A shortcut for one driver

There is a residential street in Salmiya that used to be a shortcut known to a handful of drivers. One car cutting through in the evening bothered nobody. Children played, neighbours parked badly, life went on.

Then the maps on everyone's phone found it.

Now the shortcut belongs to thousands of drivers, all at the same hour, and the street is no longer really a street. It is a road with houses on it. Nothing about any single driver has changed. Each one is doing exactly what the first one did, saving a few minutes on the way home. The only difference is the count.

We are good at judging one of something. One driver, one cheaper rival, one copy of our work, one unwanted message. We weigh it, decide it is irritating or harmless, and get on with the day.

We are poor at picturing the same thing a thousand times over, because at that scale it stops being a bigger version of the original. It turns into something else. A street that carries a few extra cars is still a street. A street that carries the whole city is not.

Several of these jumps are arriving at once now. Work that used to take a person an afternoon can be repeated a thousand times before breakfast, and the people and places built for the old pace feel it first.

The mistake is to assess each change on its own, as if it were the first car. Streets, markets, inboxes and livelihoods are joined to one another, so when the same shift lands everywhere together, it does not add up.

It multiplies.