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The Passage of a Few People Through a Rather Brief Moment in Time #101 - A Bike Odyssey
06.8.11
One or more persons during a certain period drop their usual motives for movement and action, their
relations, their work and leisure activities, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and
the encounters they find there.
It's a bike ride.
Started by user nathansnider and user theroyalacademy.
It meets every Wednesday at 8:30pm at California Donuts #21.
We ride at 9pm.
We'll endeavor to return before the last red line trains (around midnight).
See how we move.
On the second year of this bike ride, you might expect:
- more inconvenient passageways
- more full moon picnics
- perhaps more "cover" versions of other people's rides, performed with amateurish enthusiasm
- certainly more amateurish enthusiasm
- disorientation
- reorientation
- pool halls
- bowling alleys
- dance parties
- karaoke
- imaginary histories
- scavenging for fun and sustenance
- more geocaching
- more oblique strategies
- more Oulipian constraints
- traffic median tea parties
Furthermore:
- A medium pace (maybe not for beginners; certainly not a hustle)
- We're not in a rush; we don't need to run every light.
- As short and leisurely as we want to make it this week.
- Victory donuts!
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This week:
A Bike Odyssey
It has been said that we are living in the age of the algorithm. Vast portions of our daily lives consist of
interacting with abstractions whose effect (and often whose outright purpose) is to redirect our activities to
serve interests other than our own - to increase page views, revenues and stock prices; to provide provide
personal information and behavioral data. Under these conditions, it is hard not to adopt a certain kind of
technological gnosticism, attributing malevolent motives to such devices, now elevated to positions of such
great power. But they are, after all, machines - objects of our own collective (if not individual) creation.
This strange inversion of power between creator and creation becomes clearest when the machine finally
does give up the ghost. The computer goes insane; you are set adrift. What the algorithm once made simple
may become difficult, yes, but perhaps now, freed of its constraints, you may set out to rediscover a truer
self.
(but you'd better set out quickly, because the ride leaves from the donut shop in an hour)
Talk, talk, talk...
(and join the mailing list!)
The hacienda must be built.
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