Reflections on Destin’s Backwards-Brain Bicycle

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The backwards-brain bicycle, created for Destin Sandlin, the host of a Facebook show called Smarter Every Day, is a regular bike that has been modified so that if the rider turns the handlebars to the right, the bike goes left. And vice versa. The short Facebook film shows the host and several others, in various countries, attempting to ride

the backwards-brain bike and failing. They can’t go four feet without putting a foot on the ground or falling. The point of the film is that the how-to-ride-a-bike algorithm is so strongly fixed in the adult brain that it takes months to retrain the mind to accept the new algorithm. It took Destin Sandlin eight months of daily practice to accept it; it

took his six-year-old son three weeks. Can an ingrained algorithm that compels citizens to purchase and consume more than they need, to accumulate rather than share, to accept shopping as a patriotic form of entertainment, be unlearned? The destructive effects of the algorithm are everywhere evident—from our polluted atmosphere to our polluted

oceans, from shrinking glaciers to depleted aquifers, from the rapid deforestation of the Amazon rainforest to the rapid extinction of species—and yet how many of us could adapt to living with even a little less? Our bicycle would have to be modified to go backward. Can this be done? Can it be done within our lifetime? Or our children’s?

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One could argue that our notional national bike, though not geared to go backward, is geared to go up—ever upward. Social mobility means getting up there, climbing higher. Aspirationally, we are mountain climbers, eager to be above others, in one way or another. Call it the penthouse complex: this need to live above it all, above all others.

Which perhaps helps to explain why our new squire-billionaires situate their second, third, or fourth country homes atop a hill, allowing them to boss the view of the valley below, with its ribbon of a river sparkling like a necklace displayed on a velvet pad. Within the democratic American landscape, their palatial homes “crown” the hills.

Members of the new serf class, the service sector, dwell invisibly in the floodplains and flatlands below. They know their place. They have found their level. Daily or seasonally, they wind their way up the hillside to plant the flower beds, fill the swimming pools, groom the lawns, clean the nine bathrooms of the main house, and then at dusk descend.

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Meanwhile, under wraps perhaps, in an abandoned airplane hangar, welders are at work on a bike whose every pedal push will take the rider incrementally underground, at least in places not yet covered by macadam, asphalt, or concrete, where earth still can breathe, thanks to the remnant population of ventilating worms. The urge to tunnel under grows.

It increases in direct correspondence to danger from above, as embodied in drones and missiles, ever-fiercer cyclones and typhoons. The vault of heaven is no longer the abode of gods, but a hostile welkin that harbors whatever terror may befall. We pedal to get deeper, seeking refuge from our doing, a world undone, to curl and den up in darkness.