Electric bikes, where do I start? With car drivers who fancy cycling perhaps? Or with people who think they can cheat their own bodies by pretending to cycle? I'm not a fan in case you didn't notice. Indeed, you should have noticed because that's all I whine on about, is it not, the act of being carried by an energy source that is not your own and which does not arise naturally (like the wind or the wave) but has to be 'manufactured' artificially at great cost to the Earth. Resourcefulness is not about finding a machine that can carry you across the land but about originating your own power source. This means moving without the aid of crutches or prams. But people don't want to put the hard work in anymore. Capitalism and progress has taught them about cheating Nature and about the easy life. This means that people who have been made and fashioned under capitalism will always seek out the easy option, which means car and pram. Ok, so you pedal a little, but what the electric bike avoids is the hard part that edifies the cyclist: cycling into a headwind, and cycling uphill. This is when the electric motor gets automatically switched on. This destroys not just the act of cycling but the act of cycling Glasgow. In fact, it annihilates the hill-strewn hollow that Glasgow is, does it not? As far as this is concerned, electric bikes are much more dangerous than they look.
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