"Aesthetic spirits of modernity and its discontents"

This is why I don't drive - I don't think I could handle being part of such a deep and meaningful social experience:

Since the early 20th century, motor vehicles of all descriptions have been central characters in the settlement, governance and representation of non-urban Australia. They are objects of desire and exchange, characters in subsistence, ceremonial and market economies and sites of projective identification. Represented in paintings, films, novels, music, ethnography, ceremony and other media, vehicles communicate closely with the aesthetic spirits of modernity and its discontents. Vehicles add velocity to landscape’s powers, compressing distance and reframing senses of place. Containing, carrying and connecting people, knowledge, visions and voices, motor cars are deeply phenomenological spaces.

Who knew that cars had such deep significance? Or that academics could truly speak such wank?