The road, once, was a place where you went from A to B. With a bit of luck without killing yourself and, if all went well, without killing anyone. Now, apparently, it has become a set. A permanent, open-air set, lit by car headlights and phone lights, where extreme speed videos, movie-like overtakes, chases, and maneuvers that the Highway Code would define as “crimes” and social media instead call “content” are filmed.
In Great Britain they have decided to intervene. After seven people died on the A66 near Middlesbrough, and someone discovered that one of the guys behind the wheel had already posted videos of himself speeding the wrong way and fleeing the police, the government announced a crackdown. Not on dangerous driving itself – that was already there, and so were the fines – but on the videos that celebrate it, pose it, and turn it into a spectacle to share.
In Italy, Codacons is asking to do the same, and to do it before we have to count the dead. They are right. Not because social media is the absolute evil – it is just a mirror of what we have become – but because they have invented a new kind of vanity: deadly vanity. Once, people showed off the new car, or the enhanced engine, or at most some acceleration. Now they show off the accident live, or almost: the curve taken at three hundred, the overtake on the solid line, the chase with sirens sounding as the soundtrack. And below, the comments: “How cool,” “Respect,” “Next video at 250”.
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But the road is not a reality show. It is not even a video game. It is a piece of asphalt where, unlike TikTok, when you make a mistake you cannot start over. Yet, many crazy people continue to treat it as if it were. Maybe because visibility has become the only currency that matters. Or maybe, more simply, because we have stopped teaching kids that there are things you don’t film. You do them, or you don’t. Period.
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vincenzo.borgomeo@formulapassion.it
