Mercury's messengers

They are one of the city's most characteristic yet ignored sights; overnight they have appeared like a new species filling an evolutionary niche.  Latter-day pilot fish around the gleaming sharks of mobile consumerism, they shadow and glide among their chosen shoals, and yet remain apart from them.  They belong to a post-modern mythology, centaurs of the twentieth century - half man, half machine. They are Mercury's new servants: the messenger bikes.

At first sight, their appearance is simply an effect of increasing urban congestion; today the only way to deliver goods is to consign them to those who can weave in and out of the near-stationary vehicles which clog the roads.  It also reflects the accelerating tempo of modern life: not only does everybody want everything, but they want it now.  The messenger bike connects desire with fulfilment. 

But in reality the situation is much richer and more complex.  After all, it is something of a paradox that in an age where communications of every sort - cellular radio, faxes, pagers, email and the rest - are more and more widespread, people feel the need to send a physical object.  That, of course, is one of the attractions.  The relative difficulty of transmission - compared, say, with sending a fax - valorises what might otherwise be a trivial transaction; even if not the whole message, the medium is a fairly significant envelope.  By extension the messenger bike is a symbol of prestige: my communications are so important that they must be delivered by hand.  In an obvious parallelism, the whole process harks back to the royal messengers bearing hand-written scrolls from the monarch; direct transmission asserts and preserves a special power.

This new medievalism goes further.  For the journey, the messenger bikes become your vassals.  They are the embodiment of your lordly will: "Go!" you say, and behold, they go; "Take!" you say, and they take.  Their existence is predicated upon swiftness; and what is that swiftness but a willingness to service your wishes as quickly as possible?  And so it becomes all too easy to see these riders as specially dedicated to your whims. Using them becomes a means of self-gratification, an expression of will and definition of self.

In all this, the outward appearance of the messengers is highly significant.  They are usually dressed in black from head to toe, and the face is often obscured by a de-humanising helmet.  Moreover, they rarely say anything which identifies them as a person.  In fact, they are the nearest thing to obedient androids we possess.  The clipped and formulaic utterances 'pickup' and 'sign here' - suggest the limited vocabulary of a crudely programmed voice synthesis devices; their natural oneness with the chunky hardware they arrive on and depart with seems more than ergonomics, and more like the manifestation of a single, bifurcated mechanism.  From all this flows our arrogance, our indifference, to these minions of Mercury.  At least they can, if they choose, fight back.  The worrying thing is, one day we will create machines for a similar role who will not fight back, who will be the unquestioning and instant executors of our desires.  They will be the messengers of Minos.

(8.7.88)

See also Moody Sonnets - Motorini Di Roma

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