4.2.06

How to make a CRITICAL MASS


























"What’s this all about?" ask amused and bemused pedestrians on Market Street as hundreds of noisy, high-spirited bicyclists ride past, yelling and ringing their bells. There are a wide variety of answers: "It’s about banning cars." "It’s about having fun in the street." "It’s about a more social way of life." "It’s about asserting our right to the road". "It’s about solidarity." Critical Mass is many things to many people, and while many concepts expressed may evoke memories of past political protests, Critical Mass is foremost a celebration, not a protest.

Critical Mass got started in September 1992 in San Francisco as a way to bring these various populations together in a festive re-claiming of public space. The idea was initially conceived by one person, who bounced the idea off other cyclists. San Francisco’s prominent bicycle messenger community was enlisted primarily through word of mouth, while commuters were reached by someone standing in the middle of the financial district passing out flyers.

Critical Massifesto

Critical Mass offers itself as an antidote to the elimination of public space which plagues our lives. We no longer know (if we ever did) why we need public space, and we surely don't know what to do with it when we have it. So we roll along in a Critical Mass, vibrating with the peculiarly unique euphoria that comes from displacing the noisy, dirty stream of cars and being surrounded by interesting and attractive people. We exchange ideas and learn about new things in a simple, "natural" community of bicyclists who have chosen to voluntarily gather in our monthly organized coincidence. As this experience becomes more common and familiar we begin to develop ideas about life's possibilities that are considerably richer and more communal than the atomized, individualistic solutions that are the only ones that make sense when we are trapped in our "normal" late-capitalist lives.

http://www.scorcher.org/cmhistory/cmassifesto.html

http://www.scorcher.org/cmhistory/howto.html

Critical Mass essays, flyers, images from San Francisco, 1992-1998
http://www.scorcher.org/cmhistory/

posted by alvaro @ 3:24 p. m.