Super Cub, or thinking about technology two-dimensionally

Alright, we're actually getting close to the bottom of my dusty stack of posts I have been meaning to write for years! This one is a little unusual in that not only have I had the intention and rough plan lying around all that time, I've actually had the bulk of a draft written as well. I am going to try to adapt it into a complete post today. I hope it goes well. This post is largely a reaction to and a musing on an anime series I watched probably over two years ago and have not rewatched since, so I no longer have detailed memories from which I might pull extra thoughts. Also, somewhat to my own surprise, re-reading the draft after all those years I am surprised how well some of it resonates with the Smol Earth manifesto I published at the end of last year. I was not really conscious of that connection or influence, and I might try to rewrite or expand some parts from the new perspective of having finished that project. Yosh!

Very long time readers of my phlog might remember that I used to be quite into anime and manga earlier in my life. They certainly occupy a lot less of my time and attention these days, but not absolutely none. I don't want to bother trying to dig too much in to why, trying to tease apart to what extent this is just me ageing out of the adolescent target audience for a lot of the industry and to what extent it is due to shifts in the style and content of what is being produced (I mean obviously I think anime was, like everything else, Objectively Better last century but nobody really wants to hear that rant, and I don't even want to write it). I find the modern range of offerings generally pretty darn weird and unappealing, and it's a *very* narrow slice of what's on Crunchyroll or Wakanim that doesn't get a very quick and very hard pass from myself, my wife or most often both of us when we try browsing from time to time (in fact now I'm not even sure we have active subscriptions to either of these platforms anymore...I'm not sure Wakanim even still exists). But usually we do stumble across, I guess, one or two genuinely worthwhile titles a year on average. Somewhere toward the end of "last year", I really, really enjoyed the 12-episode show Super Cub (スーパーカブ), released in 2021, and then immediately afterwards the manga of the same name released between 2017 and 2022, both of which are adaptations of a series of light novels written by Tone Kōken between 2016 and 2021, the last of which I (still) haven't looked into yet. I think I actually enjoyed the anime more, for the record.

English Wikipedia article on the Super Cub light novels and associated media

The Super Cub anime was, I think, a little bit polarising. It is in some sense specifically about the legendary Honda series of small single-cylinder motorcycles, which have been in continuous production since the late 1950s and, at over 100 million bikes produced, are literally the single most manufactured motor vehicle in human history. The Honda company themselves were to some extent involved in the production of the show. I am not really 100% clear on the details of their involvement, but I suspect it was more at the level of technical and historical consultation. I don't think they paid for the entire thing or commissioned the adaption or anything like that. Nevertheless, it's kind of a show about Honda motorcycles which Honda had some hand in the production of and I think a lot of people therefore saw it as a basically being a thinly-veiled Honda advertisement masquerading an actual show. I completely understand the in-principle objection to a show being too much about a very specific commercial product which is currently being manufactured and sold at the time of the show's release, and am not surprised in the least that some people find this off-putting. I do also enjoy the Laid-Back/Yuru Camp series, but I definitely have misgivings about the extent to which it overtly encourages lusting over expensive products from the outdoors industry. So I get the discomfort, but I really, truly, sincerely believe that dismissing Super Cub as some kind of "advertainment" is selling it short. I actually think that Super Cub does an absolutely excellent job of very gently but very clearly putting its finger bang spot on a very beautiful aspect of the relationship between people and machines, and it is very clear to me that at least some of the people involved in its production must have been really trying to convey something that they had felt and believed first hand.

English Wikipedia article on the actual Honda Super Cub bike

A no spoilers (or only extremely mild spoilers) summary: Super Cub is about a high school girl named Koguma. An orphan (anime has changed a lot in many ways in the decades since I got into it, but some things seemingly never change; now as ever, Japanese teenagers with living parents are a seriously endangered species), she lives alone in a small village. She has no friends, she has no hobbies, she has very little money, and she lives an extremely monotonous, bland, frugal existence. One day, tired of struggling to school on her bicycle, almost on a whim she decides to look in to buying a small motorbike. She is shocked by the price. The kindly old mechanic running the store takes pity on her and offers her an old, well-used model (reputed by village legend to have killed it's last three owners) for a price she can just barely afford by wiping out her savings, and she takes it. The show follows the repercussions of this one decision on Koguma's life as they unfold slowly over the following years. She is almost immediately befriended at school by a girl named Reiko, who is in many ways her opposite - tall, attractive, confident and outspoken - but who also lives alone and doesn't really have any friends, because she is a hardcore obsessive motorcycling enthusiast, particularly fascinated by Honda Super Cubs, who is totally unable to relate to anybody about anything else at all. Besides the slow expansion of her social circle, Koguma slowly but surely becomes more confident, more independent, more exploratory and eventually adventurous, even rebellious. She stops simply riding to and from school each day but starts turning down roads she has passed a thousand times before without ever turning down them, just because she can, just to see what is there. In this way her Cub stops being simply a utilitarian means to get to school, and instead becomes a tool by which she discovers new places in her immediate surroundings, and in discovering them first hand develops a stronger connection to them. She grows from being a hopeless motorcycling noob who can't even remember to put fuel in the tank to an enthusiast who learns how to repair things herself. She bonds with her Cub, and learns to trust it and to rely on it as a means by which to push herself further, and understands that this special relationship is a two-way street, and that it is her responsibility to know how to take care of her bike as it takes care of her.

None of this stuff about bonding or responsibility or reciprocal caring relationships between human and machine is spelled out explicitly in the show, at least not nearly as strongly and clearly as I've tried to convey it above. But in many ways (though certainly not all), Koguma's journey very closely mirrors my own in discovering non-motor-cycling as an adult after moving to Finland, and so I recognise my own personal experience reflected with crystal clarity in this show. I don't believe for a second that I'm projecting it there. Rather, there is not a scrap of doubt in my mind that there were people amongst the production staff who grok this relationship based on their own personal experience and that it was a very clear and deliberate goal to try to convey it in the anime. They succeeded, tremendously. I felt so happy seeing so many relatable little facets of this relationship represented so well.

Very little at all is lost in translation when framing this experience in terms of motorcycles instead of bicycles or vice versa, perhaps unsurprisingly. But I don't think there's anything fundamental about two-wheeled personal transport that facilitates this kind of experience or relationship with a tool, either. It's actually pretty general. Cameras can definitely do it, too, and this is explored a little, and well, in Hitoshi Ashinano's "Yokohama Kaidashi Kikō" manga - a series exceptionally close to my heart these days, one I've wanted to write something in deep praise of since well before I ever saw Super Cub. But this particular person-machine relationship theme is IMHO explored better in Super Cub, where it is basically the entire focus of the show, than in YKK, where it is just a side thing. Maybe radios can do this too, or maybe I'm just projecting positive qualities indiscriminately onto my own interests - although, actually, radio geeks might be intrigued to know that Koguma listens to the news and weather while eating breakfast on the legendary Sony ICF-EX5MKII, which is drawn so accurately as to be confidently recognisable as such, which makes me wonder whether maybe the manga artist would agree with this sentiment.

Nobody reading this gemlog needs to be told that I've become increasingly bitter and jaded over the past near-decade about just about anything to do with the notion of technological progress. I've never gone so far as to actually suggest that any and all technology is bad, and I have in fact explicitly disavowed that stance. Nevertheless, while I try to maintain a reasonable and nuanced take on things, I guess I have generally fallen even closer to the "primitivist" extreme of the attitudes-toward-technology spectrum than to the "All hail the Singularity, upload me now" extreme. I was very grateful to find in Super Cub an accessible, enjoyable, poignant counterbalance against my natural tendency to fall into extreme views. Technology can and very often (maybe even most of the time?) does act to alienate its users both from other people and from the natural world, but it doesn't necessarily always do that and it can in fact do the opposite. And technology doesn't necessarily have to make us dependent upon others but can instead increase individual agency and facilitate self-reliance (please believe I'm very aware that self-reliance comes with a corresponding huge dose of reliance on the continued functionality of industrial society as a whole to provide the requisite inputs, I don't want to totally sidetrack and seemingly-undermine this post by unpacking all that here and now). Even industrial-era, mass-produced, proprietary products which burn fossil fuels and are designed and sold primarily for a profit motive can also do some genuine good. Not necessarily enough good to balance out all the bad they do - this post is absolutely not supposed to be any kind of apology for personal motor vehicle ownership - but there might well be a baby or two in even the most fetid seeming bathwater.

It was definitely a bitter pill for me to swallow to have a message I enjoyed and approved of so much be delivered in the context of a technology that I am obviously unable to endorse and embrace. I mean, this post coming relatively hot on the heels of my Arts and Crafts post from a few weeks back, I'm very uncomfortable about the whole idea of putting *any* kind of industrial-era technology up on a pedestal as somehow enabling positive developments of the human spirit. So shortly after enjoying the show so much I immediately set about trying to make sense of all this and to come up with some way to feel comfortable about the apparent contradiction. In retrospect, I can see that this was surprisingly profitable! It opened my eyes to what a one-dimensional approach I have taken for a long time in thinking and talking about technology, especially information technology, one which I think is pretty common in geek circles. That approach is one where technologies are situated along a single axis, with a "good" direction and a "bad" direction, and the criteria which determine where a given technology sits on that axis are, let's say, entirely technology-internal. The criteria are not based on who is using the technology, what they are using it for, how they are using it, and what the personal or societal consequences of that use are. They are focused entirely on the technology itself. Is it open source or open hardware? Is the network decentralised? Is there end-to-end encryption? Are there non-commercial implementations? Can I repair it or extend it myself? Affirmative answers to all of these push a thing up toward the "good" end of the standard-geeky-value axis. Down toward the "bad" end is where all the black boxes of vendor lock-in and planned obsolesce live. A slightly more general formulation which is not specific to computing technology might ask what a technology's carbon footprint is, which non-renewable resources are involved in its manufacture, how well can those resources be recovered and reused at the end of the device's lifespan, etc. Obviously here bicycles are closer to "good" than motorbikes or cars (and steel framed bikes are closer than carbon framed bikes, etc.).

This is a good axis to have in your head! I'm not disowning it. Instead I'm realising that I (we?) tend to fixate on it to the exclusion of all else. There's a whole separate axis, or rather *multiple* separate axes, roughly orthogonal to this one, which deserve attention as well. For the sake of easy exposition I'm going to pretend there's one axis, and silly as it sounds I'm going to call it the Super Cub axis rather than waste time trying to give it a serious name. I'm going to call it that even though I'm now going to start pulling in ideas that I've developed mainly while thinking under the Smol Earth umbrella which don't necessarily relate to motorcycling at all. The Super Cub axis asks rather different questions of a technology than the standard-geeky-values axis, questions which are more technology-external. Does it alienate me from other people and the natural world? Does it encourage creativity or consumption? Does it make me feel more connected to the region I live in, or does it devalue that relationship in favour of some kind of post-geographic globalism? Does it make my world feel ten-times bigger? Does it encourage long-term perspective and allow focused attention, rather than emphasising constant novelty and variety? Is it addictive? Does it teach me skills of long-lasting and widely-applicable value? Am I liable to bond with the tool after Long term use and think of it as mine and in some way unique and special, such that I will want to repair rather than replace it if that is possible? These questions are generally framed such that affirmative answers, or answers of "the first one, not the alternative" push things in the "Super-Cub-Good" direction. Feel free to disagree with that, or to have some different technology-external axis in mind which you feel is more important. The whole point is to encourage multi-dimensional thinking.

Let's think of the 2D plane defined by these axes, and let's make the standard-geeky-value axis horizontal and the Super Cub axis vertical. Closed-source, closed-hardware, centralised, commercial "bad" tech is the left-hand half of the plane, and open-source decentralised "good" tech is the right-hand half. The top-half is Super-Cub-Good tech and the bottom-half is Super-Cub-Bad tech. The FOSS movement as a whole, being blind or at least semi-blind of the vertical axis of the 2D world that I'm pretending we live in for the sake of argument here, is guilty of working hard to create a kind of mirror-image of the left-hand half of the axis on the right-hand side and calling it progress. This is exactly what we do when we look at Twitter and create Mastodon (or YouTube and PeerTube or Instagram and PixelFed and so on). Yes, maybe that's a little unfair, maybe we are cognisant of and make some improvements on the vertical axis too, but for the most part we most push things from left to right rather than from bottom to top. Both are possible, of course! The top right corner of this diagram is definitely The Place To Be. Tech from the bottom left corner is the worst tech going. Perhaps somewhat heretically, I would suggest that maybe the relative moral standing of the top left (closed-source, centralised, commercialised, disposable Super-Cub-Good tech) and bottom right (open-source, decentralised, non-commercial, infinitely repairable Super-Cub-Bad technology) corners is murky and ambiguous and something which has to be considered case-by-case. Importantly, I would also argue that it's okay to admire and be inspired by things in the top-left corner, as long as it's for their Super-Cub-Goodness and doesn't doesn't lead to blindness about them being on the left-half of the plane.

A lot of my early concerns about the permacomputing movement can also be easily conveyed in this 2D plane model as well. I was, and I guess still am, concerned about there being a rush to create mirror images about the vertical axis, creating "sustainable" devices which live in the bottom right of the plane and are considered an improvement on "unsustainable" devices in the bottom left. This is strictly an improvement, of course, but given that manufacturing electronic computing devices of any kind is fundamentally unsustainable, anything deep in the Super-Cub-Bad depths of the diagram is better left simply unmirrored. There is of course a down-to-brass-tacks axis where we as of any computing technology "does it directly contribute to making it feasible to feed and house and care for the health of 8 billion people on a damaged planet?", and when the answer is "yes" we must push that technology as far to the right as we can. I would contend that personal computers in the home and in the pocket (as opposed to in the school, office, factory, or laboratory) do not obviously rank very highly on that axis at all, which makes it hard for me to get excited about mirror-imaging them to be more sustainable. The core realisation which led to the final form of the Smol Earth manifesto was that, even if it's extremely Quixotic, it is at least an internally consistent and open-eyed thing to do to champion exploring the top right of a form of this diagram where the vertical axis results from heavily weighting questions about whether or not a technology fosters and transmits ideas and understandings and values which are likely to lead to behaviours which do enough big-picture good to offset the fact that those technologies necessarily do not live at the very far right of the "sustainability" axis. It feels obvious in retrospect, all of this 2D-axis stuff does, but it's just astonishing how different I find thinking in these terms compared to the suffocating and paralysing mindset I was stuck in for years, thinking in purely one-dimensional terms where anything more then pencil-and-paper or maybe at most something Curta-esque was necessarily Bad and, at best, to be begrudgingly tolerated for the sake of everybody not dying.

I think it's likely that I will still be refining my own personal conceptualisation of exactly which questions most succinctly define the Super Cub axis for a very long time yet. It will probably be an empirical, experimental process. But I think it will be a long time before I shake this overall framing. So much of my early discourse feels myopic in retrospect. Being obsessed with computing-correctly-for-the-sake-of-computing-correctly just feels embarrassing. I still think it's okay to consider a strictly practical and utilitarian view of computing, of computers as "just tools for a job" to be in some sense vulgar - I guess that is the defining characteristic of what it is to be a "computer person" - but I guess I have come to also reject the total opposite, this solipsistic disregard for what computers are actually for. There has to be *some* kind of second axis.

The high-school girls on motorbikes taught me so.