Potholes, dysfunction and dystopia: Dark irony never changed the world

One of the most outrageous Twitter threads I’ve seen recently was about potholes. It was like the Social Collapse Olympics.

People were falling over themselves to identify their neighbourhood as the place on earth with the worst potholes.

I could not help weighing in with a post or two of my own. Because these days, our black humour has spiralled to the point where we celebrate chaos.

We are proud of dysfunction!

I am as guilty as anyone.

On my recent return from Gqeberha, I couldn’t help telling people tales of structural entropy. Driving into the city, only about a third of the highway lights are working.

One panel along in alternating patches of glaring light and pitch dark. Every now and then you are overtaken by a 1990 Rekord station wagon doing 140 on the way back from fishing off the dolosse.

You should visit Cape Town sometime. pic.twitter.com/ctMgzPO9oT

— Robert Williams (@Zavosdd) April 30, 2022

Some lights simply flash on and off like a strobe from a goth nightclub.

Railings have been plundered for scrap, road markings are notional, and greenery is reclaiming the highway.

It is dystopian in the extreme.

You clearly haven’t been to #SouthAfrica???????? ???????? pic.twitter.com/a8Fph0Qyu4

— ShailendraSham???????????? (@ShailendraSham) April 29, 2022

I could not wait to tell someone about the decay of my hometown. I was certainly outraged and disappointed.

But I’m also ashamed to say I was proud!

There is a certain parochial, nihilist thrill in saying, “You think this place is bad? My place is worse!”

Same with the potholes on Twitter.

It started with a post about a Baltimore pothole that opened into a subterranean cavern that looked like the gateway to hell.

Twitter people were like, “I see your Baltimore gateway to hell, and raise you a car completely submerged below the pothole water level in Upper Marlboro, Maryland.”

When’s the last time you visited Upper Marlboro… pic.twitter.com/5Uk87PljSL

— Family Man (@TeamJGRfan) April 30, 2022

By the time the race to the bottom went global, Nigeria was weighing in with seven-metre trenches in the shape of Africa, there was a Zimbabwean pothole that could accommodate an entire bus, and one from Mumbai that managed to neatly swallow an entire hatchback vehicle, vertically!

So ja, the world is going to hell.

From Milwaukee to Maharashtra, governments are providing the bare minimum of services, dead birds are falling from the sky during heat waves, and Vladimir Putin’s bomb finger is getting itchy as hell.

The US is unbanning abortion, and removing any mention of slavery from textbooks, while enslaving its citizens with study and medical debt.

Europe is being forced to choose between war, a nuclear winter, and keeping the lights on.

China is holding its people prisoner in their flats until there is not a single Covid-19 case in the nation.

But it’s much worse here by us, we cry!

That is almost an article of faith.

My place is the pits.

In SA, we can certainly brag about collapsing infrastructure, state incompetence and impoverished multitudes, but if we’re savagely honest, that is a global phenomenon.

Collapse is not unique to any territory, and we should suspend our provincial jealousy about us having a “special” type of doom staring us in the face.

This is a systems issue.

The people on earth are no longer able to look after themselves. The elites who govern us have chosen self-enrichment over social upliftment.

The capitalist growth mantra is reaching its logical conclusion on a planet with finite resources.

All that prevents the people of earth from banding together to insist that these issues be addressed, is the small-mindedness of regionalism.

We sometimes think our problems are ours alone, and that they were caused by local conditions and local iniquity.

But the selfish governance is global, the economic system is practically universal, and climate is a planetary web that sustains or strangles us.

All of these problems have an economic basis.

Capital is a global alliance, refined and perfected over centuries to exploit the commons for individual gain.

The system has damaged the environment and people’s lives. It has corrupted governments and individuals.

For this reason, attempts to change our global system for the better must also be global. With social media, we already have the tools.

But still, provincialism divides us, builds petty – and sometimes deadly – rivalries, and makes us easier to rule.

A crumbling planet gleefully squabbling about who has the worst potholes will not achieve progressive change.

Irony is not a recognised tool for mass mobilisation. I am as guilty as the next person of navel-gazing, othering and parochial thinking.

But I am now going to try to look for similarities instead of differences, to bond over mutual challenges, to tolerate and understand differences.

You could call it alliance-building.

Mobilisation.

It is the recipe for change, and some are already doing it.

I really need to find something to join.