The notion of ‘the street’ is curious. People know what’s meant when talking about street life or having a street attitude. It implies being savvy and aware. It might be cool when applied to design and style. Social entrepreneurs and taste-makers probably say they look to the street for clues and insight about the next trend.

It’s a romantic notion really. And any average street in any average town conforms to nothing like that romantic notion. Most people in a mall or shopping district are pretty drone-like. They walk about consumed in purchasing, most of them getting from one place to the next as quickly as possible before scurrying back to a preferred place.

In the street you rarely exchange as much as a glance with another person so inwardly focused are the folks there on their own intent. They are either locked into themselves or in exclusive little groups. The idea that street life is somehow reflective of anything creative, essential, vibrant or collective is nonsense. The street like many other experiences of modern life is a cellular one. Everyone is in their own atomised space with apparently neither the desire nor the inclination to connect.

The purpose of the street in the contemporary world is perfunctory and is a means to an end, the end being mostly about consumption before anything affiliated. That this is so reflects the paucity of the common culture: drone-like people in drone-like states driven by unconscious compunction and abetted by the prescribed agenda of producers and advertisers - essentially all about acquisition, money and stuff.