It would be necessary to find an appropriate term for the exact moment when a system ceases to be able to disguise and conceal its own contradictions. The “accident” is not just the “reversed miracle”, as Paul Virilio said, which exposes the fragility of technology and development: it is the moment that exposes, in the most tragic way possible, the contradictions of an entire political-economic system. It’s certainly still to make a whole story about the “accident”.

From this point of view, the “accident” with the Gloria elevator does not only have a symbolic sense, it is not simply a metaphor, but it has a materiality of its own. It is a kind of condensation point where the consequences and results of neoliberal economic policies that a city like Lisbon has followed in recent years meet in a catastrophic way: (1) outsourcing of maintenance services, that is, privatization of maintenance of Carris and public services, that that is, precararization of working conditions and obliteration of technical knowledge transmission chains (as Paula Godinho emphasized in a text published on Facebook); (2) funding cuts from Carris (in the year 2024), and the apparent transfer of a considerable amount of money from this company’s budget to support this mega-event which is Web Summit and therefore the degradation of essential public services, basic infrastructure of the city, at the expense of the national-dazzle of the great unicorn events and the great epic of marketing of the brand cities and best destinations.

The absurd ideal of financial neoliberalism that Moedas represents is the city-Potemkin: pure fascism, pure staging of itself. City without content, city reduced the pure form of its economic profitability. And therefore, the policy of privatization (neoliberal) is, first of all, the policy of outsourcing sine die of political and social costs (and therefore, Moedas may not resign, unlike what Jorge Coelho did when the fall of the Entre-os-Rios bridge).

The “accident” of the Glory Elevator is, in fact, the “accident” in neoliberal Lisbon: but this must be seen, equally, as a symptom of burnout, a symptom for a burnout city, because there is, parallel to the lack of maintenance, the issue of the intensity and violence of the use of an infrastructure that ceased to respond to the massive use that is required of her: justly, the massive use of a tourist activity that today took over the center of the city of Lisbon, which devours and colonizes the entire city. And therefore, the “accident” takes place in the center, in one of the fundamental areas of confluence and concentration of mass tourism and hits, justly, one of the “icons”, one of the fundamental “representations” of tourism Lisbon and its ideology.

The “accident” reveals, thus, so abruptly, the social and economic materiality that supports the fragile fascist staging of requalified Lisbon, cosmopolitan Lisbon, joyful Lisbon, to expose the condition of a city (like so many others) reduced to the pure condition of Luna Park, made up of degraded infrastructure and overburdened, a city intensively exploited to the point of its collapse by a real estate speculation animated by the utopia of the endless growth of tourism and the magical reproduction of financial capital. In this sense, we should see the impeccable yellow color of the elevators as the ideological surface that conceals the absolute degradation of the components that constitute the hidden infrastructure of the funicular. The catastrophic importance of the “accident” in modern politics is precisely this: the “accident”. is the moment when the repressed (the infrastructure) appears violently in the disguised language of political ideology (the superstructure).

The “accident” of the Elevator of Glory is the “accident” of neoliberalism and its institutions: outsourcing, privatization, absolute profitability of everything and everyone until the imminent point of collapse. Someone said that the art of politics is to lie. Well, the”accident“is the tragic point where the truth appears as such. All policies have costs and the”accident“is, justly, the political way in which the cost appears. For the political logic of contemporary times, the formula can only be one: the bigger the”accident“, the bigger the lie.”

Pedro Levi Bismarck