Ride Lugged

Ok, we dont really have any new content, so chew on this.  I wrote it today, basically in reaction to issues I am dealing with in grad school.  I recently told a collegue that I felt like I was surrounded by Futurists, and this essay hatched as a result.  Sorry the footnotes didn’t copy: I used some ideas from Lawrence Lessig, from a great power point he gives on creativity in regards to copy right laws.  Find it here.    Ideas about the lens of time, ect, come from Naomi Klien’s excellent new book ‘The Shock Doctrine’ which is a must read for anyone who gives a shit about the state of our world.  Lastly, words and thoughts on supranational corporations are from the so called marxist manifesto for the 21st century:  Hardt and Negri’s Empire and Multitude, two seperate books.

Probally gunna get mulched for this, if anyone bothers to read it.

In the world of cycling, traditionalists are often called ‘retro grouches’, ‘Luddites’, ‘backward’, and ‘uninformed’. They used to be called people, because most cyclists were traditionally minded, without even thinking about it. Cycling trends followed a steady, informed slope. Manufacturers and consumers looked at products with foresight and an eye on use-value. Sure there were trends, and regrettable ones too. On the whole though, cycling was at odds with the flow of the modern world, and better for it.  This is not to say that cycling rejected new useful technology when it came their way: aluminum components, lighter weight steel frames, and improvements in shifting were genuinely useful, making the sport more enjoyable and easier to participate in.  These advancement though, were simply improvements on what was already there: steel became lighter through science and manufacturing prowess, but it wasn’t invented wholesale out of a need for a new frame material.  A new frame material was not needed: a revised and improved material was.  This linear flow was a direct result of traditional practices; i.e. building upon the past to create new or refined systems, structures, and relationships.  Limiting the influence of past through systems of control, including but not limited to marketing, economics, opaque technology, and regulation allows corporate and sovereign interests to push the contemporary meaning of progress: new new new.1

When things change for the sake of the market, it’s called progress.  In reality, it is anything but.  Capitalism pushes towards an ever expanding horizon, where reality remains confined by the 196,950,711 square miles  that make up Earth.  Confinement can be dealt with either through wholesale invention or through revision.  In other words we can learn how to deal with what we already have, or we can project beyond what we have, and ignore the confinement problem.  Developing new solutions that don’t solve old problems but instead simply replace the old with new, present only a temporary solution to the problem of finite resources, space, and time.

The act of rejecting the past in favor of the new breaks the continuum of time.  We hopscotch our way towards a confused and patchwork future.  The erratic and constant flow of information, ideas, space, capital, and resources, both human and natural, overwhelms all but the select few in charge of manipulation.  There are two ways to cope, in my estimation.  Take the blue pill, and become a complicinent participant in the flow, or take the red pill, and remove yourself.

The blue pill does not interest us for the purposes of this essay.  The red pill, the rejection of the norm, allows the user to look through whatever alternative lens they choose.  There are radical, fundamentalist lenses, religious lenses, and there are temporal lenses, lenses that allow the viewer to look at current situations and trends through the lens of time.2

Lawrence Lessig says “creativity and innovation always build on the past.”3  Building is central here: building on the past means that we take the lessons of the past and apply them to our current situation.  Building on the past implies a continuum: by participating in the building process, we are part of a linear flow of ideas.  Linear flow lies in direct opposition the established norm.  Linear flow favors transparent technology and creativity.4  Traditional building practices, be it bike construction, drawing, writing, or software development, simultaneously benefit from this practice and strike a blow against the dominant systems of control.  The systems of control exist through our mute compliance: we do nothing to stop them, to such an extent that the average person does not even recognize the problem.

The system of control has disguised itself as the will of the people, but reality holds a different truth.  Corporations, in collusion with the government control the marketplace where the will of the people is created, bought and sold.5  The need for the new is an invention of capitalism.  It has permeated every facet of life: it is impossible to escape and impossible to be unaffected.  The need for the new has created a society of futurists, who “advocate a life in which violence, power, speed, mechanization…and hostility to the past or to traditional forms of expression were advocated or portrayed.”6  There is no real basis for the rejection of the past: it is an invention used to push economic and societal agendas.  And yet…  people of all stripes adhere to the mantra of the new without even knowing they are doing it.  They are even less aware of what their participation means: increased supranational control, decreased personal freedom, and the loss of traditional, linear based building processes.

Using traditional means is not a retro idea, it is simply a way to build upon an increasingly marginalized past.  Navigating the world through the lens of tradition sheds a critical light on contemporary societies rush for the new.  Participating in events, creation and marketplaces using traditional systems turns the act of participation into a mirror.  Viewers must examine the traditional approach in relationship to their own, or reject it out right, denying its existence.

Painting a landscape of a farm, drawing a picture of a tree, using materials designed to subvert the contemporary norm, navigating by ‘obsolete’ methods all play a major part of my system of rejection.  These acts are not reenactments of the past; they can’t be: I am pulling from traditions which are not of one specific time.  Traditions take place over a temporal span, and are not limited to a decade, or specific movement.  Reenactors seek to recreate a specific moment in time through studious attention to minutia.  My actions are not retro, either, they are part of an ongoing tradition; not a retrogressive celebration of the past.  They are simply at odds with the current established norms.  In the past they were the established norm.  Words like retro, kitsch, and luddite are applied willy nilly, the linear flow of tradition is conveniently ignored.  Words are a convenient method of rejection: why examine something when you can reject it with a word?   As JC Watts said: “If you’re explaining, you’re losing.”7   I am explaining, and I am losing.  For now.  The self evident truth cannot remain hidden forever.  When popular sentiment or overt corruption eliminates the current conception of progress, we will be left with a linear continuum that embraces building upon the past to create a better, but not necessarily new, future.

The new will explode: it is a bubble, expanding ever wider and thinner.  Tradition will remain, because without the new, what else is there?  People cannot be enslaved forever, time has show us this.  Current systems of control will collapse through revolution or under their own weight, and we will be left with not the new, but what was before the systems came to absolute power.