Bike messenger archetypes in fiction and reality, past and present

I got a flat tyre riding home from work today. Not a big deal, as I always ride with a spare tube and necessary tools to change it out. But I had been pondering writing a bike-related post for a few days, and decided to take the flat as a sign that, yes, I should indeed to do that.

The trigger for all of this is a series of video games I've been enjoying recently, Citizen Sleeper and it's sequel Citizen Sleeper 2. I'm so into these games I might well make a separate post about them, so I won't say too much now. As a kind of quick summary, Citizen Sleeper is a really nice cyberpunkish interactive fiction game with a great soundtrack and beautiful character art as a background to reading a compelling story, combined with a lightweight dice-rolling mechanic inspired by table-top roleplaying games. It is big on story and characters and themes and feels, light on fancy graphics, not anywhere close to so complicated in mechanics as to get frustrating (don't be scared off by the TT-RPG comparison!) but also not so simple as to be boring. It has really nice themes, of community, of helping people out, of finding a sense of place and belonging. Highly recommended!

I'm playing the sequel now, and have met a character who is a bike courier. There's a bit of a twist, she rides an "air bike", which I guess is a minimal adaptation of the idea of a bicycle to the weightless environment of a space station. It's more like a broomstick with a compressed air engine on the back of it, I gather: I've not as yet seen one in game. Like I said, this game is light on graphics. There's zero animation, you just get nicely hand-drawn character portraits during dialogue. But I've seen a drawing of one in a free solo mini-TTRPG game which was released recently to celebrate the, uhh, third(?) anniversary of the first game's release, and I'm basing my impression on that. It's not quite as goofy an idea as it sounds - space nerds will know that Ed White, during the first US EVA on Gemini 4, manoeuvered around in free space using a compressed air gun, officially dubbed the "Hand-Held Manoeuvering Unit". Anyway, this air bike courier character embodies a very recognisable archetype of the bicycle courier / messenger, that being the young, broke, streetwise daredevil who prizes their bike above all else and risks death daily by mixing with heavy traffic to make ends meet.

It's not impossible that this character I've just met in CS2 is actually directly Chevette-inspired, as I have read an interview with the game's designer and he has definitely mentioned some Gibson work as inspiration. Anyway, I first read Virtual Light probably around 2003 or 2004, which I take it was very much the dying days of bike messengers as a viable profession, with scanners and email presumably having taken a big bite out of business. I don't think I had previously heard of them and certainly had never seen one, having grown up somewhere semi-rural. But the book was written some time in the 90s when the scene was presumably a lot more vibrant.

Gibson did some research into big city bike messenger subculture, specifically citing the "Mercury Rising" zine from San Francisco, which you can find online archives of if you try hard enough, along with other zines from other big US cities. I had no idea about that when I first read the book, but I enjoyed exploring this zine rather more recently in my life, I think probably while I was still living in Finland, but maybe later in Sweden, at any rate certainly after getting really into cycling, which was not on my radar at all when I first read the book. While devouring all the online info about cycling I could in those days, I bumped into the messenger subculture once again, the romanticisation of big US city bike messengers having played a huge role in establishing the "fixie" craze, which was already dying out by the time I started riding as an adult and which I learned about largely after the fact by reading online. The zine was great fun to read, though, a fascinating glimpse into a tightly-knit community with a strong sense of identity. Even in the early 90s when email was not widely used by the public, there still seemed to be a sense that the days of the messenger where numbered, thanks to the fax machine! I imagine if you were an SF messenger in those days, Mercury Rising was a big part of your world, and that folks from those days talk about Mercury Rising now the way some hacker types will talk about 2600 or Phrack.

Of course, traditional bike couriers carrying letters and packages are more or less extinct in most of the world (I don't think anybody counts actual post office workers, who in a lot of European cities do deliver by bike these days, as the same thing), but there's recently been a rise of another kind of bike courier, the delivery rider affiliated with Uber Eats or Deliveroo or Volt or Lieferando or whatever local variant they have where you're from, you know what I'm talking about. During the Covid area there was also a bit of a boom of grocery delivery services which used bike riders too, although I think that's died down now. At any rate, in recent years I have in fact seen and even shared the road with a lot of modern day bicycle couriers on the road and have often marvelled at just how much they do *not* embody the romanticised archetype of the "OG" messenger. There's nothing glamorous about them at all! They wear brightly coloured and heavily branded dorky uniforms. Their bikes are either provided by the company in which case they are also heavily branded, big, ugly, heavy, utilitarian looking things, probably electric, or else if they are using their own bike then it's some dilapidated old thing, the cheapest thing which would still move and avoid them getting ticketed for not complying with laws about lighting or whatever. They are not daredevils, either! They ride relatively slowly, and to be honest often do not seem particularly proficient or confident riders. They certainly don't know the streets like the back of their hand, but rely instead on their smartphone for navigation.

Please don't misconstrue this post as a criticism of these riders for not being hardcore enough! They are not paid anywhere near well enough, nor looked after by their employers anywhere near well enough, I am sure, to afford nice bikes nor to exert themselves or take risks just to deliver food a little quicker. Most of them probably wouldn't buy nice bikes if they could, not being cycling enthusiasts at all but having just taken the job because it requires no formal qualifications and minimal language skills, which are very important considerations for immigrant workers, who seem to make up a lot of this workforce. The point of this post is not criticism, but rather just to reflect on the striking contrast between reality and expectation. It makes me wonder why the current situation is so different to the earlier one - or maybe it's not as different as it seems, and the surviving archetype is the distillation of a subset of messengers who were the highly visible exception to the mundane norm? Are there so many more jobs of this type available these days due to the rise of delivery app culture that hardcore cycling types are too few to dominate the ranks? Was the typical messenger payload in the 90s so much more urgent than takeaway food? I mean, I gather most of the clients were businesses, so obviously they were sending important business documents or whatever, not burgers, but was it really critical to shave every minute off delivery times for those documents? This feels like such a strange prospect, but maybe having never worked in paper-based big business in the analog days I just don't get it. Were OG messengers actually much better financially incentivised to make really fast deliveries? Was there more competition between different messenger services then than there is in the highly monopolised delivery app segment of today, such that having a reputation for speed was important?

Signing off now in the only way that would possibly do for this post, which is, of course, with a hearty...

"Proj on!" \m/