As if our streets weren’t chaotic enough, the newest ridiculous addition to them is people on “hoverboards”, electric skateboards with coloured lights; hands-free Segways – known as Swagways, SwegWays or Megaboards – that cost hundreds of pounds. Usain Bolt was spotted riding one through Heathrow earlier this month, which is fair enough: his legs were probably a bit tired after doing all that insanely fast running at the world championships. But what is everyone else’s excuse?

Hoverboards, naturally, do not actually hover. They have wheels. The best impression of hovering you could do on them would be to don a long skirt or robe that reaches the ground and pretend to float around like a motorised ghost.

But the inaccurate name reflects a determined aspiration. In the sci-fi of the 1950s, we were promised flying cars. Where the hell are they? Until I can strap myself to a big drone like some sort of hipster Icarus, the disappointed futurist thinks, I will wobble about on a two-wheeled board and pretend it is not in contact with the ground. Or perhaps users are channelling the Mekon, the swollen-headed green enemy of Dan Dare who zoomed around on a flying platform. Or Marty McFly on his flying skateboard in Back to the Future. Or perhaps they want to be Daleks. Who doesn’t?

This expensive and unnecessary gizmo is, of course, an excellent vehicle for what the American sociologist and economist Thorstein Veblen diagnosed more than a century ago as “conspicuous consumption”. Bystanders might miss the fact that you got a high-end model of the Apple Watch, or that your trainers are made of solid gold. But they can’t very well fail to notice that you are gliding past them on a hoverboard, your body held at an unnatural and faintly comic leaning angle. Pop stars and rappers from Justin Bieber downwards love hoverboards. And that is as it should be, because part of the social good performed by celebrity culture is that the rich and famous are constantly doing new things that the rest of us can happily laugh at.

The hoverboarder is spectacularly selfish, making a moving exhibition of his dedication to not giving a toss

The hoverboard, however, has an implicit politics too. And evidently it is just the most visible recent outgrowth of Silicon Valley individualism, according to which public issues can simply be privatised and bypassed by those wealthy enough to afford the gadget. Cities need better mass transit for everyone, but I’m all right Jack because I’ve got a hoverboard. In riding a hoverboard, then, you declare that you are for Ayn Rand, high priestess of bonkers libertarianism, and against Charles Baudelaire, poet of the flâneur, hymner of aimless city strolling. The hoverboarder is spectacularly selfish, making a moving exhibition of his dedication to not giving a toss.

And yet there are, after all, worse things in city life. Hoverboards can in principle be recharged on green-energy tariffs, so in that sense they are much better for the environment than Uber, which for all its Valley tech-boosterism is actually exacerbating global warming by keeping more fossil-fuel-burning cars on the road. On the other hand, hoverboards blessedly do not convey that awful, I’m-saving-the-planet-and-myself smugness that radiates from conspicuously healthy modes of transport: incompetent cyclists who ignore traffic lights and ride up the kerb at random; elbow-flailing runners who want to barge you off the pavement while splashing you with their virtuous sweat. You could easily ride a hoverboard and smoke cigarettes – or, for added lighting effects, vape – at the same time. Try that when you’re struggling through your morning 5K in ill-advised Lycra.

Usain Bolt was seen riding a hoverboard earlier this month. Photograph: Ian Walton/Getty Images

So compared to the panoply of annoyances that already batter the modern city flâneur, people on hoverboards are going to rank pretty low. Rather a hoverboarder than an idiot pedestrian who suddenly stops in the middle of the pavement to write a text. The new machines may be adding to the anarchy of the streets, but they are also adding to the gaiety of the nation. People on hoverboards are just pretending to live in the future, like big children. In reality we’re all in the gutter, but some of us are looking up at the flying cars.