Scramble the Algorithm!

I was on assignment for one of the big surf magazines that used to be a thing and found myself driving around and surfing France with Nathan Fletcher. I was sent there to write a profile on a newly discovered surfer named Chippa Wilson. Nathan rode for the same company (RIP Analog) so he was there too, and often Andy Irons would pile in the car with us. I knew all the folklore surrounding Nathan and the Fletcher crew of course, and with Andy there it was even more fucking surreal — easy to get intimidated and go mute around legends of that magnitude, especially sitting there as an inexperienced writer kid from Huntington Beach sent to profile an unheard of Australian named Chippa with gold eyes and freakishly technical airs. But sitting in the van, and after a few surfs, Nathan (and Andy) deemed my surfing background legit enough to share things with me, understanding I wasn’t another “surf journalist” vampire looking to make a name for myself through their blood, so it didn’t take long to find common ground with these legends, and that common ground was Beavis and Butthead.

It wasn’t long before the entire van would be reciting lines, pulling up music vids and scenes and doing our own shithouse impressions of our favorite heavy metal loving couch potatoes. We’d fire up that new website called YouTube and dig deep into pirated fragments and scenes of Beavis and Butthead, deepening our well of jokes for the rides to the beach. 

I bring this up because we’re in new territory for our dear renegade social media outlets: YouTube is now a global entertainment empire piloted by Google and now comes with network laws and rules and algorithms that fuck up the organic nature of searching for a needle in a haystack with your friends. Instagram is the polished influencer and cleavage-driven version of the home shopping network and is dooming a generation entirely. And before this becomes a trite pointless rant about social media, I want to acknowledge that I love these platforms, I just wish we used them better, made them raw again. I wanna see you post something that gets the least amount of likes in the history of your feed. That’s the content we need. That’s what made the ridiculous website fun.

I want shitty pictures of signs, gutter trash, breakfast cereal and a plate of cheese enchiladas. Let’s remember the days of discovering archival footage of Fugazi playing the gates outside the White House or Charles Bukowski on a park bench telling the story about the worst hangover of his life. No one getting sued or paid and all the Beavis and Butthead bootlegs you could handle floated around like pirate ships in the night.

I recently spent a dusty post-Modelo Saturday morning back in the dregs of YouTube and found myself locked into a terrific little 1,500 view documentary about writer Henry Miller. I was reminded of Marine Layer Productions, and Dane’s ability to dredge YouTube, books, records, journals and obscure music blogs compiling fragments and scraps and screen grabs that felt extremely unique to him and to us, a surfing culture. Marine Layer was just for us. You couldn’t explain any of that to anyone outside the surf parking lot. Dane was too indie. Nothing was too weird for Marine Layer, too obscene, too raw or too weird. It was pure raw distortion from Dane. And this brought a lot of welcome creativity and friction to surfing. 

And wouldn’t ya know it, this past weekend, in the quiet feed of an Instagram Saturday night, like some serendipitous channeling of the surf spirits: Dane wrote: “Think I’m gonna start blogging again.” And the firework celebrations began. We all surfed better Sunday morning, I know it.

I’ve spoken to a variety of surfers recently, including Dane, Chippa Wilson, Tanner Gudauskas, Colin Moran, Mitch Coleborn, Kai Neville, Nate Tyler and a variety of others and the overwhelming consensus is that we need to rally together. Encourage individual creativity. There is definitely a counterculture brewing and it has nothing to do with selling you anything. The “industry” is not dying, it is dead. Crashed and burned. Now, we must start at the beginning. Be about surfing, getting together, encouraging strangeness and helping the next generation make a name for themselves all while getting back to the grassroots, renegade spirit that put us on the map in the first place. Throw away the budget, we don’t need it. Find that “Easy Up” tent in the garage and get outside, throw a surf comp or a barbecue in the parking lot at your local spot. Or maybe post a shitty Instagram of the gravel at your local spot, just for me. Get the blogs back out, get resourceful, skip the investors, we’re going back in time, just in time. —Travis Ferré

 Here’s the documentary about Henry Miller called “Henry Miller is not Dead.” If nothing else, at least listen to the first minute:  

This is just a classic YouTube moment that still exists: Fugazi playing live, for free, in the rain outside the White House protesting Desert Storm in 1991:

Remember when Dane posted this on Marine Layer? For no reason, with no explanation, just because. Can’t wait for more of that:

Another lovely YouTube moment: Sweet, sensitive, but often a drunken asshole, writer and poet Charles Bukowski talks about the worst hangover ever:

Nothing is more blog than Dane’s cult anti-pop film Thrills Spills and What Not: