Tall Bikes

What I love about this, is that these people look like… hipsters

from photographer Tod Seelie, who’s website is truly great. (via). These photos are from Indonesia.

This is Favela Chic done right – this is the future, because as Cameron Sinclair points out in this TED talk, the future isn’t high-rise buildings

I think this is cool because – with a bit of empowerment, we have powerhouses of innovation waiting to happen. What we see with traditional established industries is the milking of “incremental innovation”. The Drag-Coefficient Syndrome – where minor changes are milked forever, for money. We heard recently that efficiency in American cars since the Model T Ford have improved by… all of 3mpg.

That’s what happens when corporations innovate.

There was a buzz of breathless excitement when a sneak-peak of BMW’s new “concept car” was snapped recently

That’s what passes for innovation in the established, for-market car industry. Sorry, I drive a late 80s Honda that looks a lot like that. That isn’t innovation, that’s playing it safe. That’s an industry bringing out the same product as before, but altered slightly so people with last year’s model will feel dissatisfied with it.

But back to the hipsters… the favela chick…

It’s bothered me slightly for quite a while… all this breathless excitement about a DIY explosion brought about by cheap fabbing machines… doesn’t quite ring true, because, I come from a generation (and country) when most of the clothes that kids wore, were hand-made. By their mothers.

See… that’s me:

I used to be blonde.

Anyway… kids these days? (bah)… Well, I’ve managed to get the impression that they wouldn’t be seen dead in anything other than “labels”.

There are already cheap machines for crowd-sourced innovation available, and people aren’t using them. They’d rather be wandering round with someone else’s name on their shirts.

This needs to change. It’s boring. It’s 80s. The 80s was when things started turning ugly. The 80s was when the cunts took over the world, and really that’s doing a real disservice to cunts. A can’t believe they named an aircraft carrier after Ronald Reagan. The guy was a fucking torturer. The 80s was when Derivative Colonialism really started to turn the screws – and abominations like making it illegal for impoverished Bolivians to collect their own rainwater, so they’d buy it off foreign corporations started to come into force.

One of the major themes of the 21st Century will be recovering from the 20th Century…

…and the 80s was when the real socio-psychological damage (payed for by the likes of scum like Scaife et al) was embarked upon as a real, serious, well-funded project.

I hated the 80s, and not just for that.

Anyway, back to the 00s (3.5 months away from becoming the 10s) : these tall bikes seem to be popping up all over the place.

Here are some from Vilnius up in the Baltics

and the ones from Indonesia, where we started

Marvelous.