Are we citizens of our cities, or just customers? Zohran Mamdani’s historic oath challenges us to stop treating local government like a vending machine and start building a true home.
The City as a Vending Machine
I often catch myself looking at New York City the way I look at a broken vending machine. I put my money in—my taxes, my rent, my energy—and I wait for the product to drop. When the subway is late or the trash piles up, I feel that familiar consumer rage. I want to speak to the manager. But watching Zohran Mamdani take his oath in the Old City Hall subway station, I realized this mindset is a symptom of something deeper. We have learned to treat our cities as products we consume, rather than communities we create. We walk past the crises on our streets with the numbness of a hotel guest who assumes maintenance will handle it.
The Pathology of the Spectator
This is more than just apathy; it’s a fundamental misunderstanding of what a city is. We are suffering from the pathology of the spectator. We have outsourced our civic soul to bureaucrats and market forces, believing that the ‘invisible hand’ will organize our lives for us. But the market has no moral compass; it only has algorithms.
To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.
– Simone Weil, The Need for Roots
When we view ourselves as consumers, we uproot ourselves. We become transient, waiting for a better deal, never committing to the difficult work of digging in. We have forgotten that a city isn’t a business—it’s a shared fate.
Prognosis: The Death of the Agora
If we keep down this path, the future is bleak. A city without citizens is just a collection of lonely people stacked on top of each other. The tragedy of the modern city is that we are surrounded by millions, yet we have never been more alone in our struggles. The prognosis is a slow drift into total alienation, where the rich build walls and the poor are pushed into the abyss. We risk losing the very thing that makes urban life human: the friction, the collision, the messy beauty of living together.
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Prescription: The Audacity of Ownership
So, what is the remedy? It’s not just voting for a different mayor; it’s changing how we exist in the world. Mamdani’s talk of “audacious” governance is a call to wake up. It’s a prescription for active, messy, difficult participation.
Freedom is the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.
– George Orwell
Real citizenship means telling the market that it doesn’t own us. It means demanding that our cities serve human dignity, not just real estate portfolios. We have to stop being tourists in our own lives. We have to take the keys back.