Modern art or crowd control? DC’s got maze energy

Walked past a setup in DC that looked like an installation piece and turned out to be barricades, or maybe it was the other way around. Hard to tell the difference these days. The city has been doing this thing where the street furniture quietly multiplies overnight and by morning the sidewalk has a new “flow.” Call it design, call it security theater, call it the slow conversion of public space into a queue. Nobody puts up a wall and tells you it’s a wall anymore. They give it curves. They paint it a neutral. They wait to see if you’ll route around it without asking why. We’re asking why.