Across digital platforms, cycling content has drifted toward a curious uniformity: drone-lit gravel rides, polished product announcements, deferential “first look” reviews, and a near-complete absence of critical distance. Instead of a vibrant cultural field reflecting the diversity and contradictions of cycling itself, bike media increasingly resembles a derivative feedback loop, where the boundaries between journalism, advertising, and lifestyle marketing blur beyond recognition.
This trend is hardly unique to cycling. Yet the bike industry’s structural conditions, small media ecosystems, commercial dependency, and a deeply aspirational consumer base, make it especially susceptible to the ideological pressures Adorno and Horkheimer identified in their critique of the culture industry. Moreover, as Mark Fisher would argue, the current configuration of bike media embodies the symptoms of capitalist realism: not merely the dominance of market logic, but the incapacity to imagine an outside to it.
The Culture Industry on Wheels
Adorno and Horkheimer’s formulation of the culture industry in Dialectic of Enlightenment provides a blueprint to understand the look of contemporary bike media. While their critique was directed primarily toward mid-20th-century mass entertainment systems such as radio, cinema, and commercial music, the underlying logics of standardisation, pseudo-individualisation, and instrumental rationality translate remarkably well to today’s hyper-mediated cycling culture. In fact, the bicycle media ecosystem can be seen as a microcosm of the culture industry itself: a tightly knit circuit of production where consumer goods, affective narratives, identity formation, and ideological reproduction operate in seamless unity.
Adorno and Horkheimer famously argued that cultural products under capitalism are shaped not by the free expression of artists but by the imperatives of industrial production. Standardisation ensures efficiency, predictability, and market stability; cultural forms become interchangeable units, exhibiting difference only at the level of surface detail. When applied to bike media, this observation exposes the foundations of its aesthetic and conceptual uniformity.
Much as Hollywood studios once controlled both production and distribution infrastructures, the bike industry today occupies a structurally similar position. Brands supply not only the products but also the narrative frameworks within which those products must be evaluated. Press kits, embargoed launch dates, pre-scripted talking points, and curated testing environments create a closed pipeline through which content flows with minimal deviation. Reviewers, YouTubers, and journalists become nodes within an already-designed system. The “new bike launch” video resembles an assembly-line cultural artefact:
• shot in approved settings,
• filmed with standardised angles,
• edited according to the algorithmically favoured cadence of cuts,
• accompanied by music libraries that evoke inspirational consumer desire.
These narratives appear “natural” only because their industrial construction is concealed beneath a veneer of spontaneity.
The Erasure of Cultural Specificity
Standardisation eliminates regional, social, and subcultural specificities that once gave cycling media texture and diversity. BMX zines, messenger blogs, and early freeride films were heterogeneous expressions shaped by place, community, and material constraints. Under the culture industry, however, such traits are ironed out. Gravel videos filmed in Colombia, Colorado, or Cornwall are virtually indistinguishable; brands cultivate a globalised homogeneity because it travels smoothly across markets.
This decontextualisation mirrors Adorno’s argument that culture industry products are stripped of their concretely lived origins in order to become abstract, exchangeable commodities.
Pseudo-Individualisation: The Illusion of Difference
Pseudo-individualisation refers to the culture industry’s tactic of inserting small variations into fundamentally standardised products to create an illusion of uniqueness. This is perhaps the Frankfurt School concept most uncannily realised in contemporary cycling.
In the cycling world, brands differentiate themselves through nominal innovations, fractional geometry tweaks, cosmetic changes, proprietary terminology, presented as revolutionary. Media narratives reinforce this illusion by framing each release as a leap forward, even when differences are marginal. The result is a paradoxical abundance: countless “individualised” bikes that are functionally and aesthetically convergent.
Video creators further enact pseudo-individualisation through persona-based branding. The content itself is interchangeable, reviews, bikepacking trips, “how to choose a saddle” explainers, but the host’s personality becomes the distinguishing commodity. Viewers receive not a genuinely new form of content, but a familiar form packaged in the aesthetic of individuality.
Adorno noted that pseudo-individualisation bolsters the culture industry by offering consumers the illusion of autonomy while binding them to a closed system. In bike media, the personalised influencer becomes both product and producer, collapsing critical distance:
• they review products they rely on for sponsorship;
• they perform authenticity while functioning as advertisements;
• their identity becomes fused with the commodity they promote.
This is not simply commercial bias. It is the structural absorption of individuality into the commodity form, precisely the phenomenon Adorno predicted.
Integration of Consumer and Commodity
A central insight of the culture industry thesis is that the boundary between consumer and commodity dissolves. People consume not only objects but identities, narratives, and aesthetic frameworks. The cycling industry exemplifies this integration with striking clarity.
The cyclist becomes a bearer of commodities in multiple overlapping senses:
Material: through their bikes, apparel, gadgets, and accessories.
Narrative: through stories of progress, fitness, adventure, optimisation.
Affective: through enthusiasm, aspiration, and the performance of “stoke.”
Bike media trains the rider to understand themselves as an aggregated portfolio of consumer choices. “Who you are” as a cyclist is expressed through brand allegiance, gear selection, and participation in consumer-driven subcultures.
Adorno and Horkheimer argued that the culture industry transforms lived experience into repeatable, predictable narrative forms. Cycling, once defined by spontaneous experimentation, risk, and community improvisation, is increasingly represented through pre-scripted experiential templates. Gravel videos, bikepacking vlogs, and branded “adventures” become ritualised performances in which the participant enacts a consumer storyline rather than generating meaning from their own interactions with terrain, community, or self. The experience becomes secondary to its mediation. The ride is valuable insofar as it produces content.
Technocratic Imagination
One of the often-neglected aspects of Adorno and Horkheimer’s critique is their emphasis on instrumental rationality, the dominance of efficiency, calculation, and optimisation as the primary logic of modernity. This is perhaps nowhere more visible than in contemporary cycling culture.
Cycling media routinely frames riding not as a phenomenological experience but as a metric-driven optimisation problem. Power meters, heart-rate thresholds, aerodynamic coefficients, and training zones become the grammar through which cycling is understood. This does not inherently diminish the sport; however, when mediated exclusively through technocratic rationality, the activity becomes a technical exercise rather than a cultural practice. The Frankfurt School warns that when instrumental rationality dominates, the world’s richness collapses into what can be measured.
Bikes themselves become expressions of optimisation. Advertising emphasises marginal gains, proprietary integration, stiffness-to-weight ratios, and computational design. This language saturates media coverage until bicycles are framed less as vehicles for human expression and more as technological experiments awaiting consumer validation. This reflects Adorno’s warning that technological progress under capitalism often masks the regression of culture.
Algorithms and the New Culture Industry
Adorno and Horkheimer’s critique of the culture industry was formulated in the context of centralised mass-media institutions. Yet contemporary digital platforms reveal a new mode of cultural production that simultaneously intensifies and diffuses the mechanisms the Frankfurt School identified. The shift from broadcast media to platform capitalism does not undermine the diagnostic power of their framework; rather, it renders it newly urgent.
Adorno and Horkheimer describe standardisation as the industrial reproduction of predictable cultural forms designed to secure profit and minimise risk. In the digital era, algorithms have assumed the role once held by studio executives and radio schedulers. Instead of human decision-makers crafting standardisation through policy and editorial control, algorithms perform this function automatically, continuously, and invisibly.
Platforms operationalise cultural production by ranking, recommending, and amplifying content according to proprietary metrics such as “watch time,” “engagement,” and “relevance.” These metrics are not neutral; they encode a political economy wherein:
• content that conforms to platform-friendly norms is rewarded,
• content that deviates risks invisibility,
• creators become dependent on algorithmic favour for economic survival.
Bike media illustrates this with uncanny clarity. The most successful content often conforms to a recognisable formula:
• a 12–15 minute runtime calibrated to monetisation thresholds,
• an immediate “hook” to satisfy retention metrics,
• fast-paced editing,
• predictable emotional arcs of excitement and satisfaction,
• genre conventions such as the “new bike day,” “dream build,” or “budget vs. premium” comparison, “alt cycling is different”.
The platform’s algorithmic architecture thus becomes a silent co-author of cultural form.
Adorno and Horkheimer noted the culture industry’s tendency toward “endless sameness,” wherein minor variations disguise fundamental uniformity. Algorithms intensify this process through feedback loops: once a particular format is successful, the platform amplifies it, creators reproduce it, and audiences internalise it as the normative form of cycling content.
This produces what we might call an algorithmic repetition compulsion, where:
• one successful gravel video spawns hundreds of near-identical successors,
• a popular review format becomes obligatory,
• narrative tropes ossify into templates,
• novelty becomes ritualised imitation.
The algorithm commodifies predictability; deviations are punished with invisibility.
Creator Internalisation
The Frankfurt School emphasised that the culture industry works not only through coercion but through internalisation. Subjects adapt to its demands, adopting its values as their own. Under digital capitalism, creators internalise algorithmic logic so deeply that it becomes second nature.
Bike media creators operate within a regime of affective labour, producing not only content but a continuous performance of enthusiasm, authenticity, and relatability. The camera-facing self becomes a managed persona. Over time, creators absorb platform analytics into their own sense of professional identity:
• They track retention curves, view velocity, and click-through rates.
• They optimise thumbnails, delivery cadence, and narrative arcs.
• They rehearse authenticity to maintain brand appeal.
• They modulate critique to protect sponsor relationships.
This produces a self-disciplining subject who voluntarily aligns with platform imperatives. Adorno’s account of internalised domination finds new expression here: creators censor themselves not out of fear, but out of habituated calculation.
Under algorithmic conditions, creativity is evaluated by its capacity for circulation. Experimental, slow, ambiguous, or difficult forms struggle to survive. A philosophical meditation on cycling, a community-led documentary, or a critique of the bike industry’s environmental impact lacks the algorithmic traits associated with virality.
Consequently:
• complex thought becomes economically unsustainable,
• creators are funnelled into narrow forms of expression,
• the field of cultural possibilities shrinks.
This aligns with Adorno’s argument that late capitalism transforms culture into a form of “administered life”, not by explicit decree but by structural conditioning.
The Collapse of Critique into Brand Alignment
One of the most striking transformations in contemporary bike media is the disappearance of adversarial critique. This is not due to censorship but to a structural convergence of content creators, brands, and platforms.
The distinction between journalism and advertising is eroded by the economic dependencies of digital creators. Many rely on:
• sponsored content contracts,
• affiliate links,
• free product in exchange for coverage,
• early access to embargoed launches,
• ongoing relationships with PR departments.
This creates a hybridised form of media where the figure of the “influencer-journalist” emerges, a producer who adopts journalistic signifiers (reviews, analysis, investigations) while operating within the constraints of promotional culture. Critique becomes tempered enthusiasm; negativity becomes strategically avoided risk.
Adorno and Horkheimer insisted that the culture industry eliminates disruptive or challenging emotions. In bike media, negative affect, disappointment, frustration, anger, critique, is systematically softened or removed. Thus, the field becomes saturated with what Lauren Berlant calls “cruel optimism”: a relentless positivity masking structural problems such as affordability crises, environmental contradictions, elitism, and exploitative labour conditions in globalised bike production.
The “neutral tone” adopted by many cycling reviewers is not neutral at all. It is an ideological stance that naturalises the marketplace and obscures power relations. The subdued critique masked behind polite euphemism (“it may not be for everyone”; “the price reflects the innovation”) reinforces the norms of capitalist realism: the belief that consumerism is the primary way cycling is to be understood, enjoyed, and communicated. Adorno’s notion of “false reconciliation” applies here: contradictions are smoothed over, conflict evaporates into friendly commentary, and the commodity form becomes an unquestioned horizon.
A further dimension of algorithmic culture is temporal acceleration. Adorno and Horkheimer warned of culture’s tendency toward rapid consumption and disposability. Digital platforms amplify this tendency exponentially.
A bike review remains relevant for weeks, perhaps months; a product announcement peaks in interest over hours. The accelerated temporality of digital media demands:
• constant content output,
• rapid turnover of trends,
• continuous narrative novelty.
Creators must maintain velocity simply to remain visible. This acceleration is antithetical to deep criticism, long-term testing, historical reflection, or community-rooted storytelling, all of which require slower temporal rhythms.
Capitalist Realism and the Impossibility of Alternatives
Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (2009) argues that late capitalism has achieved not merely dominance but ontological saturation. Capitalism no longer presents itself as one political-economic system among others but as the only viable horizon of existence. Its victory is psychological, affective, and epistemological. Culture under capitalist realism does not merely reflect capitalism; it cannot imagine beyond it.
Bike media, at first glance a specialised niche within digital culture, exemplifies this condition with eerie clarity. In its homogenised aesthetic, depoliticised narrative structures, algorithmic discipline, and relentless framing of cycling as a consumable lifestyle, it offers a microcosm of the wider ideological terrain Fisher identifies.
Fisher’s central claim, that capitalist realism is the belief that “capitalism is the only coherent political-economic system”, applies with almost literal precision to the structure of contemporary bike media. Cycling, a practice historically tied to working-class mobility, collective organising, urban struggle, and countercultural expression, is increasingly reframed as a marketplace rather than a cultural form.
Where earlier cycling cultures emphasised skill, creativity, risk, or urban improvisation, contemporary media frames cycling primarily through:
• purchase decisions,
• upgrade pathways,
• accessories ecosystems,
• technical consumption,
• lifestyle branding.
The very language of cycling coverage demonstrates this enclosure. A ride is described as an “opportunity to test new gear.” Adventure is a backdrop for product placement. Community events become content markets. Fitness becomes a subscription service. Joy is inseparable from consumption.
This logic mirrors Fisher’s argument that contemporary culture “perceives itself, reflexively, as a market.”
Capitalist realism thrives by presenting consumption as agency. Bike media reinforces this belief by positioning the cyclist as an empowered chooser navigating a universe of carefully differentiated commodities.
Yet, as we just saw, these choices are shaped by:
• algorithmic visibility,
• PR pipelines,
• brand narratives,
• standardised cultural forms,
• aspirational lifestyle design.
The cyclist is constructed as a sovereign consumer while operating within a highly constrained ideological terrain. Fisher’s point becomes vivid: consumer choice disguises structural determinism.
The Evacuation of Political Imagination
Under capitalist realism, politics dissolves into managerialism, lifestyle optimisation, and micro-solutions. In cycling media, this manifests as a refusal to confront the systemic conditions that shape mobility, infrastructure, labour, and environmental impact.
Cycling is profoundly political:
• it intersects with class,
• climate,
• urban planning,
• disability rights,
• race,
• gender,
• public health,
• sustainability,
• spatial justice.
Yet mainstream cycling media remains almost entirely silent about these terrains. Instead, political questions are reframed as personal lifestyle choices:
• Traffic violence is reframed as a question of gear and vigilance.
• Cycling infrastructure debates collapse into individual route selection.
• Environmental crises become opportunities to buy carbon-offset products or “sustainable” branded gear.
• Accessibility issues are deferred to “inclusivity campaigns” without structural critique.
This is capitalist realism in action: political contradictions reabsorbed and reinterpreted as consumer decisions.
Fisher argues that late-capitalist ideology maintains itself by narrowing the bandwidth of the thinkable. In cycling media:
• The car is rarely critiqued as a political force.
• Urban space is not analysed as contested territory.
• Cycling’s entanglement with class and labour is ignored.
• The globalised supply chains of bike manufacturing remain invisible.
• The cost of bikes is treated as an unfortunate inevitability rather than a structural choice.
Cycling is presented as a neutral leisure activity floating above political reality, an ideological sleight-of-hand that reinforces existing power structures.
Even when political problems emerge, they are framed in managerial or technocratic terms:
• “How can cyclists and drivers better share the road?”
• “How do we encourage more people to cycle?”
• “Can infrastructure be improved incrementally?”
These questions presuppose the stability of the existing system. Structural imaginaries remain off-limits. Fisher would identify this as the replacement of politics by PR.
Affective Governance
Capitalist realism does not endure through coercion alone; it governs affect. The emotional tone of bike media, its cheerfulness, aspirational glow, and relentless optimism, functions as an ideological apparatus in its own right.
Cycling culture has absorbed a discourse of mandatory positivity. Influencers perform enthusiasm as a professional obligation. Reviews adopt the language of perpetual excitement. Documentaries present adventure as a commodity of personal fulfilment.
This “stoke economy” eliminates negative affect. disappointment, anger, frustration, critique, in ways that align perfectly with capitalist realism. The imperative to enjoy becomes a form of self-regulation.
Fisher reminds us that depression and anxiety are political. Under capitalist realism, the burden of unhappiness is individualised. In bike media, this appears as:
• burnout framed as lack of personal balance,
• injury framed as a setback to overcome with better gear,
• dissatisfaction reframed as the need for a new bike,
• community alienation reframed as a personal failure to “find your tribe.”
Systemic contradictions are psychologised.
Bike media sells not only goods but imaginary futures. Carbon frames promise transcendence. New tyres promise liberation. Suspension redesigns promise control over one’s life. Apparel promises identity.Under capitalist realism, the future becomes consumable fiction. Fisher describes this as the “privatisation of stress” and “commodification of hope.” Cycling culture reproduces these dynamics through:
• upgrade fantasies,
• transformation narratives,
• adventure-as-escape,
• technology as salvation.
Hope becomes tethered to consumption rather than collective restructuring.
The Foreclosure of Alternatives
Fisher argues that capitalist realism colonises imagination to the point where alternatives seem absurd, utopian, or impossible. This foreclosure is deeply apparent in bike media.
Mainstream cycling media does not imagine:
• cycling without brands,
• cycling without consumption,
• cycling as public infrastructure rather than personal hobby,
• cycling as anti-car resistance,
• cycling collectives based on mutual aid or co-ownership,
• decommodified repair culture,
• community workshops as political space.
But these are not abstract fantasies. They already exist in fragmented, subcultural forms:
• bike kitchens,
• anarchist repair collectives,
• messenger communities,
• grassroots BMX scenes,
• adaptive cycling groups,
• feminist mechanic spaces.
Yet these are rarely represented, because they challenge the product-centric ideology of bike media. Cycling contains a latent utopian energy, simple machines enabling freedom, community, ecological mobility, bodily agency, and collective reconfiguration of public space. But capitalist realism suppresses this impulse by:
• aestheticising cycling rather than politicising it,
• presenting infrastructure as neutral,
• emphasising individual achievement over collective struggle,
• framing cycling as a luxury good rather than a right.
Fisher’s insight is stark: the system prevents not revolution, but the imagination of revolution. Under capitalist realism, the only imaginable cycling future is more of the present:
• more gear,
• more tech,
• more lifestyle content,
• more algorithmically optimised videos,
• more incremental “innovation,”
• more depoliticised enjoyment.
The narrative horizon shrinks to the product cycle. In such a world, cycling becomes not a mode of liberation but a treadmill, an allegory Fisher would recognise instantly.
Despite its ideological weight, capitalist realism is not monolithic. Fisher emphasises its internal contradictions, vulnerabilities, and cracks. Within cycling, counter-narratives persist beneath the glossy surface of bike media:
• community workshops resisting consumerism,
• critique oriented podcasts and newsletters,
• urban cycling activism,
• anti-car campaigns,
• DIY cultures,
• subcultural aesthetics resistant to monetisation,
• local documentary practices centred on lived experience.
These fragments represent what Fisher calls “glimmers of post-capitalist desire”, moments that exceed the logic of the market. The challenge is not to invent alternatives from scratch but to amplify and connect these existing ruptures.
Taken together, these thoughs reveal that the blandness saturating contemporary cycling media is not an aesthetic failure but an ideological achievement. It is produced at the intersection of industrial standardisation, algorithmic governance, consumer subjectivity, and the shrinking horizon of cultural possibility under capitalist realism. Blandness becomes the sensory texture of a world in which alternatives have been polished and sanded away, leaving only the glossy surface of perpetual consumption.
Yet, as both the Frankfurt School and Fisher insist, domination never fully completes itself. Beneath the uniformity of mainstream cycling content lie heterogeneous fragments that resist absorption: grassroots repair collectives, community workshops, activist cycling movements, countercultural documentary practices, feminist mechanic spaces, disability-led adaptive cycling communities, and DIY frame-building cultures. These forms preserve what Adorno might call a “non-identical” residue, practices that refuse to be reduced to commodity logic,and what Fisher would recognise as “glimmers of post-capitalist desire.”
Recognising these fragments as sites of resistance transforms bike media from a closed ideological machine into a contested cultural terrain. The challenge is not merely to critique the machinery of late capitalism but to widen the imaginative field through which cycling can be represented, narrated, and lived. Recovering cycling’s political, communal, and phenomenological dimensions requires an aesthetic counter-practice capable of resisting algorithmic optimisation, commercial dependence, and the hegemony of capitalist realism.
Any future cycling media that aspires to such a counter-practice must therefore cultivate forms that are slower, stranger, more situated, more critical, and more entangled with the lived experience of riding. It must rediscover conceptual depth, historical memory, and the capacity to confront the structural forces that shape mobility and cultural production. It must re-politicise what has been de-politicised, and re-imagine what has been foreclosed.
In doing so, cycling media could become not merely a reflection of the culture industry’s logics but an engine for rethinking them. It could enact what Fisher describes as the “reopening of the possibility space” — a gesture toward futures in which cycling is not a consumer niche but a social practice embedded in collective liberation, sustainable mobility, democratic urbanism, and alternative ways of inhabiting the world.
Such futures will not emerge from blandness. They require critique, imagination, and a willingness to deviate from the algorithmic pathways that currently shape cultural production. The bicycle has always been a machine of deviation,from roads, from routines, from prescribed routes, and its media, if liberated from capitalist realism, could once again open pathways toward other kinds of cultural, political, and imaginative life.
Fiefdom Tracklocross 
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