#45: Universal Basic Skateboard
If anything is unequivocally good for cities, it’s bikes. The more bike-friendly a city is, all else being equal, the more pleasant it is; cities where lots of people ride bikes are places where everyone wants to be. The philosopher Ivan Illich articulated this well: The bicycle "allows people to create a new relationship between their life-space and their life-time, between their territory and the pulse of their being." In 2005, when I was in college, I remember someone exclaiming that we could have used the money spent on the war in Iraq to buy every kid in America a skateboard. That was a joke, but if you swap out skateboards for bikes (or even if you don't) it's frankly better than most ideas. People have been riding bikes for more than a century and bikes, not cars, were the original impetus for paving American streets—yet, judging by the tone of recent hype about dockless bike sharing, you would think the bike just got invented. Felix Salmon recently announced that "Bikes plus smartphones...might just be enough to usher in a new golden age for cities," but never quite explains why the smartphone is such an essential prerequisite to that golden age.
Silicon Valley faces frequent accusations of reinventing time-tested concepts like buses and bodegas, but this is unfair—nobody thought Amazon claimed to have invented bookstores. The real innovation in these cases is not the physical object but a digital marketplace for it, as well as a method of capturing value that was previously locked up elsewhere: in a local community or ecosystem, the public realm, or a context so analog that whoever was closest reaped the benefits. I’ve written previously about Reyner Banham's essay "The Great Gizmo," which praised a bygone era of American frontier technology like the Jeep and the Evinrude outboard motor, truly resilient tools that amplified their owners'—owners', not users'—abilities, thus enabling them to carve civilization out of hostile wilderness. Banham contrasted those gizmos with a concurrent development, the Coke vending machine, appearing in remote towns as nodes in a global network upon which they depended. A Coke machine wasn't a tool, it was a portal to a relationship with the Coca-Cola company, and was there in order to recode all those frontiersmen as mere consumers.
Dockless bike sharing, which has already exploded in Chinese cities and shows similar potential in the United States, does not purport to have invented or reinvented the bike, yet it presents an innovative avenue for capturing value created by a technology that basically already works, at least when we let it. A bike is another resilient tool (or gizmo, as Banham would have put it), and owning and riding one remains a pure act of self-determination in the urban landscape, a pastime situated within a rich ecosystem of recreation, maintenance, and accumulated knowledge. Dockless bike sharing offers real benefits, expanding bikes' availability to many who don't own them, and frequently augmenting their speed electrically, but these bikes are also a kind of Coke machine, replacing a nuanced tradition with a platform relationship and turning independent riders into users and customers. Even Salmon admits as much, praising the dockless bikes' ability to collect their riders' data and convert that data into civic or monetary value. Dockless bike sharing isn't bad, but it also isn't necessarily a revolution: Why does bikesharing have to save cities, when bikes could just save them?
Reads:
Ridiculously expensive, procedurally-generated books full of gibberish are being sold on Amazon to launder money.
The City That Remembers Everything: Geoff Manaugh on the literary quality of urban surveillance. "James Joyce and the US military would seem to agree that the best way to make sense of the modern metropolis is to document even the most inconsequential details."
People in Scotland mocking their local council by filling potholes with cereal and milk.
Until next time,
Drew