ABSTRACT
We may live in the aftermath of the myth of the Fall, and the even longer aftermath of the myth of Oedipus, but the first traffic lights were invented in the United States after the First World War. The traditional mutual accommodation travelers had been making to each other on their bikes and in cars and carts was replaced by a set of lights. “Its purpose,” the anthropologist James C. Scott writes, “was to prevent accidents by imposing an engineered scheme of co-ordination” (2012, p. 81). Partly through pressure of numbers and the proliferation of vehicles, and partly through the new scientific and bureaucratic fantasies of efficiency and productivity, familiar forms of cooperation gave way to a new, technologically implemented set of rules. People’s practical judgment was delegated to a red light. They had known when to stop, but now they were being told when to stop.
