‘Outlaw’
Bicycling*
CHRIS
CARLSSON
[In]
this bike subculture there’s no person who is the best, who
is winning, or
getting the most money. It’s a pretty equal community in that
everyone can
excel, but not have to be the top dog...
(Robin
Haevens)1
A
funny thing happened during the last decade of the 20th century.
Paralleling
events that transpired a century earlier, a social movement emerged
based on
the bicycle. This so-called movement is far from a unified force, and
unlike
the late 19th century bicyclists, this one does not have a ready demand
for
“good roads” to rally around. Instead,
“chopper” bike clubs, nonprofit
do-it-yourself repair shops, monthly Critical Mass rides, organized
recreational and quasi-political rides and events, and an explosion of
small
zines covering every imaginable angle of bicycling and its surrounding
culture,
have proliferated in most metropolitan areas. Month-long
“Bikesummer” festivals
have occurred in cities around North America since 1999, galvanizing
bicyclists
across the spectrum into action and cooperation.
This
curious, multifaceted phenomenon constitutes an important arena of
autonomous
politics. The bicycle has become a cultural signifier that begins to
unite
people across economic and racial strata. It signals a sensibility that
stands
against oil wars and the environmental devastation wrought by the oil
and
chemical industries, the urban decay imposed by cars and highways, the
endless
monocultural sprawl spreading outward into exurban zones. This new
bicycling
subculture stands for localism, a more human pace, more face-to-face
interaction, hands-on technological self-sufficiency, reuse and
recycling, and
a healthy urban environment that is friendly to self-propulsion,
pleasant
smells and sights, and human conviviality.
Bicycling
is for many of its adherents both a symbolic and practical rejection of
one of
the most onerous relationships capitalist society imposes: car
ownership. But
it’s much more than just an alternative mode of transit. A
tall, rugged blonde
man in his mid-thirties, Megulon-5, an inspirational character in
Portland,
Oregon’s CHUNK 666 group, declares, “We are
preparing for a post-apocalyptic
future with different laws of physics.”2
It sounds off-kilter at first, but
there is a rising tide of local activists in most communities who
accept the
Peak Oil3
frame of reference. Many are already organizing themselves directly
and indirectly towards a post-petroleum way of life. It may not alter
physics
exactly, but it certainly implies a radical change in our relationship
to
energy resources and ecology.
This
explosion of zany and whimsical, practical and political
self-expression via
bicycling comprises a deeply rooted oppositional impulse that
challenges core
values of our society. The bicycle has become a device that connotes
self-emancipation, as well as artistic and cultural experimentation.
The
playfulness and hands-on tinkering in the subculture is spawning new
communities, gatherings that can be framed as potential sites of
working class
re-composition.
The
“outlaw” bicycling subculture has no hierarchy
flowing from wage differentials
and ownership because most of the culture takes place outside of
monetary
exchange or the logic of business. Instead, these bike hackers are all
about
doing, tinkering with the discarded detritus of urban life, inventing
new forms
of play, celebration, and artistic expression. Theirs is a culture that
is
re-produced in action, not affirmed in acts of passive consumption. Not
just an
isolated geek culture, it exists in real spaces and brings people
together
across age, class, race and gender boundaries.
I
call it an “outlaw” bike subculture because it goes
against the kind of ‘good
behavior’ norm that a lot of mainstream bicycle advocates
promote. The outlaw
subculture is not particularly concerned with wearing helmets (or even
safety
in general), having the latest gear, following traffic rules set up for
cars,
or seeking approval from mainstream society. A 2003 Christian Science
Monitor
article described a “mutant bike” culture4
. Critical Mass
rides have been
important arenas for staking out these counter-norms in the bike scene.
Crucially, this counter-sensibility has attracted legions of youth, and
is
eroding the nerdy image that has helped reinforce bicycling’s
reputation as
unhip (recently emphasized in the film “40 Year Old
Virgin”).
It
has long been a curiosity that mainstream,
“middle-class” bicyclists have been
obsessed with law-abiding behavior and have been so quick to denounce
other
cyclists for flouting their sense of propriety. Mainstream bicycle
advocates
maintain that cyclists as a group must demonstrate angelic behavior, in
order
to reinforce the self-congratulatory fantasy that bikes are angels in
the
transit universe, compared to the (automobile) devil… Once
again, even among
bicyclists, we run into a neo-Christian moralism that seeks to impose a
black
and white, good and bad dichotomy, warmly embracing those who shop and
ride
correctly, and casting the rest of us into a purgatory of illegality
and
disrespect. It’s reinforced by an ideology called
“effective cycling” developed
by a Stanford rocket engineer (and bicycle enthusiast) that essentially
advocates bicyclists should strive to behave like cars on the streets
of
America.5
The
bicycle has been enjoying a resurgence in the past 15 years. Daily
bicycle
commuting has expanded dramatically in San Francisco, New York,
Chicago, and
other cities where the monthly seizure of streets by bicyclists known
as
Critical Mass has opened space and imaginations, and given people a
safe and
enjoyable way to reconnect with urban bicycling before venturing out on
their
own. For most of these new bicycle commuters, the choice is
self-reinforcing.
Once tried, bicycling is much more pleasant than sitting in traffic in
a car.
Moreover, it is much cheaper. Meditative, physically engaged cycling to
and
from work also improves mental and physical health.
Underneath
this broad move towards bicycling is a burgeoning subculture that is
reaching
down to kids and teens, welcoming and embraced by women, and making
bicycling
and things bicycle-related hip in unprecedented ways. This subculture
is
largely a do-it-yourself (DIY) phenomenon, based on word-of-mouth,
homemade
zines, informal parties and events, and a deliberate sharing of basic
technical
know-how. The zine explosion, a quintessential DIY movement based on
increasingly available reproduction technologies in copyshops and at
corporate
jobs since the mid-1980s, was crucial in spreading the new bike
subculture.
Robin
Haevens moved to San Francisco in 1996, knowing no one and not yet a
bicyclist.
But thanks to her roommates she found herself immersed in the bike
messenger
scene, and before long she was publishing her own occasional zine, Rip
It Up!,
about “bikes, beer and boys.” Eventually she became
a bike mechanic, founded a
bike repair workshop for kids in San Francisco’s
Hunters’ Point, and now
teaches bike repair as part of a public high school curriculum.
She
declares,
“The
underground bike subculture represents self-sufficiency,
self-sustainability,
and responsibility… [qualities that] could definitely be
attributed to other
kinds of ecological activism, e.g. community gardening. I also think
that the
bike or the garden culture (really healthy cultures) allow for a kind
of giving
and receiving that you can’t get in the broader society
… It breaks down the
anonymity of the city.6
The
mental space opened up is one of bicycling’s best kept
secrets. For many,
choosing to bicycle is a public act of individuation, reinforcing a
self-reliant and critical mentality. Often it is the most
individualistic
cycling “rebels” who invest the most time and
effort in new communities and
institutions.
Jessie
Basbaum of San Francisco’s Bike Kitchen says,
Riding
a bike is a very independent act. Just riding your bike around fosters
a lot of
self-reliance and comfortableness being alone. Riding by yourself gives
you a
lot of time to think, to look at things around you, so in that sense
it’s going
against the grain a little bit.7
Ted
White, long-time bike activist and “bikeumentarist”
says,
People
who are into bikes tend almost always to be in some way independent
thinking
and self-sufficient… I think bikes are a positive response
to almost everything
that is wrong with American mainstream society today. Bikes are cheap,
simple,
and democratic and sexy in a very different way than riding around in a
car.
Bike transportation is about individuality but not about excess. Bikes
are
congenial and social. Bikes force us to be in our bodies and help us to
know
and love our bodies as they are.8
By
contrast, there are glossy magazines and plenty of upscale marketers
selling
bicycles and frou-frou lycra clothing, helmets, bike accessories and
all the
things you would expect a prolific consumer society to promote. But
that
mainstream bicycling culture is largely separated from the grassroots
upsurge,
even if there are crossovers aplenty in the form of messenger bags,
headlights,
and other mass-produced accoutrements that trickle through the
permeable
membrane between the two worlds. As Stephen Duncombe eloquently put it,
“Contemporary capitalism needs cultural innovation in order
to open new
markets, keep from stagnating, invest old merchandise with new
meanings, and so
on. Far from being a challenge to The Man, innovations in culture are
the fuel
of a consumer economy.”9
Chicago’s
“Rat Patrol,” a self-described “anarchist
group,” articulates the subcultural
rejection of commodification and marketing, and with it, underlines the
outlaw
assault on marketing efforts to co-opt the bike culture:
The
pathetic sports junkie on a bicycle is no more free than a motorist
trapped in
an SUV in a traffic jam… There is a void of self-doubt which
athletes attempt
to cover with spandex outfits and titanium objects of veneration. The
sporting
goods “user” is compelled by nervous guilt to look
down upon those who do not
ride as fast, or as far, or as often. Persons exhibiting the following
behaviors are best regarded as covert operators of the capitalistic
conspiracy
to further co-opt and defuse non-fossil-fueled transportation
movements:
*
Abnormal concern with perfect finish and perfect operation of the
bicycle
*
Keeps glossy bicycling magazines under the mattress
*
Suggests you should buy new equipment instead of repairing old bicycle
*
Always rides in superhero tights
*
When riding, is more concerned with speed and distance covered than
scenery or
places visited
*
Unable to hold a conversation unrelated to bicycles or biking
*
Paranoid delusion that he/she is being persecuted for his/her hobby
*
Speech is sprinkled with component brand names
*
Constant desire to witness to bicycle's transforming power in his/her
own life
*
Believes that biking is a morally superior choice, therefore befitting
a
morally superior attitude
*
Attempts to bring bicycle-related issues into every conversation
*
Awkward duck walk caused by wearing cleated bike shoes into roadside
businesses
*
Easily impressed with expensive equipment and celebrity endorsements
*
Wears helmet even when not on bike
As
you can see, these easily-identifiable symptoms of sporting goods
addiction are
identical to the symptoms of capitalist-driven automobile addiction.
They are
caused by the fetishization and worship of lifeless objects. What was
once
viewed as a useful tool, a means to an end, becomes the end in itself.
Should
your comrades seek to impose these dangerous ideas on you, or should
you find
yourself believing them, stay on your guard, and remember that these
innocent-sounding
ideas are in actuality part of a sinister plot to coopt the velorution.
Do not
let the greedy multinationals once again derail progressive attempts to
save
our Earth from global warming and environmental disaster!10
The
outlaw bicycling subculture is distinctly anti-consumerist. It is a
tinkering
culture that spontaneously re-uses and recycles in ways environmental
advocates
of recycling can only dream about. It is a culture that often merges
bicycles
with art and performance. Portland’s CHUNK 666, an exemplary
and probably
typical group of bicycle hackers, “acquires whatever bicycles
we can ethically
without spending, [or] spending as little money as possible. We cut
them into
pieces and weld them back together again in different
configurations.”11
In
the first issue of the CHUNK 666 zine, a feature on one of the
legendary early
groups, the Hard Times Bicycle Club in Minneapolis, described how it
has no
dues, no regular meetings or rides. “Part of the HTBC
aesthetic is anti-money
and anti-retail… A mechanic and artist, 38-year-old Per
Hanson, is president of
the HTBC… He lives ‘minimally,’ having
few possessions and no real job.”12
The
Hard Times Bike Club spread the word that they would recycle used bike
parts
and as a result, parts were dropped off at their garage regularly.
Martin
Leugers founded Chopper Riding Urban Dwellers (CRUD), a San
Francisco-based
group that also puts bikes back together
“artistically”.
I
like the punk rock ethics of not wanting to make money from my
art… I decided
I’m going to make money at my job, and I enjoy what I do
(industrial design),
though it’s not my perfect ideal. But it gives me the ability
to make crazy
bikes that basically nobody wants. The bikes I make I view as a kind of
sculpture… It’s my totally creative outlet where I
don’t have to worry about
selling them.13
Class
doesn’t often enter into the identities being created in
these new subcultural
spaces, and yet, a resilient anti-capitalist instinct runs through much
of it
and gets expressed in various ways. Echoing Leugers, a recurrent theme
is the
refusal to allow the wage-labor relationship to define one’s
engagement.
Jessie
Basbaum (25 years old, works as a private investigator) and Catherine
Hartzell
(24, immunology lab researcher) co-founded San Francisco’s
Bike Kitchen in
mid-2003. The Bike Kitchen quickly became a favorite haunt adjacent to
Cellspace in the Mission District (It has since moved to Mission and
9th
Streets near San Francisco's Civic Center). Covered in wildstyle
graffiti, the
Bike Kitchen sits in a former truck rental facility surrounded by
asphalt, and
on weekends, a neighborhood flea market. It’s an
all-volunteer space and
deliberately refuses to provide paid services.
“It’s part of our policy not to
do repairs for money… we’re here to show people
how to do it,” says Basbaum.
“It’s definitely not a job,” emphasizes
Hartzell. In fact, if it were to become
a job, Hartzell wonders “how I would feel. I don’t
think I would love it as
much. When it’s required of you, and you’re not
making the decision, you lose
some sense of enjoyment.”14
Basbaum
described a cultural critique of wage-labor without naming it as such:
“[People
have] this idea that you have a job, but whatever you really care about
should
be your hobby, it shouldn’t be your job, because then it
becomes more mundane.”
Bicycling
subculture activists routinely work long hour hours for free. But they
also see
wage-labor’s reduction of their full engagement with work as
an oppressive and
unfortunate distraction from their “real work.” Ben
Guzman, co-founder of the
Los Angeles Bike Kitchen (no direct relation to the San Francisco Bike
Kitchen,
but the same name), works on television commercials for a living. But
…my
work the last few years has just been a way to get to be able to do the
things
I want to do… all my jobs, are just a means to get back to
doing what’s
important. While I’m at work I’m taking a pause
from the rest of the stuff I’m
doing.15
Robin
Haevens explains how doing her teaching job, even though it’s
similar to what
she was doing before for free, changes the nature of it.
If
you’re somehow making enough money to live, it’s
easy to use your extra energy
on these projects, whether it’s writing a
zine—where I didn’t make any money—or
starting a bike program in Hunter’s Point. … I
started that with no feeling
that I needed to be paid for it. Just a feeling that there were kids
out there
that would like to work on bikes, that had NOTHING else going on, and
really
needed to be doing something. But after a year, I was broke! The fact
that it’s
my primary source of income and that I’m being paid a
teacher’s salary, puts
extra pressure on it. It makes it different from just doing things
because I
want to do them and I see a need. It’s no longer me
independently doing something
that I can change at will.16
Rides
…all
you habitual motorists are suckers. You’ve been hoodwinked.
Your automobile is
expensive, annoying, and anti-social. My bicycle is cheap, fun and at
times, a
traveling party.”
—Resist
#42
The
bicycling subculture is action-oriented. A lot of energy can go towards
fixing
and acquiring bikes, but finally it always comes down to riding them.
There are
countless recreational bicycle clubs around the United States but those
clubs
have been remarkably apolitical, except for occasional forays into
lobbying for
a rare road closure for a race or ride. Moreover, their members are not
famous
for hanging out together, working together, or having any other
existence
together beyond the club rides themselves. But the outlaw bikers have
forged
new communities out of hundreds of theme rides,
“derbies”, races, rodeos, even
bicycle polo and bicycle ballet in San Francisco. Messengers in New
York and
San Francisco spontaneously asserted their strength in large group
rides in the
late 1980s to avoid municipal regulation and harassment.
The
New York Independent Couriers Association swung into action in 1987
when Mayor
Koch announced a 90-day experimental ban of bikes from central midtown
Manhattan. Groups of 30-400 messengers organized ‘work to
rule’ rides up 6th
Avenue and down 5th.17
These
courier rides took place fifteen years after large
rides in 1972 demanding the elimination of cars from Manhattan, in the
first
late 20th century upsurge of bicycle activism.
In
San Francisco the 20th anniversary of Earth Day was celebrated in 1990
with a
big ride through the city, under the slogan “Bicycles
Aren’t In the Way,
Bicycles Are the Way!” Months later cyclists converged on the
big anti-Gulf War
marches in January 1991, acting as scouts and roving bands of cycling
protestors. A group of 50 cyclists even rode 65 miles from Santa Cruz
to join
in. Later that year the Bay Area Bike Action Winter Solstice
People-Powered
Parade rolled through Golden Gate Park on Dec. 21, protesting the
prevalence of
auto traffic in San Francisco’s premiere public park.
Cyclists have been
campaigning for over fifteen years now for a Park and against a Parking
Lot.
Critical
Mass erupted out of this years-long climate of politicized bike rides
and
direct action. The first “Commute Clot” took off
from the foot of San
Francisco’s Market Street on September 25, 1992, about 50
riders strong. After
a couple of months of the “organized coincidence”
growing steadily, riders
dubbed it “Critical Mass” after a comment in Ted
White’s “bikeumentary” Return
of the Scorcher. It has since spread throughout the world and has
appeared in
over 400 cities on five continents. It is still a magical monthly
occurrence in
San Francisco, routinely drawing over 1,000 riders, and sometimes
several
thousand.
The
full history of Critical Mass has been told elsewhere.18
Among the different
threads of the outlaw bicycling subculture, Critical Mass represents
the most
public demonstration of the subculture’s existence, and its
most overtly
political expression. The monthly drama of a mass seizure of the
streets by
bicyclists is unique in many ways. It has no official organizers or
leaders and
thus is a monthly experiment in spontaneous self-management. It has
more of a
celebratory tone than one dedicated to protest, but both realities
coexist.
More subversively, it is a prefigurative demonstration; it puts into
practice a
new type of public commons, created and animated by human conviviality,
the
kind of life usually promised “after the
revolution.” It escapes the logic of
commodification entirely. No one has to buy anything to participate,
and there
is practically no hawking of wares around the event. Rolling down the
street in
a new mobile community, Critical Mass has pioneered network swarming19
as a
political tactic, albeit a tactic employed to no instrumental purpose.
Critical
Mass’s amorphous and prefigurative qualities militate against
making demands,
declaring an agenda or seeking specific goals (at the same time,
hundreds of
political ideas, campaigns and slogans have been distributed during
Critical
Mass rides, including e.g. “Bicycling: A Quiet Statement
Against Oil Wars”).
Instead, an unpredictable number of citizens come together freely each
month in
cities large and small to begin living the life they can only dream
about the
rest of the month.
City
life based on bicycles, walking and well-developed public transit is a
dream in
America, but it’s a dream that becomes real every month
during the brief
minutes Critical Mass fills the streets. The right to assemble and to
engage in
free speech also get exercised each month, highlighting a diminishing
public
life through dramatic public action. Critical Mass exceeds simple civil
libertarian behavior though. In gathering dozens, hundreds or thousands
of
cyclists month after month for over a decade across the world, a social
space
has been opened up in which further networking has flourished. The bike
ride is
the premise, but the deeper transformation of imaginations and social
connections
is hard to measure.
Clearly
bicycling is on the rise, and the public manifestation of a grassroots
embrace
of cycling and a whole range of cultural alternatives is most visible
in
Critical Mass. But other bike rides have emerged in its wake, as have
dozens of
new associations and initiatives. In Chicago a campaign to
“Depave Lakeshore
Drive” bubbled out of the Critical Mass community. Chicago
has also staged a
“Bike Winter” festival, held annual auto-free art
shows, and organized dozens
of theme rides, including a lengthy ride along the old canals and
railroad
right-of-ways. In Bloomington, Indiana, cyclists have held midnight
full moon
rides over the past few years. “Midnight Ridazz”
take over the streets of Los
Angeles in the middle of the night, too, on themed rides for more than
a year
now, slowly mapping the entire city of Los Angeles.
In
August of 2002, the New York Bike Messengers Association hosted the
first
annual Warriors fun ride—all night, from the Bronx to Coney
Island. Maggie
Bowman described the scene at the beginning of the ride, a rainy night.
The
park is filled with approximately 500 warriors, loosely sectioned off
by gang,
83 gangs in total… We make our way around the park checking
out the
competition. The Fearleaders, Los Banditos, the Aliens, the Turf, the
Ridge
Street Wrenches, the Pelham Park Tennis Pros, the Flatbush Dandies, the
Electric Vikings, the Ghost Riders, the Furies, the Killer Clowns, the
Riffs,
the Rotten Apples, the San Francisco Cutters.20
In
San Francisco, inspired by Critical Mass,
an ongoing series of Cultural Bike Tours were started in 1993. The
first ride
visited three-dozen community gardens (out of a citywide 110 or so) in
the
southeast part of town. After a few more informal tours, the local bike
advocacy
group began sponsoring them, and has had a wide variety of rides over
the past
decade, including tours of ice cream parlors, gay history, labor
history, a
Freeway stump tour, and more. In Los Angeles, a Tour de Tamal took
riders to a
half dozen tamale parlors around the town. And so on.
Annual
Bikesummer festivals in San Francisco, Portland, Vancouver, New York
and Los
Angeles have brought thousands of people onto bicycles and into contact
with
the whole gamut of bicycling culture—from mainstream to
decidedly “outlaw.” In
Los Angeles, some of the Bikesummer organizers put on a event in March
2004
called “More Than Transportation” which centered
around bicycles and DiY punk
culture, which in important ways set the stage for 2005's Bikesummer
there.
Zany
clubs and their events have created their own cultural whirl. In San
Francisco,
the motley crew of Cyclecide have developed a full-scale Bike Rodeo,
including
pedal-powered rides, derbies, races, bike toss, and more. CHUNK 666 in
Portland
is famous for their Chunkathlon’s, with tall bike jousting
and beer-soaked
races, while other outlaw cyclists have developed what’s
become known as “zoo
bombing,” hurtling down a major local hill, often in the dark
on various
altered bicycles. The wild creativity of the Cyclecide mechanics and
their ilk
in Portland and elsewhere underscore a profoundly creative engagement
with
bicycling technology.
Contesting
The Technosphere
From
the early ruminations on future shock and the problems of too much
leisure that
would come in the wake of widespread automation, popular culture has
tended to
treat developments in science and technology as automatic processes,
almost
natural, that proceed independent of human choice or will. The
elevation of
expertise onto an unchallengeable pedestal has been an important means
by which
the juggernaut of capitalist modernization has been imposed on society.
Most of
us are plainly mystified about science and research and the choices
that go on
behind the scenes that in turn lead to the technologies that shape our
everyday
lives. Changes wrought in workplace technologies and entire industries
have
repeatedly left people unemployed, or at best finding their work much
more
tightly controlled and regulated.
Ironically,
this much-touted modernization has consisted overwhelmingly of a
systematic
process of deskilling human labor. In pursuit of profitability and
competitive
advantage, capitalists and technologists have focused their efforts on
controlling the labor process, turning living humans into cogs in a
much larger
machine, and to the greatest extent possible, taking the skills and
knowledge
out of the workers heads and hands and implanting them into the
machines. The
time-and-motion studies known as “Taylorization”
after their early 20th century
inventor, Frederick Taylor, have reached such extremes that labor
processes now
seek to extract 56 productive seconds of each 60-second minute in the
workday.
And of course the workday itself has been lengthened in addition to
being
intensified. During the past 25 years the eight-hour day has been lost
to most
people.
Humans
make the technosphere, of course. Though people may be deskilled on the
job and
turned into keyboardists and dial readers and
“checkers,” they retain a great
deal of creativity outside of the workplace. Additionally, the
dissemination of
practical technical knowledge has become much more widespread with the
Internet, and many people are hybridizing and inventing new uses for
the
detritus of modern life. A key piece of that process is the cultural
rejection
of expertise that we find prevalent among DiY (Do-it-Yourself) youth.
Nowhere
is this more apparent than among the outlaw bicycle subculture where
the
proliferation of skill sharing and repurposing is rampant. Objects made
to be used
in one way are constantly being re-imagined and re-purposed to new
uses.
Eric
Welp of Washington DC’s Chain Reaction:
We’re
dealing with a self-sufficient, efficient, simple motion machine; not a
perpetual motion machine. It’s a pure, simple technology... I
appreciate the
use of bikes in terms of benefits for the community, human well-being,
self
empowerment and all that, and those are good values to apply to the
idea of
technology, but I think that sometimes technology has lost sight of its
basic purpose
in terms of those values. So the shop is an important reminder of how
technology should be.21
In
an issue of CHUNK 666, the whys and wherefores of
“gear” are addressed at some
length. “The corporate slimelordz of America have fixated
upon gear as an easy
method of sponging money from yuppies and yuppy wannabes.”
Though they refuse
the marketing juggernaut knocking at the edges of their culture,
CHUNKsters
have developed their own argument for “gear” that
also eschews the total
rejection position that some have adopted.
Rising
from the homebrew gear kit, we have the refunctionalized gear, gear
which has
either been adapted to its purpose or which would normally be retired.
The
majority of headwear fits this category. Garage-sale bicycle and
motorcycle
helmets, football, army, and construction helmets, and even Viking
helmets with
added straps have served to encourage dwindling collections of brain
cells to
retain their coherent mass. Ski or aviator gogs with a handkerchief
taped to
the bottom protect the sensitive face when diving (or being thrown)
through
plate glass windows.22
Many
of the prominent activists in the outlaw bicycle subculture turn out to
be
newly adept at working with tools and mechanics. “I
didn’t become a mechanic
until after I’d become a bike nut,” says Robin
Haevens:
Technology
can empower people because they can use it as a problem-solving tool. I
see
technology as being much more useful to me than I did before. When I
say
‘technology,’ I mean in a limited sense, I mean
tool use and such.23
Ben
Guzman tell us that:
it
was through bicycling that I developed tinkering. In college I did an
art piece
about how my father didn’t teach me about cars, because he
didn’t know about
cars, but how that’s so not-male. But it was through
bicycling that I learned
how to do things.
Jesse
Basbaum has a similar tale:
I
was not previously mechanically inclined… to someone who has
never put a wrench
on a bike, it’s this utter mystery, it’s like
magic. But after having some
basic skills everything makes sense, it all fits together in a logical
way.
In
New York, Bill diPaola helped start the bike activist group Times Up!
He became
a plumber after becoming chastened at his own lack of practical skills.
I
realized if you want to do something, you just can’t be
sitting in a room and
talking about the philosophy of it. You have to know how things work
and you
have to be able to get your hands dirty. I’m not very happy
with a lot of the
new activists I see, that don’t really understand
mechanics… I’m happy whenever
I see a new person in the group who’s got a skill.24
In
the dissident subcultures that bicycling touches, there is a common
undercurrent of anti-technology ideology. Basbaum explains:
…
A lot of the people in the bicycling community and a lot of the people
coming
to our shop, and who love bike mechanics, really have an
anti-technology bent,
you know? These are people who don’t like cars, who
don’t like television, that
kind of thing, [but they] like organic food and all that.
It’s healthy technology
I guess, to put a term on it. Gardening and bicycling versus
automobiles and
monoculture. Those are two types of technologies, technology
that’s in theory
sustainable and environmentally friendly.
But
Megulon-5 of CHUNK 666 debunks that idea as simplistic.
“It’s a technology that
a lot of people don’t see involves steel foundries and rubber
plantations and
oil extraction.” His own experience of the recurrent
anti-technology line leads
him to argue,
I’m
not only pro-technology, I’m anti-anti-technology…
I’m willing to make
distinctions about the use of technology. I’m willing to
distinguish between
cutting your tofu jerky with a knife or stabbing me with a knife!
That’s
technology… Technology is not a thing, it’s a
process. And I’m for the development
of technology… there’s a lot of people who want to
turn to a pastoral,
neolithic, paleolithic, level of technology, and they’re
“against technology.”
But what they’re really against is a certain level of
technology… the plow is
ok, paper clips are ok, the telegraph maybe, bicycles yes, but no steel
refinery. Wooden bicycles are good. They’ve never ridden a
wooden bicycle, but
they want to… As I got more hands-on I became more
realistic. I don’t think of
bikes as the cure for society’s ills so much
anymore,… everyone’s living in a
factory that moves people. So I see bicycle technology as a way to
escape, or
help escape that…
Technological
know-how, and the sharing of information, creates new circuits of
knowing, of
trusting, of social verification, and finally and most importantly, of
self-confidence. In Los Angeles, Ben Guzman had a typical experience
with
someone who had no knowledge of bike repair, but also felt alienated
culturally.
This
guy didn’t want to talk to me, and he didn’t want
to really ask me for
anything, but he’s like, “yeah man, I need a tool
to do this thing,” and you’re
like, “yeah, man, well you can come in and do it.”
He’s like, “oh man you have
to show me…” and I’m like
“That’s what we do, come on in.” So he
comes in. Once
he pulls off the crank arm, he walked outside the door to his friend,
and he’s
like “Check it out!” Removed his bottom bracket and
swapped it. And then he
came back the next day. On Thursday he’s back going,
“Oh man I want to do this,
and I want to do that!” And then what’s cool is you
have him interacting with
this woman, that he would never interact with, but [now]
we’re all buddies
because we ride bikes.25
An
unexpected, but perhaps unsurprising, result of bike tinkering is the
emergence
of new communities. One common glue in working class cultures,
especially but
not exclusively among males, is the ability to engage in tech talk.
Bike
Kitchen’s Basbaum concurs: “Talking about bikes,
absolutely, I’ve made friends
through the shop and so have other people, strictly based on bikes. Of
course
it bleeds into other things. You can talk about bikes for a long time,
but
eventually it’s like “so, where do you
work?”
Eric
Welp in DC describes the role of shop talk this way.
Shop
talk sort of gives us all a common ground in the shop working with each
other…
it gives the kids working in the shop confidence to be able to
communicate and
talk knowledgebly about bikes with these folks who they might not
otherwise
interact with. It gives them a sense of pride to be able to help other
people
in their neighborhood with repairs and explain things to them. Self
confidence:
It’s amazing, you see it everyday working with innercity
youth.
For
example, Jimmy, he was one of the kids we had in a class. When he
started, he
was just a really skinny, shy kid. Now, it’s amazing, you can
talk to him about
bikes and he is actually passionate about it, and he is extremely
articulate
with customers. I think he’s really developed confidence as a
mechanic, so he’s
a great example.26
Not
content to buy and ride a bicycle, outlaw
bicyclists have banded together to reconstruct hybrid bikes in all
kinds of
shapes and sizes from the junked bikes littering any city. The
widespread
rehabilitation and sharing of discarded bikes is common in many cities.
Bike
co-ops have institutionalized outside of economic logic, through
skill-sharing,
training, and experimentation with technology that have given rise to a
whole
subpopulation of tinkerers and appropriators. Ultimately their practice
portends a practical engagement with the technosphere more broadly,
perhaps
eventually addressing the shape and direction of scientific research
itself.
Autonomous
Spaces or Small Businesses?
The
new DiY bicycle shops are trying to bridge class and racial divides.
Facing
daunting problems of sustainability they exist on the verge of
co-optation.
Everyday rent and survival confront DiY bikeshop staffers with the
necessity of
making money. This in turn pushes them towards converting cooperative
spaces
based on sharing and mutual aid into small businesses. Even when
officially
not-for-profit, cash flows inexorably begin to shape decisions and
behaviors.
Moreover, by providing training and experience to kids (and adults),
one of the
ironic outcomes is to help them open the door to a
“real” job.
Chain Reaction in DC is trying
to survive without becom[ing]
a chain with a bunch of locations around the city. I think
we’d just like to be
stable and not have to rely on any donations or grants. It’d
be great to be
self sustained and sustainable. We’re not going to save the
world with bikes,
but we can change it by changing a kid’s outlook. If we can
change things to
help them better understand the effect of their actions and how they
can
function in society, then changing our principal mode of transportation
is just
the beginning.27
Ted
White recounts his own experience at the Center for Appropriate
Transport in
Eugene, Oregon:
At
San Francisco’s Bike Kitchen “someone volunteers
six hours of time to our shop
and they learn, hopefully, a set of basic skills and contribute a
little bit to
the shop, and then they earn a frame, and build up the bike on their
own. …
When someone does the earn-a-bike program in earnest and with
enthusiasm I
think it’s very self-empowering,” Basbaum told me.
Earn-A-Bike
programs are running all over the U.S. Often supported by local
governments and
police departments, they are widely recognized as programs that help
kids learn
basic skills and bicycle safety, get involved in their community, and
give them
a means of transportation they can keep at the end of the program. The
Boston-based Bikes Not Bombs is one of the organizations that have done
a lot
to promote the model, and they make available on their website an
Instructor
Training Manual.29
Often starting
with donated bikes from the police collection
of recovered stolen bikes, there’s no telling how far afield
some of these
programs can go.
In
the case of Bicas in Tucson, Arizona, kids who have been arrested can
work off
their misdemeanors and infractions by enrolling in the Earn-A-Bike
program. To
fulfill the terms of their “penalty” they must
select a broken bike from a room
of over 1000 such rusting hulks, and then go about learning to bring it
back to
life. Once the bike is properly rebuilt, fixed, and tuned up, they have
completed their “sentence” and may ride it home.
SF’s
Bike Kitchen, along with the Bike Hut Foundation and some other San
Francisco
shops, give kids a chance to earn bikes too, but without the
involvement of
local authorities. Often enough, once kids get involved with a bike
shop
experience where they are treated with some dignity and expectations,
they come
back for more. Viktor Veysey’s Pier 40 Bike Hut has been
mentoring poor kids
for almost a decade. Pedal Revolution in the Mission District started
as a bike
shop to provide training and work opportunities for homeless and
runaway youth.
It has since evolved into a more mainstream bike shop, but still has
training
and job opportunities for youth in need. In all these programs, kids in
trouble
get to interact with engaged and interested adults and other kids. It
doesn’t
always “save” every kid, but hundreds of youth
across the country have gotten a
new start thanks to these kinds of hands-on training programs. Often
enough, a
seriously motivated youngster can learn real skills and go on to find
employment in the growing local bicycle repair business, as, for
example, DC’s
Chain Reaction has seen with a number of its
“graduates.”
The
backbone of this network of underfunded, barely sustainable co-op and
DiY
bikeshops is provided by the outlaw bicycle subculture’s
shock troops—the men
and women who find a way to survive on very low incomes, or who work at
these
shops after (and in addition to) their paid gigs. They are altruistic,
politically engaged, and passionate. They challenge the transit and
energy
systems shaped by capitalism but crucially, they are making connections
in
practice between race, class, gender and urban life, city planning,
technology
and ecological reinhabitation. Ironically, by teaching kids to work for
their
bikes, these programs also reinforce the core values of a capitalist,
work
ethic culture.
John
Gerken, writing in New Orleans’ Chainbreaker zine, describes
why he is involved
with the local bike co-op, Plan B (which survived Hurricane Katrina
without
damage, and re-opened by late October 2005).
This
place is a working example of how I think things could be different.
It’s a
place where people can share resources, skills and knowledge, and not
have to
pay for every single thing. I think people can help each other out more
than
we’re led to believe, and it feels good to also learn so much
while I’m doing
it.
Plan
B is the New Orleans Community Bike Project. It’s a DiY bike
shop located in a
huge warehouse near the French Quarter that also has shows, Recycle for
the
Arts, trapeze practice, Food Not Bombs, yoga, art shows, and other
stuff. We’re
all volunteer, and have all kinds of tools and resources for people to
use, as
well as piles of parts and old frames and bikes… We
don’t fix your bike at Plan
B—we’re there to help you learn how to do it
yourself… A broad mix of people
does come in. It’s a measure of success in any community
project that gets
beyond its own specific community—in this case, for the most
part, scrappy
young white people… I’m proud that, while it is
rooted in the ideals that are
formed within my specific community, Plan B interacts with a broad
cross-section of New Orleans. Yuppies, college kids, European tourists,
homeless folks, and street performers, clowns and circus freaks,
neighborhood
kids. Really people of all ages and walks of life come in.
Class Composition And Community
There’s
very little doubt in my mind that the way our society works is dictated
by
corporations. Ultimately our lives are run by commerce and corporations
that
drive it, and the politics that shape corporations’ behavior.
It’s all
capitalism I guess, it’s all an exchange of money…
I’m definitely not working
class. I mean I work but, I don’t work a blue collar
job… My upbringing was
probably upper middle class. My parents are scientists at UCSF. I
don’t know what
economic class I would fall in. (Jesse
Basbaum)30
The
vast majority of Americans work for a living. But they are divided in
countless
ways, primarily by race, gender and income. Combined with an amnesiac
culture
that disdains history, the American working class is unaware of itself
as such.
In fact, a majority of American workers think of themselves as
“middle class”
irrespective of the color of their collar or their relative income or
security.
This
process is further complicated by the fact that there is no desire to
embrace
being a worker. Self-definition is increasingly established outside of
wage-labor, and given the stupidity and pointlessness of a great deal
of the
work people do as wage-laborers, this is a very healthy response.
Instead of looking
for a movement to embrace an obsolete and denigrating self-conception
of
“worker” as a starting point, we might have better
results by looking
objectively at what people are doing, regardless of how they define
themselves
in class terms.
The
fragmentation of daily life due to workplace and residential transience
has
been well-documented. Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone provides
sociological
evidence for what most of us know in our bones: the fabric of
sociability is
seriously frayed. The institutions that once knit together communities
and
daily life in America, from unions to Lion’s Clubs to Boy
Scouts and even
mainstream religion31
, have all
suffered a precipitous decline in membership
and participation during the past 40 years. Activities such as letter
writing,
participating in local politics, joining with neighbors or other
parents at
school to effect change, have all dropped dramatically. Most people
interact
with others primarily through economic relationships (work and
shopping), and
otherwise retreat into the isolation of family and home.
Leftists
and labor organizers have been trying to “organize the
unorganized” for
decades, but unions are at historically low numbers. A crucial factor
underpinning this dynamic is what might be called a
‘rear-view mirror’
conceptual framework. Many organizers and leftists are still committed
to
political models that depend on steady employment, state guarantees and
long-term residential stability. In fact, the bicycling subculture is
but one
of numerous examples of people assembling themselves into new
constellations,
creating new ways of associating that escape the familiar bounds of
mid-20th
century, “middle-class” America.
The
new bicycling subculture is one of the preeminent examples of the
gradual
re-composition of the working class in the North America (the emergence
of the
bicycling subculture is also a European phenomenon, and can be glimpsed
in
South America and urban centers in Asia too). This claim does not mean
that
self-aware workers are embracing bicycles as a strategy of class
resistance in
a capitalist world (although it may be largely true that these are
wage-laborers who are deserting the economic constraints imposed by car
ownership). What it denotes is a process by which people who survive
through
selling their time and skills in “normal” jobs are
connecting outside of that
process through association with the bicycling subculture.
Bike
Kitchen’s Jessie Basbaum says
[w]e’ve
created a space where all different people come through; people that
wouldn’t
normally associate with one another. You meet people and other people
meet
people and friendships are made… we’ve created a
space that fosters people
helping one another”
Megulon-5:
“Everyone in the Chunk 666 community for whatever
reason—cheapness or ideals or
just bike obsession—has [escaped] being a chump about the car
culture. Usually
they have the same kind of nonsubordinate [attitude] to [The Machine].
Part of
my view of the role of Chunk 666 in the bike community is we do what we
do because
we love it. Hopefully we can get people together to have a fun time
involving
bicycles, low technology or high technology, and drinking beer, hanging
out on
the street. Like the Family Truckster, a long bike with a grill on the
back.
We'd park it somewhere on the sidewalk and start grilling burgers and
drinking
beer, and people come over and hang out with us. One of the best things
about
the Chunkathlon [a zany gathering of bikers on improvised choppers who
participate in beer-soaked races, jousting matches, and fire-leaping
stunts] is
that we own the street. We have a block party to close off the street,
but long
after our permit expires we are drinking beer around a bonfire in the
middle of
the street. 32
Los
Angeles’s Ben Guzman sees the new community as central.
The
community is so much fun. We hosted a Tour de Tamal. Everyone chipped
in some
money, and we went on a ride and ate tamales all over the
place… Riding a bike
is part of a community, and you wave hello to everybody you see that
rides a bike.
It’s the biggest punk rock thing to be a
community… The giant city of Los
Angeles is saying ‘don’t be part of a community,
don’t interact with each
other, don’t be happy, don’t commute on a
bicycle’… If you do those two things,
interact with each other well and ride a bike, those are the biggest
extremes
you can pull off in LA.33
Bill
DiPaola of New York’s Times Up! gives community a similar
importance.
Community
means a lot to me personally. It’s everything. I’m
surrounded in the East
Village… we actually help save the community gardens, and we
have community
spaces. We are nothing, the bicycle community in NYC, unless we can
organize.
We cannot organize unless we operate in community spaces.
There’s a big public
space issue in New York, and we’re using a lot of the
community gardens, the
community spaces, the parks, to meet and talk about these
things… With class we
try to say “everybody is acceptable in our group.”
So when I hear the word
‘class’ I think we need to break that down, but not
in a negative way.”
As
a long-time activist on the left, DiPaola struggles to overcome the
baggage of
past efforts. He rejects outright the labels “working
class” or “middle class”:
“Those are just labels that are created by the corporate
media.”34
But in the
next breath DiPaola quickly agrees that there is a ruling class. For
his part,
Ben Guzman says:
I’ve
heard and seen the statement forever, that ‘there’s
no war but the class war.’
In the last six months, I finally figured it out, and it’s
TRUE!! I grew up in
a middle class neighborhood… I choose to ride a bicycle and
then people say
‘oh, you choose to ride a bicycle because you’re
allotted the choice to ride
because you come from a certain class.’ Everybody in my class
is NOT riding a
bicycle by choice. Everybody else in my class is driving a car because
they
haven’t even thought that there’s a different
choice… what’s happening with the
Bicycle Kitchen, is we’re breaking down the classes.
Everybody rides a bike. Or
if they want to, everybody CAN ride a bike.
Portland’s
Megulon-5 explains why outlaw bicyclists’ values are distinct
from mainstream
America’s.
Being
a bicycle person turned me into the kind of person who saw the value of
spending a lot of time doing something I liked, as opposed to spending
more
money… yeah, it changes what you do, and also it often
involves your doing it
with your comrades… [it creates] a social process, not
necessarily ‘all for one
and one for all’ … but a competition and
cooperation together for resources,
mostly cooperation. I’m a craftsman. I think most people are
surprised if they
meet me in the context of C.H.U.N.K. I’m a very anal
retentive, uptight and
stable type of person. I’m a computer programmer.
I
don’t even know how I define ‘class’
myself, because I’m not much of a
political thinker… a lot of the people riding bikes
don’t want to be riding
bikes. They are not excited about the fact that they’re
riding a bike to work.
I recognize that it is class that puts them there.... [and] that our
class is
what gives us the opportunity to be Chunk 666. Most, but not all, have
an upper
middle class background. They all have a comfortable enough life that
they can
spend time doing this. They can play. They can live in Portland and
have jobs
that involve riding their bikes to work, for example, or spend time
looking for
a job that will give them that. Mainly, we're all just young slackers
without
kids, so we can mess around. Lots of us are broke, but I don't think
any are
poor. Someone might not be able to buy the beer one night. Most of us
are
living in cheap rooms in rundown houses, but nobody's worried about
being
homeless. 35
Martin
Leugers
“grew
up really poor and my parents always tried to appear, not well off, but
like
they had no problems when they clearly had HUGE financial problems. My
dad was
unemployed most of his life but too proud to ever get public
assistance, which
they probably could have got, and my mom was a teacher at a Catholic
school.”
Now Martin is a well-paid industrial designer at a small consulting
firm in
Silicon Valley and has the freedom to work on bikes for fun.
“I avoid any
appearance of being wealthy. I definitely do identify as
déclassé.”36
Jimmy,
a young African-American man working at Chain Reaction in DC, explains
his own
sense of class:
“I’d
say I’m probably in the lower middle class. You gotta work,
and if you’re
makin’ it all right and the work’s not too tough,
you’re sorta in the middle.
Lower class means you don’t have nothing. And middle class
pays the upper class
by consuming all the upper class’s goods made by the lower
class. But nobody is
better than anybody. I don’t think about it at all.”37
No
one wants to think of themselves as low class. The dignity of being
“working
class” is a lost cultural concept and no amount of demands
for “respect” can
overcome the abject stupidity and routinization that has destroyed the
dignity
of work itself. So first, most workers don’t want to think
about class. We each
examine our own lot in life and reasonably conclude that
we’re somewhere in a
sprawling “middle” between Learjet luxury and total
destitution. And given the
fact that the poorest 10% of Americans are still
“richer” materially than two
out of three of the world’s population, that idea has some
objective truth.
But
this so-called middle is in fact a broad working class made up of
wage-laborers
in innumerable occupations and paid a wide range of salaries and
benefits,
under many different conditions. The micro-stratification of the U.S.
working
population puts everyone into the subjective position of being able to
imagine
falling down or climbing up a notch or two (or several). In that daily
life,
people see themselves as “middle class” as a way of
avoiding the plain everyday
truth of living in class society. But the shared reality of wage-labor
and
basic powerlessness is the overriding truth of most people’s
lives. The steady
dilution of class consciousness with the successful implantation of the
“middle
class” idea is part of how people’s identities came
to be defined by shopping
choices more than occupations. But insofar as people are creating
meaning by
doing interesting things outside of the job, they are slowly creating
new ways
of understanding their own lives and the communities in which they are
lodged.
The
common resistance to thinking about class shows up again and again in
assertions that in the bicycling subculture they are
“breaking down” class,
that “everyone’s welcome” and so on. In
fact, the subculture demonstrates a
healthy impulse towards free association and mutual aid. Going back to
Marx or
even Kropotkin, we can see that in a real sense these are the stirrings
of
individual and social revolt against being reduced to mere
‘workers’, to being
trapped in the objectified and commodified status of labor power.
The
invigorated subjectivity of outlaw bicyclists is apparent in their full
engagement, their humanity and their urgent need to define their own
culture,
to make their own lives’ meaning directly and cooperatively.
From these myriad
experiments new ways of living are being created in the here and now,
which not
only make life better immediately, but in crucial ways are laying the
social
and technological foundations for a post-capitalist life. Resilient
individualism insisting on a cooperative shared future illuminates the
subjectivity that might finally overthrow a society that has reduced us
all to
mere objects.
References
Arquilla
John, and Ronfeldt, David. (2001) Networks and Netwars: The Future of
Terror,
Crime and Militancy. Santa Monica: Rand Institute.
Bikes
Not Bombs (2006). “The Earn A Bike Program.” URL:
http://www.bikesnotbombs.org/eab.htm (September 12, 2006).
Bowman,
Maggie, “Bicycle Cherry Throws Down at the Warriors
Ride…” Sin on Wheels 1.
Buchbinder,
David. (2003). “Rise of ‘mutant bike’
culture” Christian Science Monitor. Oct.
24. URL: http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/1024/p05s01-ussc.html?usaNav
(September
12, 2006).
Carlsson,
Chris (Ed.). (2002) “Critical Mass: Bicycling’s
Defiant Celebration. Berkeley:
AK Press.
Duncombe,
Stephen. (1997) Notes from underground: Zines and the poltics of
alternative
culture. New York: Verso.
Forester,
John. (1992). Effective Cycling (6th edition). Cambridge: MIT Press.
Kunstler,
James. (2005) The Long emergency: Surviving the converging
catastrophes
of the twenty-first century. Kunstler: Grove/Atlantic.
McGlynn,
Bob. (1987). “Bike Messenger Strike in NYC?”
Processed World, 20.
Interviews
conducted for this article
Martin
Luegers:, 34, CRUD, Chopper Riding Urban Dwellers, Industrial Designer
Ted
White: Bikumentarist, 41, filmmaker, gardener
Jessie
Basbaum, 25, Bike Kitchen SF, private investigator
Catherine
Hartzell, 24, Bike Kitchen, SF, Immunology lab researcher
Robin
Haevens, 31, Rip It Up!, bike mechanic, bike repair teacher, public
school
teacher
Eric
Welp, and Jimmy, Chain Reaction, Washington DC bikeshop at Shaw
Ecovillage
Ben
Guzman, 30, Bike Kitchen, Los Angeles, film editor
Bill
di Paola, 30s, Times Up! NYC, political organizer
Jay
Broemmel, 30s, Heavy Pedal/Cyclecide Bike Rodeo, SF, metal fabricator
Karl
Anderson, 31, C.H.U.N.K. 666, Portland OR, computer programmer
Jarico,
Cyclecide
Bike
Co-ops (not comprehensive)
Bicas
(Tucson AZ), Bike Kitchen (SF), Bike Kitchen (LA), Chain Reaction (DC),
Center
for Appropriate Transportation/Eugene Bicycle Works (Eugene, OR),
Recycle-A-Bicycle (NYC), Pedal Revolution (SF), BikeHut (SF), Bicycle
Community
Project (SF), North Portland Bicycle Workers (Portland, OR), Re-Cyclery
Bicycle
Collective (Ashville (NC) Community Resource Center), Bike Church @
Neighborhood Bike Works (Philadelphia PA), Santropol Roulet (Montreal),
La Voie
Libre/Right To Move (Montreal), Third Ward Community Bike Center
(Houston), The
Hub Bike Co-op, (Minneapolis), Oberlin Bike Co-op (Oberlin, OH), Bike
Church
(Santa Cruz), Ciclofficina (Rome: Exsnia, Macchia Rosa; Milan: BULK),
Plan B
(New Orleans), Blackstone Bicycle Works (Chicago), Ohio City Bicycle
Co-op (Ohio
City), Recycle Ithaca’s Bicycles (Ithaca, NY)
Zines
in my collection
Sin
on Wheels, Cognition, Bike Pride, CHUNK 666, Voice of Da, Giddy Up!,
Resist,
Mudflap, The Illiterate Digest, Rip it Up!, Chainbreaker, bike.not,
Operation:
Courier, Moving Target, the derailleur, V.jer
Bike
Clubs (not comprehensive)
Notes
1 Robin Haevens,
author’s interview, Dec. 20,
2003.
2 Megulon-5,
author’s interview, Feb. 5, 2003
3 For one of many analyses
see Kunstler, James.
(2005) The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging
Catastrophes of the
Twenty-First Century. Kunstler: Grove/Atlantic.
4 “Rise of
‘mutant bike’ culture”, David
Buchbinder, Christian Science Monitor, Oct. 24, 2003.
5
Forester, John. (1992). Effective Cycling (6th edition). Cambridge: MIT
Press.
6 Robin Haevens,
author’s interview, Dec. 20,
2003.
7 Jessie Basbaum,
author’s interview, Sept. 25,
2004.
8 Ted White, email
interview, June, 2004.
9 from Duncombe, Stephen.
(1997) Notes from
underground: Zines and the politics of alternative culture. New York:
Verso. p.
192.
10
Rat Patrol. “Rat Patrol Manifesto.” URL:
http://www.geocities.com/ratpatrolhq/Manifesto1.html (September 11,
2006).
11 Megulon-5,
author’s interview, Feb. 5, 2003
12 CHUNK 666, April 1997,
Portland, Oregon.
13 Martin Leugers,
author’s interview, March 22,
2004
14 Jessie Basbaum and
Catherine Hartzell,
author’s interview, Sept. 24, 2004.
15 Ben Guzman,
author’s interview, Dec. 7, 2003.
17 “Bike Messenger
Strike in NYC?” Processed
World #20, Fall 1987.
18 see Carlsson, Chris (Ed.).
(2002) “Critical
Mass: Bicycling’s Defiant Celebration. Berkeley: AK Press.
19 David Ronfeldt and John
Arquilla characterize
Critical Mass as “an unusually loose netwar design”
in (2001) Networks and
Netwars: The Future of Terror, Crime and Militancy. Rand Institute.
20 Sin on Wheels #1,
“Bicycle Cherry Throws Down
at the Warriors Ride…” by Maggie Bowman.
27 Eric Welp, Chain Reaction,
Washington DC,
interview conducted by Jasmine Chehrazi, Dec. 23, 2004.
29
Bikes Not Bombs (2006). “The Earn A Bike Program.”
URL:
http://www.bikesnotbombs.org/eab.htm (September 12, 2006).
31 The evangelical and
fundamentalist
mega-churches are a notable exception.
34 Bill DiPaola,
author’s interview, July 23,
2003.
37 Jimmy, Chain Reaction,
Washington DC,
interview conducted by Jasmine Chehrazi, Dec. 23, 2004
Chris
Carlsson, ‘Outlaw Bicycling’ (Article). Affinities:
A Journal of Radical
Theory, Culture and Action, Vol. 1 No. 1, Winter 2007 pp. 86-106. No
copyright.
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