Aik Kramer

The streets are relatively safe to ride, but any group larger than three has its own dynamic. At that point there are only two ways you can turn. Up or down.

Evening falls. W rides his board on a concrete slab through the park. Three lamp posts down the path two girls stand like amateur hookers. Some primitive force crawls up his spine and sends his attention through the bushes where he sees three young predators lurking in the dark. Make no mistake - this is no time to be a hero. W remembers one of the few lesson that stuck by him from high school - there is no free lunch unless you are the lunch.   Read more...

Eating alien babies. Dorothy liked the Chinese restaurant very much. The buzzing conversations, the carefully contrived atmosphere of oriental chic. Plus, there’s that waiter that looks like Christian Bale. But she always thought that doing dim sum was like eating alien babies. Cute little monsters that sliver down your throat.

‘My life is effectively over.’ Millie fishes for martian shrimp and is having somewhat of a quarterlife crisis. ‘Today I had a job interview. I think they googled me and found the party pictures my ex-boyfriend posted on facebook, because they had this disgusted look on their faces. It could have been arrogance, I’m not sure. There was this woman, I swear, with the characteristics of a sweatshop manager. She asked me what music I liked to listen to and I just panicked.’   Read more...

Waves of information overload the senses. Awkward truths encourage many to get comfortably numb. Then technology lands us in a strange place, some off-beat world, where legislators sit stunned into silence as the whole of society turns itself upside down.

Now we think sideways and sort by opportunity. We talk in metaphors, because the source-code for public discourse has been hijacked by fanatics. There are no procedures for these circumstances, no maps for these territories. A mediated reality has infused us with simultaneously a sense of loss and a sense of excitement. It is as though the moment has gripped us and won’t let go.   Read more...

Rent-a-cop runs but has all the odds against him as W pushes off for extra speed, then pops his tail and plants his skateboard on the handrail. Backside smithgrind, slightly tweaked. Rent-a-cop sees a combination of private and public transgressions. W thanks his predecessors for sanding off the skatestoppers. As the board slides, the trucks grind and sends up a beat. Too bad there’s no fisheye to capture this. Sponsors pay good money for close encounters.

Curve corner, clear gap and he’s back on track. Some claimed that his reputation as a skateboarder would flip into a disadvantage in the field. But group dynamics are tricky to ride. You need image of self, or at least a cloke.   Read more...

The crowd surges, hands grazing for the dreamscape overhead, its pulse locked into the synthesized loop spinning from the dj's drumkit. Dorothy tends bar, gently rejecting pleas for sex and pouring cocktails for comfort. She stares peacefully at a virtual representation of a Mayan witch-doctor dancing across the club in mid air.

For the past few weeks she has been working double shifts. Turns out her course credits are in direct proportion to her bank's. So she skipped this semester’s exams and allowed herself some time to decide on a Master for next year. But it's hard to think that far ahead. It's hard to think past the case which is about to come to justice or which might boomerang around the corner and stop her dead.   Read more...

I walk the path of a warrior and settle on enemy ground. Take on their color, logic and language. Dance with their daughters. Make notes in the dark. Daylight comes early and breathes life into the apartment. The sun casts a nostalgic glow on the books as they stand row upon row upon row. The harddrive hums attentively, hosting a fresh batch of downloads. Sleeping in the apartment is like crashing in an airport holding room. Ghosts of globalization drifting in and out.

I wake to the sound of thunder as the DINKIES upstairs throw their morning fit. The one advantage to freelancing is that it strips life to its core disciplines, my morning ritual now burned into my physiology. It is as though I am released into the day from a deep stage of hypnosis, my subconscious mind fully functional as my conscious mind still searches for a point of recognition.   Read more...

There's a thin line between action figure and father figure. And when it comes to kicking fatherly ass, Steven Seagal is your daddy. Off-screen he is an actual Aikido sensei, the first Gajin to open a dojo in Japan. He tests his students with the famous three man attack.

If we follow Seagal we learn that for young men anger and sometimes aggression are perfectly natural things. But they have been pushed to the edges of what we call civilization. It's great to want to be civilized, but what about the impulse? Violence dominates the media and we seem to have projected all our darkest urges onto 'the bad guy'. Only there are no protectors, no heroes, no rolemodels. Some critics complain that young men have lost their manhood. Have we no anger? Are we not men? What is a man? This lack of definition seems to be at the core of our current existential crisis. Let me answer that question, bluntly and honestly, the way real men do.   Read more...

In Japan, the phenomenon of total self-isolation has become so common that it now has a name: hikikomori. The international media report of an ‘epidemic’ and estimate the number of sufferers - typically men in their twenties - at 1.2 million. That’s 1 per cent of the population! Hikikomori refuse to leave their room, completely disconnect themselves from their environment and usually flee into the digital world, where they are masters of the universe. It seems that in the twenty-first century information overload has become physical reality for some.

Hikikomori could also be described as an extreme variant of what is known in the West as a ‘quarter-life crisis’, where individuals refuse to commit themselves to a specific goal amidst all the possibilities that a globalized world has to offer. We smoke pot and play videogames, Hikikomori play videogames. Quite often, they do so professionally, looking after our avatars while we -Westerners- reluctantly go to work. Japanese possess an honest and enviable attitude to work. They either do the work or they don’t. They either connect with each other by committing themselves to a common goal or they don’t.   Read more...

Indeed, we're hipsters. Critical consumers. Concerned global citizens. Gadget freaks. Into wellness. Fast learners. Flexible workers. Each of us a little unit of subculture, capable of generating powerful trends with a few taps on the keyboard. And it gets even better, because we're human beings too!

Why? Today's twentysomethings are a breed apart. We managed to clear the trap of post-modernism and seem to have moved to the next level of personal development. Bypassing the Achievement so sought after by our parents, we go directly for what is really important (to us): fulfillment. Whether it's through a diet of Ritalin and videogames or dedicated idealism, fulfillment of our human needs is the focus of Generation Why.   Read more...