Everyone’s favorite surf writer Jamie Brisick is back in the pages of The New Yorker with a story titled Surfing In The Age of the Omnipresent Camera. It’s about Surfline’s new Sessions app that allows anyone with an Apple Watch to capture a video record of all the waves they surf in front of a Surfline camera. Of course, Brisick uses this piece as an opportunity to give newbs an overview of the last 50 years of professional surfing, his career as a pro surfer, and the history of Surfline itself.
For so many of us surfers, the ocean is where we go to work things out, to heal, to escape. And for it to become all about the photo op cheapens the experience. And, even if the documenting or the posting is not your thing, you’ll inevitably be surrounded by surfers for whom it is. Emerging from the water with these thoughts, I did not have to wait long before the contradictions of modern surfing returned. Up on the roof deck, we went straight for our phones. Gilovich smiled broadly. “Soon we’ll be able to alert you when the conditions are to your exact liking, based on what you’ve rated with five stars,” he said. He went on about algorithms, and a bunch of other tech stuff, but none of us were listening. We were checking out our waves.
It reminded us of that scene in Dave Egger’s book The Circle when the founder of the company rolls out the ubiquitous “seaChange” mini cameras that will allow crowd sourced surveillance on a global level. Secrets are lies. Sharing is caring. Surfing the apocalypse, indeed.
[Link: The New Yorker]
