Most voters are cyborgs

Many Hollywood Sci-fi dystopias are wrong in that they are not fictional. They reflect present-day realities. In America, for example, most people today are cyborgs, a mass of cyborgs.  By"cyborg" I mean the dictionary definition: a person whose physiological functioning is aided by or dependent upon a machine. This machine is the car. By the term "masses" I mean the common majority. I also mean to reference John Sloan's 1911 magazine "The Masses."  I also reference the daily ocean of cars surrounding us all-- a mass of metal machines.

Imagine a dystopia where humans are confined to metal pods for most of their lives, of which they must pay for every day, or civil and social rights will be restricted. These pods take you to all the important locations of your day-to-day existence. They are not fast. They are expensive, difficult to maintain, emitting toxic fumes, but inside they are comfortable, fitted with cup-holders, air-conditioning, and t.v. screens. You might picture present-day Atlanta, Georgia, Washington DC, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Dallas, Orlando, or anywhere, really. 
Remember the famous Russian-reversal joke that goes like this: "In Soviet Russia, car drives you!" Well, in modern America, it's a nightmare coming true. 
In modern 21st century America, car-ownership is roughly opposite to land-ownership in old America. Instead of granting independence, the car steals it away. The car is presented as freedom, but it is slavery. One must continue to pay for the car, one must always buy the car, and it becomes a part of you. You love your car. Taking care of it makes you feel good, like taking care of yourself. Your only choices are qualitative--what kind of car? That's all. And yet, all cars are all the same between the hours of 4 and 7. We cyborgs live in service to our car-masters, trapped inside like Pixar characters, becoming fat, lazy, and alienated, always rushing to the next pleasure or home from pain. We have our identification ready in case the road-police want to stop us, for any reason, and ask for our papers. We have our car-insurance in case we land in a fireball of screeching metal, officially termed "car accident" We also have out health insurance in case we are injured in the accident. All of this freedom costs a lot of money for cyborgs. 

But it gets worse! If you are so unfortunate as to be fully-human, living without a car, then life in America is even more difficult. Using the roadways is a "rite of passage" for the masses. By roadways, I mean the spiderweb of pavement blotting out the land all over America. By "rite of passage," I mean: a ceremony or event marking an important stage in someone's life. By getting a driver's license, society opens before you: higher income, pay raises, social advancement, voting, and recreation. Without it, all of the above is restricted. How so? Well, there's no way to get there.

America is not the land of choice and opportunity when it comes to transportation for the masses. Our choices are often limited to: what kind of car would you like to pay for? Another way to phrase it: the social order of America is regulated by dependence on cars. If you do not have a car, you are excluded from the social order. If you do not have a car, it is more difficult to get to the polling station, get to work, or have a social live. It is a ball-and-chain with wheels. 

This is the life in the southern empire state of Georgia. Imagine: endless interlocking parking lots obstructing pedestrians, and hundreds of miles of highways lurching like slow-moving rivers of metal. Here, it is a very rare individual who walks to his high-paying or well-paying job, which would most likely be located in Atlanta. 

Although she has a lovely airport, the capitol city's infrastructure suffers from over-dependence on the automobile. Georgia learns this lesson every minor snowfall. Business development followed the highways and the city sprawls wide, bending space and time. Almost any job in Atlanta is too far for any transportation that does not use major highways. Almost no one can use exclusively buses, trains, bikes, etc. Eventually one must concede to carpool, borrow a car, chip in for gas, or pay for last-minute uber. Everyone always using cars all the time means it can take hours to travel a short distance. MARTA, Atlanta's tram system, deserves a mention if just to denounce it entirely-- it is a contradiction. People must drive to it to use it. 

A huge amount of time, energy, and money goes into the car-infrastructure. Consequently, a huge amount of money is harvested from violators of that social order. The cost is many fold. On a daily basis, all drivers pay in time for traffic and money for gasoline. This adds up to  thousands of hours and thousands of dollars a year. On a monthly basis, most drivers pay for car insurance. On a yearly basis, most drivers pay for registration. For the legal driver, it's the law to charge you a fee every month and year, just to get from point A to B. Other costs include: emissions testing, tire maintenance, auto-maintenance, traffic violations, gas payment, fines, parking tickets, accidents, tolls etc. When there is no choice but to drive, one incurs all of the above costs. 

When the cost of working must include the cost of owning and operating a vehicle, everything to do with the vehicle is an opportunity cost. By opportunity cost, I mean: a benefit, profit, or value of something that must be given up to acquire or achieve something else. The driver must give up large sums of time and money before work even begins, in order to get "something else," i.e. get to work. What we are getting for this opportunity cost is "to work." Gas, repairs, and the actual vehicle itself are mandatory costs for those that must use roadways. Essentially you must pay to go to work. This is slavery.  
Technically it is possible to drive unregistered and/or uninsured. This driver runs a higher risk of a pull-over, maybe a ticket, and pays a daily cost of “peace of mind.” And also without health insurance-- wow, you are just a disaster waiting to happen. This person is still stuck in traffic. This person still must carry a driver's license in order to vote, drink alcohol, fill out government paperwork, etc. This person is merely a disobedient slave. 

In Georgia, traffic congestion synergizes with voting laws in a way that prevents voting. Georgians are only allowed to vote in their home county, and counties are very small, which, combined with constant heavy traffic, makes it more difficult for college students at UGA, for example, to vote in their home counties. There are also all of the opportunity costs of owning a vehicle required to drive the vehicle to the polling station. Some people might call this a poll tax. This system subordinates humans to machines, or, renders them cyborgs. By "subordinate humans to machines" I mean the traditional definition of "subordinate": belonging to an inferior class or rank, secondary; subject to the authority or control of another. In America, most voters are cyborgs, or we depend on cyborgs in some way.

Another way to look at it is from the perspective of a family. Traditionally, the family is the basic structure of society, yet it would be almost impossible for an American family to function without a car. There are too many essential services accessible only by car--hospital, school, utilities, groceries, employment, etc. In this way the family falls subordinate to a machine, the cyborgs.

Some readers may be asking-- how can one be subordinate to an  object? Are cyborgs also subordinate to their own machine parts? Henry David Thoreau, the transcendentalist, remarked "But lo! Men have become the tools of their tools." The cyborg would feel a loss without his machine; he is attached to it. He is a tool of his tool. He serves the car. in this way, man serves an object.
One could also envision a trapped monkey furiously pleasing itself, subordinate to its "machine parts." One can only imagine what we do in traffic. Slavoj Zizek observed that in the west, especially in America, we are the "subjects of pleasures." The car, then, would be the object.
Who does not participate in the social order of cars? Besides individuals risking themselves by not paying for insurance or registration---and even they must pay for gas---the rare people who skirt the system must almost always be without a family and within walking or biking distance to employment, or this person is homeless and hops trains. But even a homeless person must wait on traffic—the payment is time. It is the homeless, alienated from and feared by society, who are the most liberated from the use of cars, and the least afraid of strangers. Every day thousands go whizzing by and some even leave behind money.

Even the sacred college degree is not worth as much if you do not have access to a car. Of course it is worth something, but based on the severe penalties of living without a car, it becomes clear a college degree is worth less than an automobile. To put it another way: it would be more difficult for a Georgian to find employment without access to an automobile than without a college degree. In science-fiction terms: machines run your life; only cyborgs have civil rights. 

If a college degree is worth less than a vehicle for the worker, then clearly, education falls secondary to infrastructure when it comes to social advancement, economic achievement, success, liberty, and so on. Georgians may have heard about the fabled Athens to Atlanta rail, or improvements to MARTA, talked about for decades now with nothing done about it. Is our government inept? The truth is likely worse. Chronic congested infrastructure is not a problem for the government of Georgia--it's part of the system. As a tool of oppression, poor infrastructure slows down the transfer of wealth and prevents the mixing of people. To put it another way: traffic enhances de-facto segregation. Highways serve the double-function as wall and transportation.

Incumbents in Georgia benefit from congestion at the county level, which, combined with infrastructural congestion, prevents voting. What happens on voting day? Many an unlucky Georgian may discover on election day to be located in the wrong county--- this is not difficult. The tiny state of Georgia contains 159 counties, second only to huge Texas, and if you are in the wrong county, you cannot vote. How must the Georgian escape to the correct county? By car. What happens if this county is in Atlanta? Traffic and time slow you down, making it more difficult to vote, especially for the young voter who might be away in another county for college--another county might as well be a different country when it comes to voting. And if you do not have access to a car, voting is impossible. How can this civil right be permitted to be subordinate to the use of cars?