Antonio Garcia-Martinez has an excellent critique of Netflix’s Social Dilemma documentary, which is yet another factually challenged piece of agitprop warning of the alleged evils of the Internet and social media. The entire thing is worth reading, but Garcia-Martinez’s discussion of bicycles is particularly amusing.
As might be expected from someone who oozes as much self-righteousness as narcissistic self-importance, he [ethicist Tristan Harris] faceplants in due course. “No one got upset when the bicycle showed up,” he proclaims, invoking the ill-advised example of bicycles as historical foil to the Internet and social media.
That’s of course hilariously and incontrovertibly wrong: There was a wave of anti-bicycle activism (much of it fanned by those in the horse trade) when the first two-wheeled conveyances came out in the late 19th century. And that’s been true of every technology—bicycles, cars, radios, TV, movies, video games, smartphones, and indeed even vaccines—since the mythic Prometheus gave humans fire. The supreme irony is that Harris, who always talks up his former techie credentials, is falling prey to the same historical myopia and cluelessness for which many techies (rightly I should add) are routinely criticized. It’s always Day One in the Eternal Present of the Internet, no different for its detractors than its fans.
Probably my favorite 19th-century anti-bicycle scare was an ailment termed “bicycle face.” You couldn’t make this stuff up,
“Over-exertion, the upright position on the wheel, and the unconscious effort to maintain one’s balance tend to produce a wearied and exhausted ‘bicycle face,'” noted the Literary Digest in 1895. It went on to describe the condition: “usually flushed, but sometimes pale, often with lips more or less drawn, and the beginning of dark shadows under the eyes, and always with an expression of weariness.” Elsewhere, others said the condition was “characterized by a hard, clenched jaw and bulging eyes.”