The way we protest authority now: With funny videos, designed to go viral.
Yes, out are the days of torches and pitchforks, apparently, and in are the days of clever short films, as evidenced by the action filmmaker Casey Neistat — he of HBO’s The Neistat Brothers — took when he was given a $50 ticket recently for riding his bike outside of a New York City bike lane.
Put in place by Mayor Richy Rich Napoleon, aka Michael Bloomberg, over the past couple of years, the bike lanes have been a source of great controversy in NYC — personally, it seems to me that everyone in the city who rides a bike loves them, while just about everyone who doesn’t loathes them. There appears to be no grey area.
Neistat’s argument in disputing his ticket was that he had to leave a bike lane because it was obstructed, as bike lanes in the city tend to be, by delivery trucks, cars, etc. So it appears as though wandered the city with his camera searching for such obstructions, and then risked great bodily harm to illustrate his larger point. The end result is pretty damn funny. No wonder this guy and his brother have a show on HBO, which I guess I’ll have to try to watch now.
(via Alex Leo)