Marcel Winatschek

The Squat Ticket

Moscow put a squat machine in the subway for Olympic year: ten squats gets you a ticket. Stupid and perfect at the same time.

The joke is it’s honest. You already know how this works: need money, you work; want something, you perform. Now they’re just asking you to do it literally. Squat for your commute. Run for your welfare. Do push-ups for a movie. Make your body the currency instead of pretending it’s something else.

Most people saw it as a fun stunt. I saw it and immediately thought about the person with bad knees, or the person who’s already sore, or the person who just needed to get to work. The machine doesn’t care. It counts.

It’s not evil, exactly. Just transparent. You already know what the deal is: pay with money or pay with effort. Nothing’s free. At least with the squat machine you can see it happening.

I never found out how long they kept it running or if anyone actually used it. But I kept thinking about it—the image of someone on their way to work, sore and bitter, feeding themselves to a machine that demands physical proof before it lets you through. That’s the system, just made visible.