Over the past two decades, cycling has undergone a subtle but profound transformation. What was once a relatively self-contained practice, defined by embodied skill, local knowledge, and informal cultures, has increasingly become embedded within digital infrastructures that extract value from participation. Platforms log rides, quantify performance, rank bodies, monetise attention, and translate lived experience into data flows. Cycling, like many everyday practices, has been folded into what scholars describe as platform capitalism: an economic system in which digital platforms intermediate social activity and convert it into profit.
Against this backdrop, tracklocross can be read not merely as a niche cycling subculture, but as a quiet form of resistance. This resistance is not overtly political in the traditional sense. There are no manifestos, no demands, no organised refusal. Instead, it operates through non-alignment: a refusal to fully cooperate with the logics of platforms, metrics, and algorithmic valuation.
Platform capitalism and the capture of movement
To understand how tracklocross can function as resistance, it is first necessary to clarify what is meant by platform capitalism and how it has come to structure everyday bodily practices such as cycling. Platform capitalism does not simply refer to companies that operate online. It names a broader economic and cultural configuration in which digital platforms position themselves as indispensable intermediaries between people, activities, and markets, extracting value primarily through data rather than through the direct production of goods.
As articulated by Nick Srnicek, platforms are best understood as infrastructures that enable, organise, and govern interaction. Their power lies in their capacity to render activity legible. Once an activity can be logged, measured, stored, and compared, it becomes amenable to optimisation, prediction, and monetisation. What matters is not merely that data is collected, but that participation itself becomes dependent on the platform’s categories of meaning. To act is increasingly to act for the platform, or at least through it.
Cycling provides a particularly clear example of this process because it involves movement through space, exertion over time, and measurable outputs. With the widespread adoption of GPS-enabled devices and applications such as Strava, riding a bicycle is no longer just a physical act; it is a data event. Distance, speed, elevation, power, heart rate, and even perceived effort are translated into numerical representations that can be stored indefinitely and compared across individuals and contexts.
This transformation has significant consequences. When movement is captured in this way, it becomes abstracted from its immediate sensory and situational context. A muddy field, a headwind, or a moment of hesitation at a corner may all be reduced to fluctuations in speed or power output. What is lost is not simply richness, but autonomy over meaning. The platform provides the framework through which the ride is interpreted. Improvement is defined numerically. Success is framed comparatively. Value accrues through visibility.
From a critical political economy perspective, this process echoes long-standing concerns articulated by Karl Marx about alienation. In classical industrial capitalism, labour becomes alienated when workers no longer recognise themselves in the products of their work. In platform capitalism, a similar alienation occurs at the level of activity and selfhood. Riders may begin to relate to their own movement primarily through its representation on the platform. The ride becomes a means to produce data, and the data becomes the site where meaning is negotiated.
Crucially, this capture of movement does not require coercion. Platforms rely on voluntary participation, social incentives, and affective rewards. The promise of self-knowledge, community, and motivation masks the asymmetry of value extraction. Riders generate vast quantities of behavioural data, while platforms retain control over how that data is used, aggregated, and monetised. The individual gains feedback and recognition; the platform gains scale, predictability, and profit.
Over time, these dynamics reshape subjectivity. Riders internalise platform metrics as measures of worth. A “good” ride becomes one that produces clean data, visible progress, or social validation. Slowness, inconsistency, and non-standard practices are subtly devalued, not through explicit prohibition but through neglect. What cannot be easily compared or ranked becomes marginal.
This is where the notion of capture becomes particularly important. Capture does not mean that every aspect of cycling is controlled, but that the dominant frames through which cycling is understood increasingly belong to the platform. Even riders who claim indifference to metrics often find themselves orienting towards them unconsciously. The platform becomes the background condition of possibility for how riding is narrated, remembered, and shared.
In this sense, platform capitalism extends beyond economics into epistemology. It shapes what counts as knowledge about cycling. A ride that cannot be graphed, segmented, or optimised risks being perceived as incomplete or unserious. The platform does not merely record reality; it participates in producing it.
Understanding this context is essential for appreciating why certain practices, such as tracklocross, appear anomalous or even perverse within contemporary cycling culture. They are not simply alternative styles of riding. They are practices that sit uneasily with the dominant infrastructures of capture. Their resistance lies not in explicit opposition, but in their partial illegibility to systems designed to extract value from movement.
The incompatibility of tracklocross and optimisation
The friction between tracklocross and platform capitalism becomes most apparent when examined through the concept of optimisation. Optimisation is not simply a technical process; it is a cultural logic. Within platform-mediated cycling, optimisation frames how riders understand improvement, effort, and even enjoyment. The ideal ride is one that can be made faster, smoother, more efficient, and more repeatable over time. Crucially, this ideal depends on conditions of relative stability: predictable terrain, consistent equipment performance, and activities that can be repeated under comparable circumstances.
Tracklocross violates these conditions at a structural level.
Unlike road cycling, track racing, or indoor training, tracklocross takes place in environments that resist standardisation. Grass grows differently week to week. Mud behaves unpredictably depending on rainfall, temperature, and traffic. Gravel shifts under load. Lines that work on one lap may fail on the next. This instability undermines the basic requirement of optimisation: that inputs and outputs can be meaningfully compared over time.
The fixed gear intensifies this incompatibility. In optimised cycling systems, gearing serves as an adaptation tool. Riders adjust ratios to maintain ideal cadence, control fatigue, and smooth power output. On a fixed gear, adaptation is internalised. Cadence fluctuates wildly. Muscular strain is redistributed rather than minimised. Momentum becomes both asset and liability. There is no “correct” response that can be generalised across rides, only situational judgement.
From an optimisation perspective, this is a problem. Algorithms depend on regularity. Training models assume progressive overload, controlled intensity, and repeatable stress. Tracklocross produces irregular, non-linear, and difficult-to-classify stress. Effort spikes unpredictably. Recovery demands vary. A ride that feels trivial on paper may be neuromuscularly exhausting, while a statistically “hard” ride may feel subjectively unremarkable.
This disconnect exposes a deeper issue: optimisation frameworks privilege what can be measured cleanly, not necessarily what is meaningful. In tracklocross, skill does not manifest primarily as increased output or reduced time. It manifests as fewer errors, smoother terrain negotiation, better anticipation of loss, and improved tolerance for discomfort. These qualities resist quantification. They do not accumulate neatly. They are revealed only in context.
As a result, tracklocross rides often appear unproductive when rendered as data. Average speeds are low. Power curves are erratic. Segments, where they exist at all, are meaningless due to constant variation in conditions. Even personal records lose relevance when a section of trail that was dry last week becomes unrideable this week. The platform’s promise of comparability collapses.
This collapse is not accidental; it is diagnostic. It reveals how deeply optimisation depends on abstraction. To optimise, the ride must be stripped of contingency. Terrain becomes elevation gain. Effort becomes watts. Experience becomes a chart. Tracklocross reintroduces contingency at every level. It refuses to stay abstract long enough to be optimised.
There is also a psychological dimension to this incompatibility. Optimisation encourages a future-oriented relationship to activity. The present ride is valuable insofar as it contributes to future performance. Metrics justify effort retroactively. In tracklocross, this temporal logic weakens. Improvement is difficult to narrate. Progress is subtle, often regressive, and easily disrupted by external factors. The rider is returned to the present, not as a mindfulness exercise, but as a practical necessity. You must attend to what is happening now, because prediction is unreliable.
This has implications for motivation. In optimised systems, motivation is sustained through visible progress and social comparison. Tracklocross offers neither in stable form. The reward structure is intrinsic and situational. Satisfaction emerges from moments of successful negotiation, from rides completed rather than dominated, from the quiet sense that one responded adequately to difficulty. These rewards do not scale. They are not easily shared or validated externally.
From the standpoint of platform capitalism, this is inefficient. Engagement thrives on clear feedback loops, on the promise that effort will be legible and rewarded. Tracklocross breaks these loops. It produces rides that feel meaningful to the rider but unremarkable to the system. In doing so, it creates a mismatch between lived value and represented value.
This mismatch is politically significant. When optimisation fails, the authority of the metric weakens. Riders may begin to trust their own judgement over the platform’s interpretation. They may accept rides that look “bad” on paper but feel right in the body. This does not require explicit rejection of the platform; it emerges organically from repeated encounters with its inadequacy.
In this way, tracklocross does not oppose optimisation through argument, but through exhaustion. It makes optimisation irrelevant by refusing to cooperate with its assumptions. The ride cannot be made clean enough, stable enough, or comparable enough to satisfy the system. What remains is activity that exceeds its representation.
This excess is precisely where resistance resides. Not in refusing technology outright, but in engaging in practices that reveal its limits. Tracklocross demonstrates that when movement becomes too entangled with unpredictability, platforms lose their grip. What cannot be optimised cannot be fully captured. And what cannot be fully captured retains a degree of autonomy.
Tracklocross, gravel racing, and endurance optimisation cultures
The contrast between tracklocross and contemporary gravel racing is instructive precisely because, on the surface, the two practices appear closely related. Both take place off-road, both often reject the smooth tarmac of road cycling, and both present themselves rhetorically as alternatives to hyper-specialised, rule-bound racing disciplines. Yet beneath this shared aesthetic of dirt, adventure, and informality lies a fundamental divergence in how each practice relates to optimisation, metrics, and the logics of platform capitalism.
Modern gravel racing has increasingly aligned itself with endurance optimisation culture. Events such as Unbound Gravel or the Dirty Reiver frame themselves as tests of resilience, self-management, and long-duration performance. While often marketed as inclusive or anti-elitist, these events nonetheless depend on highly developed preparation systems. Riders obsess over marginal gains: tyre casings, rolling resistance, aerodynamic bags, carbohydrate intake per hour, pacing strategies, and recovery protocols. The gravel bike itself becomes a platform for optimisation, capable of absorbing ever more technological refinement.
Crucially, gravel racing remains deeply compatible with platform metrics. Distance, elevation, average speed, heart rate, and power output all scale cleanly over long durations. The endurance format amplifies data rather than disrupting it. Long rides generate rich datasets, perfect for post-hoc analysis and social comparison. Platforms such as Strava thrive in this context, offering badges, leaderboards, training load metrics, and narrative coherence. The rider can tell a clear story: longer, faster, stronger, further.
Endurance optimisation culture thus produces a particular kind of subject: the self-managing athlete, constantly calibrating effort against metrics. Fatigue is not simply endured; it is modelled. Suffering is not merely experienced; it is justified through data. The ride gains legitimacy through its measurability.
Tracklocross, by contrast, offers no such coherence. Its distances are often short, its speeds unimpressive, and its outputs erratic. A tracklocross ride may involve intense effort punctuated by walking, skidding, stopping, and restarting. From an endurance perspective, this appears inefficient, even irrational. Energy is wasted. Momentum is lost. There is little opportunity for steady-state optimisation.
This difference has profound cultural implications. Gravel racing tends to reward those who can best align their bodies, equipment, and strategies with known variables. Even when conditions are harsh, they are harsh in predictable ways. Riders prepare for wind, heat, and distance through simulation and modelling. Success is framed as the correct execution of a plan.
Tracklocross undermines planning itself. Fixed gearing means that no amount of preparation can fully resolve the mismatch between rider and terrain. A gear that works on one surface fails on another. The rider must improvise continuously, responding to friction, traction, and cadence in real time. Where gravel racing celebrates resilience through control, tracklocross cultivates resilience through acceptance.
This distinction maps neatly onto broader critiques of optimisation culture. Endurance optimisation assumes that the body is a system to be managed, improved, and disciplined over time. Progress is cumulative. Setbacks are deviations from an expected curve. Tracklocross rejects this temporal narrative. Progress is fragile and reversible. One muddy corner can undo weeks of confidence. Skill is situational rather than transferable. There is no stable baseline from which to measure advancement.
From the standpoint of platform capitalism, gravel racing is an ideal activity. It produces large quantities of clean, comparable data. It encourages aspirational consumption, as riders seek equipment and services that promise marginal improvements. It sustains content ecosystems: race reports, training plans, nutrition guides, and influencer narratives. Even its rhetoric of freedom and adventure is easily commodified.
Tracklocross resists this integration not through ideology, but through awkwardness. It is difficult to market, difficult to standardise, and difficult to scale. There is no obvious pathway from participation to prestige. Success is often invisible to outsiders. The rider who navigates a slippery field without crashing has achieved something meaningful, but this achievement does not translate into recognisable status.
Endurance cultures often moralise effort. Long rides become evidence of discipline, toughness, and commitment. Metrics provide a moral ledger: suffering is validated if it produces numbers that can be displayed. Tracklocross decouples suffering from validation. You may suffer greatly and still produce an unimpressive file. You may ride skilfully and still appear slow. This breaks the moral economy of optimisation.
In doing so, tracklocross creates space for a different relationship to effort. Effort is no longer something to be justified through output; it is something to be managed for survival and continuity. The goal is not to extract maximum performance from the body, but to remain capable of riding at all. This shifts attention away from achievement and toward sustainability in a more literal sense.
The contrast also extends to community formation. Gravel racing communities often coalesce around events, brands, and online platforms. Identity is reinforced through shared participation in named races and visible achievements. Tracklocross communities tend to be local, informal, and ephemeral. Knowledge circulates through conversation and imitation rather than through formalised guides. There is little incentive to optimise collectively, because the practice itself resists generalisation.
Ultimately, the difference between tracklocross and endurance optimisation cultures is not about dirt versus distance, or fixed versus geared bikes. It is about whether riding is oriented toward legibility or experience. Gravel racing, despite its countercultural aesthetics, remains legible to platforms. Tracklocross does not.
This illegibility is its political and philosophical significance. In refusing the smooth narratives of endurance, progress, and optimisation, tracklocross exposes how deeply those narratives are entangled with systems of capture. It reminds us that not all movement needs to be efficient, scalable, or meaningful in the same way. Some movement can remain stubbornly local, situational, and resistant to being turned into a story that platforms know how to tell.
Tracklocross, Marx, and the refusal of exchange-value
To bring this discussion back to Marx is not to retrofit an ideological frame onto an innocent cycling practice, but to recognise that Marx’s critique of capitalism remains useful precisely because it begins from everyday activity. Marx was not primarily concerned with markets in the abstract, but with how systems of value shape what people do, how they understand their own labour, and how meaning is displaced from lived activity into external forms of equivalence. In this light, tracklocross can be understood as a minor but revealing site where these dynamics are rendered visible.
At the core of Marx’s analysis is the distinction between use-value and exchange-value. Use-value refers to the concrete usefulness of an activity or object: what it does, how it is experienced, how it satisfies a need. Exchange-value, by contrast, abstracts that activity or object into a form that can be compared, exchanged, and accumulated within a market system. Capitalism, for Marx, is defined by the dominance of exchange-value over use-value. What matters is not what something is, but how it can circulate, scale, and generate surplus.
Platform capitalism intensifies this dynamic rather than departing from it. Cycling activity becomes valuable not primarily because it is enjoyable, grounding, or socially meaningful, but because it produces data that can be aggregated, analysed, and monetised. The ride’s exchange-value lies in its metrics, its visibility, and its capacity to sustain engagement within a platform ecosystem. Use-value remains, but it is increasingly subordinated to representation. Riders learn to see their own movement through the lens of exchange-value: watts, segments, rankings, and narratives of improvement.
Tracklocross disrupts this relationship by foregrounding use-value in a way that resists conversion into exchange-value. The fixed gear, the unstable terrain, and the absence of optimisation pathways do not merely make the activity harder; they make it less abstractable. The value of a tracklocross ride lies in qualities that do not travel well: attentiveness, restraint, embodied judgement, and situational awareness. These are not easily stored, compared, or exchanged. They exist primarily in the moment of practice.
From a Marxian perspective, this matters because abstraction is the mechanism through which capitalist value asserts dominance. To abstract is to strip away specificity in favour of equivalence. Tracklocross refuses equivalence. One ride cannot stand in for another. One rider’s competence cannot be easily measured against another’s. The practice continually reasserts difference, contingency, and locality—precisely the qualities that exchange-value seeks to neutralise.
This refusal is not ideological in the conventional sense. Tracklocross riders are not necessarily anti-capitalist, nor are they attempting to exit market relations altogether. Marx himself was clear that capitalism is not escaped through individual moral choices. Yet he was equally clear that contradictions emerge at the level of practice. Systems reveal their limits where they fail to fully subsume human activity. Tracklocross occupies such a limit. It is not outside capitalism, but it is imperfectly integrated into its dominant value regimes.
Importantly, tracklocross also complicates the Marxian notion of labour alienation. In platform-mediated cycling, alienation occurs when riders relate to their activity primarily through its external representations. The ride becomes something to be evaluated after the fact, through dashboards and comparisons. Tracklocross short-circuits this process. Because representation fails to capture what matters, the rider is pushed back toward immediate experience. Meaning is re-internalised, not as a romantic return to authenticity, but as a practical necessity.
This does not make tracklocross a revolutionary practice. Its scale is too small, its effects too local, its resistance too quiet. But Marx never argued that all resistance must be total or systemic. He recognised that capitalism is sustained through everyday practices, and that its contradictions are lived before they are theorised. Tracklocross exemplifies a form of resistance that operates not through refusal of participation, but through refusal of abstraction.
In this sense, tracklocross can be read as a modest reassertion of use-value against exchange-value. It insists that riding can matter without being productive, comparable, or optimised. It demonstrates that not all effort needs to be justified through accumulation, and not all value needs to circulate. Within a system increasingly defined by capture, metrics, and platforms, this insistence is quietly political.
To ride fixed off-road is not to overthrow capitalism. It is to momentarily inhabit a different valuation regime, one in which meaning is generated through use rather than exchange, through presence rather than representation. Marx helps us see why this matters, not because tracklocross confirms his theory, but because it reveals, in mud and cadence, the ongoing tension between lived activity and the systems that seek to own its meaning.
Fiefdom Tracklocross 
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