Bike Snob - Anonymous [38]
fyi: swm, ggg, 5’10”, 135, red hair, clean, born to die. hit me up.
Clearly, the hipster’s standing in the community is defined by his or her bicycle-having status. Either hipsters have some cool bike and want other hipsters to notice it, or they need an excuse to talk to other hipsters so they comment on their bike, or they don’t have a bike at all but are acutely aware of this absence so they use it as an opportunity to engage another hipster to help them find one in the hopes it will serve as the pretense for a blossoming love affair, like the plot of a bad romantic comedy.
Anthropomorphism
We’ve all seen a dog wearing a sweater or a T-shirt. Sometimes, this is because the dog simply can’t handle the cold. However, just as often the dog is wearing clothing because its owner is laboring under the sad misapprehension that the dog is human. All you have to do is watch The Dog Whisperer to see that an alarming number of people simply do not know how to treat a dog like a dog. Instead, they defer to their dogs because they project their own feelings onto the dog. They think they’re human. And people do the same thing with bikes. They coddle them and clean them and pamper them and name them and dress them up in top tube pads and buy them little presents. Barf.
Yes, in hipster society, the bike can do everything a dog can do. Though you don’t need to take bikes outside to go to the bathroom.
So Is This Good for Cycling?
It’s hardly surprising that bicycles have become the new dogs. We live in a world in which we’re defined by our purchases. Our choice of pet, bicycle, car, footwear, jeans, and apartment complex is how we tell everybody that we’re people of taste and sophistication. And even though it’s expensive to express ourselves through our purchases, it’s still much easier than expressing ourselves through our words and actions. Sure, you may think you’re a pretty interesting person, but how is anybody else going to know that in a crowded and noisy bar if you don’t have tattoos? You might also think you’re pretty clever, but who’s going to know that if you’re not wearing the right sneakers? After all, it can sometimes take a whole hour to get a sense of someone’s personality by talking to them, while it only takes a fraction of a second to glance at someone’s feet.
It’s this attitude that’s at the heart of gentrification. And while this attitude is as old as the first caveman who made a necklace out of bison’s teeth (I think bison-tooth necklaces are making a comeback in Williamsburg), the sheer degree to which people use products and cultural references to express themselves has reached a bewildering level of sophistication. On a given day, you can decide you like, say, eighties hardcore music. You might have woken up that morning not having ever heard a single hardcore song, but after a few hours of search engine jockeying you’ll know more about it than you would have in a year had you actually been living in the eighties and forced to learn about it by experiencing it firsthand. (Experience is totally overrated.) And by the end of the weekend, you’ll have acquired a period-correct wardrobe and maybe even a tattoo to underscore your newfound authenticity and commitment. There’s not a single brand, style, lifestyle, or art form that isn’t readily accessible, and there’s no limit to the energy people have for uncovering new ones in order to appropriate them for the purposes of self-expression.
The result is “hipster culture,” and for this reason gentrified neighborhoods can often feel like a pop-culture museum. And cycling and its many subsets are but some of the many lifestyles that have been uncovered and appropriated by the forces of gentrification. It can be annoying to see something you love being used as a fashion statement. But at the same time, being annoyed by this sort of thing is