There’s probably no doubt that someone like Jens Voigt, Heinrich Haussler or Andy Schleck could win a bicycle race on a lesser bike than the one they’re sponsored to use. There’s also no doubt that we can enjoy other things like listening to music and going for a run and enjoy the experience without spending up big. But, I have a theory that finding the precise balancing point of form-function-price is going to be as elusive as finding an alien signal via SETI, so long as we allow the death grip the marketing profession continues to inflict on these trying, post-Copenhagen times.

As we launch off into the teen years of this new era where ecology and economics have, finally, declared open-war, the search for more modest consumerist satisfactions will become ever more important. Sometime soon, the all consuming flood tide of culture change will start to recognise excess as the new ultimate social fopaux. Conspicuous consumption will become the baggage of the ‘naughties; that odious era of the Global Financial Crisis and government bailouts for those who should, more reasonably, be left to float in the bilge of their own vile excess. Lean footprint consumption should be the meme for these new teen aged years of this, our 21st Century.

But the challenges presented by the necessary purge-we-have-to-have, have me worried. You see, marketing can corset flabby reality under the disguise of an iron spun PR girdle. To play the new ‘lean is keen’ game of what should be a genuinely enlightened new era, we’re going to have to shove the virus of marketing hype and vacuous spin into the airlock and open the door. All those marketing campaigns proclaiming ‘eco-sensitive’ SUV’s, the virtues of weight-loss pills and zero-footprint bottled mineral water: out they go! Into the airlock. It’s going to be harder to insult our intelligence with junk like this as we enter these more jaded, post failed-Copenhagen years.

But, never underestimate the cleverness of the dark marketing arts. These black witches work on the very gravity well of our souls: our ego’s. Those master-builders of fallacious social constructs are out there and looking for prey. How many fell for the clean-green claims for enviro-fouling SUV’s? How many sucked the slop of Emissions Trading Schemes as the panacea of all our collective, accumulated enviro-evils? And who fell for the abject nonsense of carbon-offset air travel?!

I declare that the overriding sign that we are ready willing and able to grow up and face the consequences of our environmentally-destructive actions is a new-found cynicism for ALL marketing campaigns. Will the human race evolve to become self-aware of the manipulations of the marketing machine? Our progress will pace that emergence via the rise of a degree of cynicism that has, hitherto, been a commodity rarer than diamond and more valuable than fresh air.

So, to return to my opening point, the new crusade to launch at the dawn of this new decade is a new search for truth; the truth of our real needs as opposed to the needs we think or are told we should have. To focus on an example close to the home zone of my own obsessive pile: how can and should I choose my next bicycle? If I need a next bicycle at all.

As a rampaging subjectivist (truth is in the eye of the beholder), it’s a little perverse that I am about to contemplate objectivist choices all of a sudden. But perhaps mathematics can, indeed, help us out. Imagine an equation wherein we could measure up all the attributes of a bicycle (or a new refrigerator, a new car if you must, or a new TV…) that best suits the needs we might claim are in need of a fix. There’s two sides to this equation. On one side are the attributes of the thing we want. On the other are attributes of the needs we are attempting to fulfil.

Let’s take the attributes of the thing we think we need. If it’s a racing bike that’s desired, and racing is the thing you want to do, then the key elements are weight, mechanical efficiency, reliability and handling. All these attributes are somewhat hazy and imprecise for sure, but we can at least have a go at filing our facts on the decision tree. Notice what’s missing here? All those bits to do with ‘image’ and apparent prestige. Forget those bits for now. Do as wine tasters do and white out the brand. Taste our choices blind to makers names and the like.

Now let’s look at the mathematical bits on the other side. Let’s look at needs. This is the wild side of just about any of the choices we make. Extract, with the dedication of a surgeons knife, the tumours and related extraneous growths our egos tend to impose. What are the real needs? The real needs… other than for meeting the demands our tyrannical ego’s usually impose. If your need is to go fast, suffer a minimum of mechanical failure and to be as unimpeded by technology to put all the power you genuinely command onto the road in the form of speed, we can start to fill in the equation with some realistic facts. If, on the other hand, the real need you have is to look like a Fred, that’s revealing too. In that case, do us all a favour and buy a car instead.

OK. If we populate our equation with as much in the way of measurable or at least vaguely quantifiable data as possible (which means that the machinations of our egos and the related panderings of marketing spin have been removed), we can get down to work. The results might prove to be a surprise.

I’d be willing to make a bet. If we could take such a clinical calculation, unclouded by the fictions of marketing spin, most of us would be best served by significantly more humble choices than the choices we’d ordinarily make. I’d probably be choosing a mid-range Giant instead of a top-end Colnago. Ultegra over Dura Ace. Chorus over Super Record. In a different space, that might mean a 40 inch TV over a 50 or 60. K-Mart shorts over Gucci … Blundstones over Prada. You name it. Once we de-spin the choices once poisoned via that odious orgy of marketing in perpetual copulation with ego, these new lean, more enlightened times should, indeed, be freed to take a firmer hold. I am going to proclaim this new post-Copenhagen, post-top heavy governmentalism, post-consumerism era to be the dawn of our necessary ‘Ultegra-Chorus Years’. Hallelujah.

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