I did the Stranger Things Ciclavia
I wrote here about LA's local open streets event, Ciclavia, planning a collaboration with Netflix over Stranger Things. Well, against my better judgement, I attended it. It was pretty cringe and bad!
I already have a personal caution against attending Ciclavia events which are shorter than 5 miles long. They tend to attract pretty huge crowds regardless of the route length... and the shorter the route, the closer together all the cyclists are. And very few of the attendees generally know how to bike safely around a lot of other people. Short Ciclavias tend to feel very dangerous to me.
Well, this "Netflix Ciclavia" made that particular phenomenon much worse. I arrived at the Vermont end of the route and immediately encountered numerous comic-con-esque art installations and photo-op booths themed around the fifth season of Stranger Things:
There were huge crowds of pedestrians, way more than usual, and I suspect that a lot of them were just there to interact with those booths. The event was nominally bike-themed... they did have a lot of fancy artistic pedicabs that nobody was biking around:
You may notice that there is a cosplayer standing next to the second pedicab. If I had to guess, there were maybe like a goddamn hundred cosplayers scattered all over the event, posing as various characters or factions (like ice cream servers? Cheerleaders?) so that you could take pictures next to them.
My first reaction on seeing all this was that it was certainly boosting attendance numbers, which is great for Ciclavia. However, I also think that it was like, completely rancid funko-pop-ass cultural invasion on behalf of a technology megacorporation, and I strongly feel that this kind of thing is not what I want to see when I go into a public space. So. Mixed feelings!
I think I would feel fine about this if, as I said previously, Netflix paid Ciclavia a lot of money for the privilege of doing this. But there were so many people here in cosplay, and so many booths and interactive installations - all heavily staffed, often by people in cosplay - that I began to doubt money changed hands. If I were Netflix trying to cut a deal with Ciclavia, I would have probably offered staffing and installations instead of cash!
The event was handing out a lot of commemorative merch:
It was pretty easy to see that a lot of people were here for the Stranger Things installations and merch only, not to cycle, and only incidentally to walk. There were tons of pedestrians walking between the various route hubs, gathering in large crowds outside the hubs in areas that were supposed to be for bike traffic, or walking directly in the middle of the road. I had multiple near-misses myself, most spectacualrly with an elderly couple who sprinted out hand-in-hand from the sidewalk, saw me, stopped in my path, and screamed "Sorry!!!!!"
The route followed Melrose, which is not a wide road by LA standards - two lanes, but usually no parking lane. The curb-side lane of most roads in LA (and most big cities, I imagine) is extremely damaged from the weight of parking or stopped traffic. During Ciclavia, skaters/skateboards tend to avoid this area near the curb because it's too cracked, patched, and warped for them to use safely. This is also the area where parents (wise ones, anyway) will walk their children, and the area where bikes will pull over to deal with an emergency. As a result, you have to assume that the "main traffic" of any Ciclavia route will begin 5-10 feet away from the curb, past this cracked and damaged/busy area. So on Melrose, only about 1-1.5 lanes on each side of the road were being used by non-pedestrians. This is very dangerous! Everyone was crammed together much to close for safety and far, far too close for comfort.
Melrose also passes through several extremely dense commercial areas where there'd probably be a lot of foot traffic even on a regular weekend. The space was so crowded that the average speed of the cyclists was probably close to 6 miles an hour, and I was still seeing physically dangerous near-misses between bikes, pedestrians, and skateboarders almost every minute all afternoon long. Moving a mile along this route required about the same amount of anxious, locked-in attention that I usually spend on a ten-mile ride in vehicular traffic.
If 4-mile Ciclavias are dangerous, 4-mile Ciclavias that attract a lot of unfamiliar pedestrians are even more dangerous.
The next section is just me complaining about Stranger Things... but I was also overwhelmed by the sense that I had entered like, the same commodified-fandom context that has generated the phenomenon of Funko Pops, which I loathe. Imagine my surprise when I realized that they were, in fact distributing actual Funko Pops at the event. I believe that they were a prize for completing a "quest" on the route, but I'm not sure.
I saw a lot of people walking around with stacks of Funko Pop boxes, and I suspect that a lot of people came to the event only to get them.
The local businesses were decorated in extremely on-brand ways. There was such a careful commitment to the black and red color scheme, specific imagery of the demogorgon character, the Christmas tree alphabet imagery, etc, that we began to suspect that Netflix had distributed a decoration guide to local businesses. My husband actually thinks that Netflix may have provided decorations to businesses along the route.
Man, I don't know what to think. This kind of thing can make you pretty paranoid!
This has been a blog post that's just me complaining about a nice thing Ciclavia tried to do for the city. But I really do think that Netflix is up there with Meta, Alphabet, Amazon, and other major tech companies in their negative influence on contemporary life and human culture. I think we should see these companies as our enemies; I think we should be careful about allowing them to take space in public. To get gross about it, I think that we should see them as, like, a beast to bleed and take our cuts of meat from. If they're not bleeding for it, they shouldn't be able to throw a street fair for us. I hope they paid, I hope they paid cash, and I hope that Ciclavia is going to use this money to throw better events in the future, with no branding on them.
If that's not what's happening, I don't really know what to say about this funko-pop-ass cringe shit, except that it was a pain in the ass and I didn't enjoy it!