A Lime Bike for your mind

In 1815, a week-long eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia launched so much soot into the sky that 1816 became known as The Year Without A Summer. The lack of sunshine wrecked harvests across Europe and what little food survived was ravaged by soldiers returning from the Napoleonic War. Horses, the primary and expensive transport method of the day, either died or were eaten as a last resort, throwing Germany into an equine transport crisis. During this notably unbrat summer, noble forest official Karl Drais von Sauerbronn invented a two-wheeled, human-powered wooden transport method, aka The Bicycle. By 1816 horse-free travel became an accessible reality for the masses.

A few hundred kilometres south, under the same darkened sky, Mary Shelley was hauled up in Lord Byron’s …

A few hundred kilometres south, under the same darkened sky, Mary Shelley was hauled up in Lord Byron’s Geneva gaff, seeing out the eruption taking liquid opium and writing Frankenstein. Shelley’s masterpiece is essentially about an innovator who creates an ungodly blend of technology and living being, which gets rejected by the public and spins out of control. The Whole Planet Event of the Tambora eruption created the bicycle and a prescient warning sign of a lime green future to come.

Fast forward 150 years to the 1960s, and 20,000 kilometres up into the sky, the Space Race is in full swing. The US Military Industrial Complex going toe to toe with the Soviet Union to win the prize of Sickest Possible War Technology. The early astronauts also reached new heights in their minds. Seeing the whole Earth as a single entity, a borderless interconnected system inspired a feeling of awe and spirituality which became known as The Overview Effect. Pictures of Earth as a fragile blue orb floating alone in the empty darkness had a transformative impact on the ideas forming back on the ground. These images sewed cybernetic seeds in peoples minds, we could now comprehend the idea of the world being one whole thing, through which we are all connected. Far out, man.

The Whole Earth Catalog was a publication shaped by The Overview Effect in both name and nature. The Google Search of its time, it was a manual of how to understand and make your way in the global network. The catalog promoted materials which helped “the individual to conduct his own education, find his own inspiration, shape his own environment, and share his adventure with whoever is interested”. This included books on how to build your own house, details of plots of land for sale, information of where to find a commune to live on and so on.

The **1968 **edition included a poem by Richard Brautigan titled All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace. The poem imagines a utopia where we return to a primitive state, where mammals live side by side with machines in mutual harmony. Altruistic computers somehow kept The Whole Earth System in check, freeing us from our labours so we can return to roaming through green and pleasant lands.

Throughout the 1960s thousands of alternative living communities started up across in America and The Whole Earth Catalog was a key resource for the discerning commune dweller. These were places where disillusioned people could opt out of the problematic structures of mainstream society and return to the land. Freed from the bollocks of the day to day, their new societies could redefine ways of organising and living.

The communes were the fundamental idea of cybernetics rendered into a prototype society. Everyone was a node in a social network and each node had to give out and take in the right amount of energy (feedback) to keep the whole system regulated and in harmony. The result, in theory, would be a system stronger than the sum of its parts.

In 1974, the All One Farm commune in Oregon was home to a young college drop out by the name of Steve Jobs. Freshly home from his travels to India seeking enlightenment via Zen Buddhism, Jobs tended the apple grove (omg) on the commune, Whole Earth Catalog in hand.

Jobs managed to somehow live a loosey goosey alternative hippie life while simultaneously being paid to design computer chips for Atari. Benefitting from the The Fattest Cash In Of All Time (aka designing computer chips for a company indirectly funded by The American Department of Defence) while living it up on a free-living commune makes for a uniquely Californian Ideology.

So why don’t we all live in communes today? For all the promise of a clean break with the superstructure, communes ultimately flopped because dominant voices ended up finding power and Being Well Annoying. Unspoken currents of control emerged along familiar lines and it became an untenable environment to live in. Adam Curtis’ documentary familiarly titled, All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace is a sprawling, not-safe-for-sunday-scaries must watch which has a section on communes.

All One Farm disbanded at some point around 1980. Its founder, Robert Friedland, went on to become a billionaire gold mining executive. It turns out that spending your 20s on a commune doesn’t actually rule out a life spent mining the earth for precious metals, or in Jobs’ case, founding the world’s first trillion dollar company.

By **1990, **Jobs sacked off his Hippie look for the signature Issey Miyake roll neck + blue jeans + grey trainers uniform. Here he is reminiscing about an article he read as a boy on the level of energy different animals have to exert in order to travel one kilometre. Unassisted humans just about made it into the top third of the energy-to-movement efficiency chart, but a human on a bicycle comfortably outperformed the whole animal kingdom. Chalk that up as another historic W for homo sapiens.

Jobs waxes lyrical in his admiration of humans as tool builders, describing the computer as “a bicycle for our minds”. The commune, the catalog and the poem encapsulate the starry-eyed zeitgeist Jobs and his silicon brethren inhabited as they began developing mass market computer technology and can explain his alluring positivity when describing computers.

Across the proceeding decades Jobs, Wozniak and Ives would design and build the only cool computers in history. But for all the clam-shaped see-through iBooks of yonder, 2007’s announcement of the Apple iPhone is Jobs’ true legacy.

Calling this small slab of metal packed to the gills with sensors, gyroscopes, cameras, lights and chips a “phone” is an understatement of Scottish proportion. A single device for creating and consuming content, we can find and communicate with our micro communities digitally and find resources on how to Do Our Own Thing any place any time. The iPhone blasted publications like The Whole Earth Catalog into antiquity.

Freed from the sedentary shared computer access point, the iPhone removed the speed limit of the information superhighway and the App Store enabled new services to reach hundreds of millions of people instantly. A new generation of SoLoMo (Social, Local, Mobile) apps became possible now we had a powerful mobile browser, map and camera with us at all times. Over the next decade, these services were perfected and began to proliferate into our physical environment.

By 2018 a new apex predator emerged in the cybernetic cityscape: The Lime Bike. An alien species sent from an unknown Californian entity, they’ve polluted the visual/sonic/memetic landscape of the city ever since.

The clickity clack of the hacked lime can be heard in the Burberry Summer 2024 show soundtrack by Dean Blunt. For all the hundreds of millions spent on engineers, the Lime Bike was instantly hacked by young people in London. This makes me proud to be British. To Lime is now mundane verbiage in the mouths of tabi wearing, esoteric handbag carrying doyens of East London’s small plate glitterati. The evolution of noun to verb signalling the ubiquity of the latest transport innovation. A runaway green machine wreaking havoc in the wild? Fair play to Mary Shelley, you absolutely smashed it babes!

It’s Robert Brautigan Summer, baby!

Saurbonn invented the original bicycle out of sheer necessity to keep us moving. Lime Bikes are geolocated, battery powered, rented convenience machines made of downstream military technology. Lime Bikes are as bike as an iPhone is a phone. For all his hippie talk in the 1990s, what Jobs unleashed on the world in the iPhone was a Lime Bike for our minds.

Both adorned with a acidic fruit symbol on the side, Limes & iPhones have much in common. A ride on a lime bike/scroll through the phone isn’t just a casual breeze around, your vector/swipe through the city/timeline is tracked down to the meter/pixel and beamed up into the cloud. Against the clock where every second adds to your bill/profile, roaming and whimsy now come at a cost.

Walking around London here in 2025, one rarely feels like a mammal living together in mutual harmony with programmed machines. I recently walked past this mangled Lime Bike just off Peckham Park Way which resembled an animal carcass out in the wild. This mammal has come a cropper in the cybernetic meadow.

Seeing a broken e-bike on a work-from-home post-pandemic now-your-home-is-your-office lunch break is hardly what the commune poets had in mind when they imagined a future of humans and technology being in harmonious balance. Somewhere along the way between The Poem and today, we’ve fallen off. A bike so heavy it’ll break your leg is not a Machine Of Loving Grace.

Every single day that goes by I regret not dragging it back to my flat to keep as a readymade sculpture. So, if you ever see a lime bike in this state please DM me on instagram immediately.

So pray tell unc, is our cybernetic dream chopped and/or cooked? Well, a recent blog post about someone hacking a disposable vape and making it a web server gives me some hope. The processing chip in a typical vape, utterly primitive compared to those in the iPhone, is 10x faster, with 6x the memory of the Apollo Guidance Computer. The Guidance was a briefcase sized machine which guided 27 humans into orbit and back, bringing with them the Overview Effect which Jobs et al internalised. Every day we wander past discarded electronics which contain the computing power to calculate how to put a person into space.

This project reminds us how technology is modular by nature. Chips are components which can be reused and reprogrammed in any way we want. The business logic of the inventors is baked into these pieces of hardware, but it is not impossible to reverse engineer and remix these machines.

A Hacker News comment on the vape server project sparked a daydream**. **

Imagine we are in 2115, 200 years on from the origianl Mount Tambora eruption and a similar climate event rocks the planet. Our internet-connected One Whole Network is suddenly lost from view and malfunctioning. Hyper-localised and on the ropes, the citizens go Karl Drais von Sauerbronn Mode and repurpose existing resources to serve their immediate needs. Information flows via a hodge-podge of hacked devices, racks of vape-servers host DIY nanosites which provide information, Alexa pucks are chained together using Bluetooth to provide a local news radio wire. Batteries get stripped from Lime Bikes, freeing the herd from Californian captivity for all to enjoy. The bikes themselves no longer need to even be bikes, perhaps rather than a Duchamp readymade, the chain and wheels are remixed to become looms or mills. NFC becomes paramount as memes and culture continues to flow digitally via signals measured in centimetres rather than miles.

With a Lime Bike For Our Mind in every pocket, life is becoming ever faster and automatic. As we speed into the future, we need to continue to deconstruct and question the ideas behind our day to day devices and imagine new configurations on a hardware, software and cultural level.

Don’t forget to wear your helmet.