Paper short abstract:

This talk deals with eschatology and the Carthulucene in the realm of vehicle and road infrastructure ecologies. Hitchhiking, as a landscaped form of resistance and mobile transgression, serves as a type of serious play when driving through the cultural inroads of ride-shares in the COVID era.

Paper long abstract:

There are a lot of 'rules' broken and Memento Mori features in auto-stopping. From vanishing hitchers, through to the uncanny aspects of fear, danger, environmental concerns and the search for liberation from social constraint through adventure – death-memory is never very far away from spontaneous roadside lift solicitation. Memento mori is interesting because it is about remembering, about death/escatology and it is inherently material. As such, it is a memorialisation format that lends itself well to landscape studies, to phenomenology and to better understanding a practice that is both about textual/audiovisual representation as well as a hybrid human-technology form of action. A practice of the embodied imagination, hitchhiking is itself increasingly memorialised because it is seen as an endangered transgression and a dying out form of displacement. Hitching is thus a social and spatial memento mori for an era of the 'Carthulucene', when counter-culture wasn't commodified or as cynically narrativised. Is it thus useful to ask whether we should see the autostop phenomenon as a tristesse topic? The sadness here residing in that it hasn't been adequately studied in the humanities or social sciences. Not, at least, until that time when it might possibly be driven to extinction by the fear that strangers are not just potential axe murderers, but carriers of contagious viral pathogens.