Relaxing Decisions: Making Driving Chill

This chapter shows how an open-source driver-assistance start-up called Comma is attempting to ‘make driving chill’ through a form of empowered individualism. Understood as a contemporary manifestation of the ‘Californian ideology’, the Comma project offers a rather unique alternative to either a tech-driven dream of autonomous driving or the automotive industry's offer of assistive driving. Fostering an active, online community of users, Comma can be understood as an interesting mutation of open-source ethics, a derivation of McKenzie Wark’s idea of the ‘hacker class’. Cultivating a wide range of antagonists—from ‘conehead’ engineers at Waymo to traditional car manufacturers—the Comma community fosters a kind of ‘spiritual communion’, in which members share experiences of using their Comma devices. Committed to a ‘culture of testing’, members happily compose notes on how to calibrate their devices, report unknown device bugs, document their experiences in video and photographic form, and ultimately, take pleasure from being in control of the automation of their own vehicle. In such instances, as the chapter contends, Comma draws on, and extends, an electronic form of libertarianism lost to platform capitalism.