Dispatches from the present
“In theory, it takes only fifteen minutes to find someone to have sex with.” This is how a friend described the appeal of “OxShag”—a website enabling students and staff at the University of Oxford to efficiently find other people with whom to have sex—when it launched early last month. Supposedly, other dating apps require too much time and effort: “No one wants to slog through yet another boring talking stage for the faint chance of a mediocre hookup.”
The way OxShag was designed to work was that anyone affiliated with the university could enter the site, type in their university email address and select twenty students or staff members with whom they desired a “casual shag.” (I have been in England for five years, and I still cannot reconcile myself to the word “shag”; the same goes for “knob,” as in “penis,” which brings to mind an image of a person with a doorknob for a penis.) The OxShag user would then receive an email before Valentine’s Day, informing them how many people listed their name in common, and finally, upon paying three pounds, the names would be revealed. The website’s logo was a pair of pink fuzzy handcuffs. Its tagline: “For the overworked and undersexed… bringing your wildest fantasies to life this Valentine’s Day [squirting water emoji] [tongue out, winking emoji].”
It should be noted that the students at Oxford, on average, do not work harder or engage in more overwork than students at other universities. As for the “undersex,” though—it is probably true. When Susan Sontag went to study at Oxford in the late 1950s, she observed, “There is a type—the male virgin—lots of them in England.” Today, the word one hears most frequently in the cafés, pubs and restaurants where students date is not “Herodotus” or “debt” or “shag” but always, and with great consistency, “application.” As in: “I just submitted my application to McKinsey.”
In the end, OxShag was short-lived. By scraping names and email addresses from the internal university network and making them available online without consent, the site’s creator violated General Data Protection Regulation laws and the university’s IT policy. In less than a week, it was shut down. “I started this genuinely with the best of intentions,” said the creator of the site, dubbed the “OxShagger.” Even though they were only trying to make life in the city of Oxford better, more efficient, it was acknowledged that, ultimately, they had “fucked up.”
In the days that followed, I found myself returning to my friend’s comment. Fifteen minutes? What could anyone do in fifteen minutes? It was the kind of statement that could leave one feeling rather abstract about the possibilities of clock time.
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Oxford, internationally, is renowned for its university, but locally it is renowned for its traffic. Like so many medieval cities, city planners in Oxford have improvised one solution after the next to manage a modern siege of buses, taxis and cars. The vision for the city’s future, as proposed last fall by the Oxford City Council and the Oxfordshire County Council, is to lower emissions and lighten traffic by turning Oxford into a “15-minute city”: making all essential provisions of urban life attainable by foot in fifteen minutes and eliminating the need for cars. In November, the County Council also proposed installing “traffic filters” on roads across the city—basically using cameras to impose fines on unauthorized vehicles at certain times of day. By the end of December, these two proposals spiraled into an internationally publicized conspiracy theory that Oxford was being placed under a “climate lockdown.” Some residents thought they were being forcefully confined to their neighborhoods and started sending death threats to local councilors.
Carlos Moreno, a professor at the Sorbonne and an advisor to Anne Hidalgo, the mayor of Paris, coined the concept of “la ville du quart d’heure,” or “the city of fifteen minutes,” in 2016, and the idea has been celebrated for its “stickiness,” catching on in cities around the world like Houston, Milan, Bogotá and O’Fallon, Illinois. The fifteen-minute city is advertised as a place of “proximities,” where everything is local: work, shopping, hospitals, exercise, recreation, entertainment, socializing—and presumably dating.
City governments, media outlets and social media conspiracy theorists on both sides of the Atlantic are talking about “the 15-minute city,” but no one is saying much about the most distinctive, verifiably specific feature of Moreno’s plan, which is its insistence on fifteen minutes. Why not twelve, or 22?
Moreno’s idea rests on a rather idiosyncratic philosophy of time called “chrono-urbanism.” Time can be carved up in many ways, but it is often split into quantitative and qualitative: objective time versus “durée” (Henri Bergson), or “clock time” versus “lived time,” or chronos versus kairos. Moreno has said that he wants to free people “from the grip of linear time, Chronos, to find the interstices that make visible the Time suitable for creativity, the Kaïros.” Time has apparently “lost a large part of its inner soul, that of our humanity, of our vital breath.” His solution, the fifteen-minute city, is to humanize the feeling of clock time, to reduce our commutes and fill our lives with a “multitude of possibilities.”
The academic, almost sacerdotal air that hangs over some of Moreno’s writings about the fifteen-minute city has a tendency of muddling its politics. According to him, the force that has taken away our creative time in modern society is Fordism—which he defines as “a lifestyle based on a very strong specialization.” Moreno is very good at avoiding the word “capitalism,” even though it is impossible to think about Fordism without capitalism. It helps to explain why Moreno’s idea has been taken up so uncontroversially in one city after another, and used as a signal for innovation by towns in the provinces trying to raise their public profile. The fifteen-minute city is a ready-made template that can be used to justify anything from providing equitable access to health care, housing and education to the creation of quainter, boutique epicenters of wealth and convenience.
For Moreno—who is trafficking more in metaphysics, not policy or particulars—the fifteen-minute city is a homeopathic solution for modernity. It uses efficiency against efficiency, fifteen minutes to cure us of our addiction to doing everything in fifteen minutes, fifteen minutes to allow us to get back to a life in which every technology, advertisement and business is promising to waste less of our time and let us get back to living.
In the future, it will take fifteen minutes to find sex, fifteen minutes to have it (“bring your lady to boil quicker than a pot of pasta”) and fifteen minutes for everything else. The quarter hour will structure the limits of the known world, and the words “fifteen minutes” will sound like empty shells, rustling with the sounds of a forgotten age. We will endlessly circle our neighborhoods, looking for pleasures and a bite to eat, distracted from distraction and freed from the shackles of linear time. Maybe only then will the OxShagger return (or someone with a less stupid name).
Photo credit: JR P (Flickr, CC / BY 2.0)