boredom is always counter-revolutionary

Amsterdamers!

The asphault terror of the motorized bourgeoisie has lasted long enough. Human sacrifices are made daily to this latest idol of the idiots: car power. Choking carbon monoxide is its incense, its image contaminates thousands of canals and streets.

PROVO’S BICYCLE PLAN will liberate us from the car monster. PROVO introduces the WHITE BICYCLE, a piece of PUBLIC PROPERTY.

The first white bicycle will be presented to this Press and public on Wednesday July 28 at 3pm near the statue of the Lieverdje, the addicted consumer, on the Spui.

The white bicycle is never locked. The white bicycle is the first free communal transport. The white bicycle is a provocation against capitalist private property, for the white bicycle is anarchistic.

The white bicycle can be used by anyone who needs it and then must be left for someone else. There will be more and more white bicycles until everyone can use white transport and the car peril is past. The white bicycle is a symbol of simplicity and cleanliness in contrast to the vanity and foulness of the authoritarian car. In other words:

A BIKE IS SOMETHING, BUT ALMOST NOTHING!

From the Dutch Provos, 1965. Stewart Home reports on the success of this move in his Assault on Culture:

The PROVOS hatched a series of ‘white plans’, as solutions to ecological and social problems facing the city, and which simultaneously acted as ‘provocations’ to the Dutch authorities. Among the more famous of these was the ‘White Bicycle Plan’. The PROVOS announced in a leaflet that white bicycles would be left unlocked throughout the city for use by the general population. The prototype of this ‘free communal transport’ was presented to the press and public on 28th July 1965 near the statue of Lieverdja. The plan proved an enormous success as a ‘provocation against capitalist private property’ and ‘the car monster’, but failed as a social experiment. The police, horrified at the implications of communal property being left on the streets, impounded any bicycle that they found left unattended and unlocked.

Its interesting how this gesture reappears forty years later – although funded by advertising and most certainly not ‘public property’ – in Paris’ Velib scheme, which also became a much-vaunted proposal from most sides during the recent London mayoral elections (I haven’t noticed any mention of it since, though). It was also tried out, I believe, in Cambridge in 1993, but abadoned after all 300 bikes were stolen on the first day. Ironically, it would seem that the measures that have made the Parisian scheme successful are the very regulations that the anarchistic Provos opposed.