“Social media is less a reflection of who we are, and more a performance of who we want to be."

- Drew Harwell and Shiori Okazaki, May 11, 2021, in a Washington Post front-page story featuring a life-long motorcycle rider. Here’s a link to the full article.

The story is about a 50-year-old male rider in Japan who successfully pretended to be a beautiful young female rider on social media by employing a popular face-image altering app. This technology helped him develop a large social media audience. When he eventually revealed the truth about who he actually was, his social media audience became even larger.

Missing from this exceptional article is how similar such online behavior is to traditional real-world cosplay, and, extrapolating further, how closely linked cosplay-in-general is to the huge commercial success of the Harley Davidson company as they provided a mass-produced river of carefully developed bikes and ‘costume’ gear which allowed a generation of average people (baby boomers) to dress up and enjoy riding around casually projecting the appearance of genuine 1% biker outlaws. At least a passing resemblance to those riders.

Putting aside how actual criminal bike gang members may have felt about being elevated to aspirational fashion icons by thirty-five years of Harley’s brilliant marketing programs, at the bottom of this story is (…predicably) William Shakespeare and his famous stage-scripted line about how “…all the world’s a stage, and we are just players.” That is a paraphrase from the opening soliloquy in “As You Like It.” (which might partly be about how marketing works, but I’m guessing).

There’s no place else to go with this except to note a sentence from Steve Thompson’s 1985 Cycle World Op-ed essay “Dressing Up”, which was written about his confounding and revelatory experiences using one of the very first Aerostich suits. At that time even the most enlightened and expert riders did not understand or appreciate high-tech armored textile coveralls. Summarizing this, he wrote:

“…there is an obvious reason why riding gear for street bikers is so style sensitive: Riding a street bike itself is largely a matter of style.”

We had always sorta hoped otherwise.

Shakespeare knew better. All the world IS a stage, and this inescapably includes all of us Road Grimed Astronauts.

Here’s the rest of Steve’s prescient 1985 one-page essay.

- Mr. Subjective, May 17, 2021