LAUSR

When Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller premiered in 1949, the job of selling merchandise by peddling wares in a designated area was common. It was a very different age—intermodal containers were being standardised, and consumerism was becoming rampant. In the play, the salesman, Willy Loman, is unhappy about all his travelling, and rightly so. The disappearance of his kind of job reminds us that, until recently, we thought that digital technologies were just going to decrease the need to move around. Today, we shop online, and the new selling agents are recommender systems (Milano et al. 2019), which canvass the space of information, or infosphere. It is true that we move a lot of bytes and not just atoms around, yet this is not the whole story. It is really too simplistic to conclude that the only impact that the digital revolution has, and is still having, on mobility has been that of reducing it. One still hears some driverless car evangelists arguing this (sometimes hijacking a green rhetoric) but they are clearly mistaken, because more people who cannot drive today will be able to do so in the future, thanks to increased levels of automation. It is far more accurate to say that digital technologies are changing the very essence of mobility (they are re-ontologising it), in four different ways (see Fig. 1).