Power Struggle

Paris, October 2019

They invaded our streets and sidewalks without us being able to do anything about it: it was the modernity, the lightness of the start-up, the unfettered mobility that finally entered our cities. And then came congestion, nuisances, complaints, even to the point of causing cities to regulate and companies to try to domesticate their customers.
But the list of scourges associated with these portless fleets has grown steadily: night-time precarious workers’ exploiters, massive producers of greenhouse gases, causes of road accidents, symbols of programmed obsolescence and even more recently strike breakers. Faced with so many evils, some people reinvest in direct action.
They could certainly destroy these devices by force, but they rely instead on their greatest weakness: the tenuous writings that connect them to a vast infrastructure of location, payment and maintenance. A marker or a small paint can in hand, a few moments of discreet inscription are enough to make the machine unusable. In this power struggle, the ubiquity of the conquering start-up is destroyed by a small surface of high optical density.