I first noticed our societal breakdown of stay-right walking in the early 2000s, when I had to cross the Harvard freshman quad on my way to the subway. Not everyone was on a phone in those days, but even those who weren’t distracted by a phone walked on any part of the sidewalk they pleased.

One of my earliest memories was walking “downtown” with my grandmother to the A&P on Market Street. I was old enough to be out of a stroller but young enough to be a pedestrian hazard. I’m sure I started out at my grandmother’s side, but invariably I drifted. That’s when it happened—the startling yank to some piece of my clothing. My grandmother’s arm maneuvered as if by reflex, as pneumatic as a robotic claw turning a diesel engine. “Stay on the right and everyone gets to where they’re going.”

In the 2000s, it was hard for me to fathom how this custom—you drive on the right and you walk on the right—could be cast aside in lieu of nothing. I rationalized that the Harvard students and their generation never learned how to walk on a public sidewalk because they grew up in the suburbs and only walked inside malls and sports arenas. Or they didn’t have public-sidewalk-walking grandmothers.

I recently watched A Trip Down Market Street before the Fire, a short film of San Francisco’s primary thoroughfare shot days before the April 18, 1906, earthquake. What astounded me about this camera-on-streetcar perspective was the mayhem of the streets. Roadsters and horse-carts traveled in any direction; pedestrians did the same recklessly. The road apparently was the sidewalk.

Clearly, America’s streets were chaotic before Henry Ford started cranking out cars—but with cars came carnage. In cities with populations over 25,000, automobile accidents accounted for two-thirds of the entire death toll in 1925—and a third of those traffic deaths were children, half of them killed on their own blocks.

The introduction of cars and trucks brought rules to both roadways and sidewalks for the safety of everyone but mostly pedestrians. Cars were a monumental economic disruption, but coexistence was solidified by rapidly multiplying laws for motorists (designated lanes, stoplights at intersections) as well as pedestrians (no jaywalking). With these laws came the pedestrian custom of mimicking the rules of the road by staying to the right. Under this Pax Pedestriana, we’ve had decades of successful walking in crowds.

Since then, however, the stay-right breakdown has infiltrated all demographics and parts of our culture. Probably the only place in New York City where at least 90% of pedestrians still stay to the right is the tunnel passageway between Seventh and Eighth avenues at Times Square. Everyone hates that claustrophobic passage and wants to get out fast. Elsewhere, however, it’s a free-for-all.

As I see it, the disinterested neglect of the functional (and self-beneficial) civic habit of staying to the right while walking is a symptom of three larger changes in our culture.

1. The acceptance of self-absorption as consensual asset.

Nowadays you never think of yourself generically as a “pedestrian”; you are Olivia, and Olivia’s priorities are the same whether Olivia is in Olivia’s bedroom or on a public sidewalk: namely, Olivia. But self-absorption only explains so much, because it is a symptom that can be rolled up within the second change below—a development whereby individualism and choice is surrendered to Big Tech in return for the “freedom” of self-curation on a chosen platform. Tech platforms free you from antiquated social stigma against promoting yourself above all others.

2. Submission to corporate capitalism’s culture of constant change.

Humans are naturally risk-averse, so replacing the ethos of loss-of-the-familiar-is-bad with loss-of-the-familiar-is-good has been quite the feat. The primary commodity of Big Tech is constant change. Google, Apple, Facebook, and the rest have trained users to not just accept constant disruption but to desire it as an indicator of quality and even taste. Thus, societal traditions—everything from being careful not to let a front door slam to picking up your litter in public places to giving up a subway seat to someone who looks over 65—have no currency.

3. The steady injection of casino capitalism into social interaction.

The high-risk/high-reward I win/you lose culture of hedge-funders has permeated our society. If two people are walking in opposite directions but are on the same side of the sidewalk, that creates a situation in which one or the other must yield the right of way. That is, each human encounter must always have a winner and a loser—the one who yields and the other who claims the lane. If people followed pedestrian rules, each encounter with a stranger would not be one of winning or losing but a mutually satisfying communitarian agreement that requires no thought or decision-making of either party. We have become so self-absorbed and such insular walking units that we are creating situations in which we must needlessly compete with one another in activities that ought to be wholly benign.

These cultural changes that Big Tech capitalism only accelerates are erasing the norms and agreements of our shared public life. Sometimes I think that this breakdown in how we physically move when we are in proximity to many others could be the first domino falling in our transition from Homo sapiens to Techno sapiens. I fear that Rousseau’s social contract—the basis of progressive ideas since the Enlightenment—has been nullified by the reorientation of our attention and awareness away from physical bodies and toward the capitalist-controlled digital commons. If the rules of the sidewalk are now falling away, it can’t be long before the need for the sidewalk will as well, when Techno sapiens begin making the rules. §