smart cities, with their attendant possibility for surveillance

and the amorality of the tech industry, are a development that should worry us very much. News of techno-luddites setting fire to 5G masts after reading on WhatsApp that they caused

coronavirus should not blind us to the fact that transforming our very selves into data is not in our interests. At a very minimum workable models for shared transport require

infrastructure, such as we see with municipal bikes. The e-scooter, and for that matter the similar street trash that is the various non-municipal bike-sharing schemes, fail precisely

because they are decoupled from responsibility, both for the rider and for the business. Perhaps the coronavirus will put an end to these things. I wouldn’t bet on it, though. People seem to

like jollying around while leaving others to deal with the mess they leave behind, all the while transforming themselves into marketable commodities. I can think of no better symbol for the

tech industry.