Nobody Can Draw a Bicycle

A quick one this week as I'm heads-down on a few things I'm genuinely excited about.

The links below all rhyme with what I keep circling in these letters: the physical, you-had-to-be-there world refusing to be faked. (Mostly. One of them is a gorgeously gross fake from the animal kingdom, and I've decided to root for her.)

REI taught an AI to draw a bicycle. Turns out, it had never ridden one.

REI, the boardroom in a fleece vest cosplaying as a hippie commune, posted an AI-generated ad for a road bike where the handlebars sprout out of the back of the seat, the frame has disc and rim brakes at the same time, and the rider's pinky is doing something no pinky has done. Cyclists clocked it in minutes. (Best comment: "The good news is that bicycles continue to completely defeat AI.")

And it isn't just the machines that get it wrong. Ask a person to draw a bicycle from memory, and most of them hand you something just as impossible: the chain looped around nothing, a frame that would fold the second you sat on it. We ride these things our whole lives and still can't picture how they hold together. So the bicycle defeats the model that's never ridden one and the commuter who rides one daily, which makes me suspect some shapes only live in your hands, never your head. And then there's the fake that actually worked: pro cycling spent years hunting tiny motors hidden inside otherwise-real race bikes, a fraud that fooled everyone precisely because the bike underneath was genuine.

A 24-hour store in Hong Kong staffed by one employee, a humanoid robot.

No people on the floor, just the robot running the whole shop. Forget the hardware for a second. A store is a tiny social contract, strangers cooperating without thinking about it, and somebody just quietly deleted the humans from it. I'm curious what it would feel like to shop there for a week and notice every small moment you'd want a person, and the robot can't be one. I suspect those little gaps are the real spec sheet for the next decade of robots.

The FBI built a 22,000-square-foot fake town to rehearse cyber war.

Our most abstract threat is practiced in plywood storefronts and fake streetlights. When a danger becomes too abstract to feel, we build a physical stage and act it out, as we did with flight simulators and war games. There's a whole lineage of pretend places we build to learn real things, and I'd happily fall down that hole for an afternoon. Somewhere in it is the reason the body learns faster than the briefing.

A spider in the Amazon disguises itself as the fungus that eats spiders.

Researchers in Ecuador spotted what they took for a tiny mushroom on the underside of a leaf. It turned out to be a new spider, Taczanowskia waska, evolved to look exactly like the parasitic fungus that infects and kills spiders. A whole animal whose survival plan is to take on the form of the thing that murders its own kind. Nature has been shipping deepfakes a few million years longer than we have. I can't stop wondering what finally gives this one away, the tiny tell that a hungry bird can read that we can't. That seems to be the whole game lately, finding the seam in a perfect fake. Are we the spider or the fungus in this metaphor?

The personal website is coming back as a rage against the AI.

I've been collecting indie personal sites the way a kid catches Pokémon. There's a real repatriation going on: people leaving the big platforms to build small, weird corners they actually own. Just like when I first started online.

I know it's "insightful" to say "websites and blogs and SEO are dead in the world of AI-powered searches."

I think that's exactly backward.

The artisanal web is where the human voice still calls out from the noise, and that's what people will actually want to read.

At least the humans I'd want to meet will.

A French artist turned Paris's oldest bridge into a cave you can walk through.

JR wrapped the 400-year-old Pont Neuf in printed fabric and air, turning it into a 120-meter limestone grotto, free to enter, scored by Thomas Bangalter of Daft Punk. It existed for three weeks (it closes June 28), and it only works if you physically go stand inside it. Part of me is annoyed I'm stuck in a metaphorical cave in Boston instead of standing in that one in Paris. The other part is taking notes. A thing that only exists if you show up in person, for three weeks, then disappears, is the exact opposite of everything social media feeds reward. Sure, people will post this on TikTok, but it’s not the same as being there. I want to understand why the version you can't screenshot is the one that actually moves people.

I think it has something to do with sitting on a bicycle seat as you zip through the streets of Paris.

/ David

On repeat: Daisy Bell (Bicycle Built for Two), as "sung" by an IBM 7094 in 1961. The first song a computer ever performed, and of course it was about a bicycle, which makes it the REI ad's great-grandparent. It's also the tune HAL sings as they switch him off, which feels about right.

Reading: How to Do Nothing, Jenny Odell. Her case for paying attention to the physical world instead of the platforms is 2026 in a nutshell.