Many hands have been wrung about the decline of “third spaces” in America — the social membrane between home and work/school. Some of society’s ghouls have maintained that these interactions now thrive online, and it’s like, get a fucking life you data-mining losers.
For an activity that had bottles hurled at it by jocks in the early nineties, and had to proclaim itself as “not a crime” via bumper sticker for decades, in an age when your average person is afraid to say “hi” to someone IRL because The Algorithm™ has rotted a hole through their medial prefrontal cortex …skateboarding doesn’t look so bad anymore! We socialize! We get fresh air! We have …friends.
But there is another digital scourge encroaching upon skaters, perhaps even more consequential than the widespread breakdown of societal order. There is a disappearance of third spaces for our …footage.
We used to be a society. The first place was the team video [work]. The second place was the homie video [home]. Our third places were after-credits sections, DVD bonus features, thoughtfully constructed raw files, monthly montages and the like. Today? We feed the algorithm and the wheel keeps churning. And churning. And churning. Post to story. Post to page. Feed the machine. Repeat.
But not today, buddy.
For nearly half-a-decade, Zach Baker has been lugging a TRV-900 around in a backpack to document the in-betweens of sessions: the dumbass spot across the street from the main spot, the filmer’s clips, the shit that the filmer won’t pull the HPX out for. He described it as a “sk8diary,” with a verbal prologue to “watch it or don’t.” It is like the drafts folder behind many great videos he was in the background of, dating as far in the past as the days when we had to shove sterilized cotton swabs up our noses and wait ten minutes to see what color the lines on the tab come back. Baker 3 is a beautiful reminder that skateboarding is 90% more than what comes out on the showreel. On Vimeo! Remember her?