Screenland
8
Above and opening page: Screen grabs from YouTubegenerating on-the-scene narration for
viewers at home: ‘‘Crazy story. You go
to the sauna. You’re relaxing inside. And
the next thing you know, your bike, which
is parked next to you, just gets stolen.
Double- locked, they carried it away.’’ He’s
visibly peeved: This can’t stand. ‘‘Nah.
Let’s fi nd this bike.’’
Welcome to ‘‘Bike Hunters,’’ a You-
Tube series produced by VanMoof, a
Dutch e-bike company. When you buy a
VanMoof , starting at $2,298, you can also
subscribe to a theft-protection package.
If your bike is stolen, VanMoof will either
recover it within two weeks — possibly
by sending Daniel or another ‘‘hunter’’ —
or replace it. Each VanMoof comes with
an electronic tracking system designed
to make it easier to fi nd. I’ve watched
VanMoof’s bike hunters, tracking devices
in hand, traipsing through cities all over
the world — Berlin, San Francisco, Lon-
don, Tokyo — following signals to street
corners, basements, scrap-metal sites and
tent cities. (The series bumps up against
urban poverty and homelessness, but
tends to restrict itself to thinking about
them in terms of bike security.) Often the
hunters themselves cruise from clue to
clue on VanMoofs, showing off the bikes’
sleek design and the benefi ts of giving
your pedaling an electronic boost.
Sometimes the hunters fi nd the bike
chained up — or parked in a specialized
structure that may, to American viewers,
look like something from another world
— and liberate it with a power cutter.
Sometimes they confront the bike’s new‘‘owner,’’ always possibly the thief himself,
but perhaps just someone who got a deal
they might have known was too good to
be true. (‘‘I bought it for 10 euros,’’ one
man says, shrugging.) Whatever happens,
the story is told in the grammar of real-
ity TV. Quick-cut montages boil hours
of searches and stakeouts down to mere
minutes, backed by techno music that
makes the hunts feel consistently adrenal-
ized. The hunters speak in narrative beats:
‘‘Let’s fi nd this bike.... We were waiting
for this bike to move, and it just moved.... We have to go right now!’’
In Stockholm, Daniel and Ludo follow
the tracker signal to a group of apartment
buildings. As they interview residents,
Daniel picks up ‘‘super tense’’ energy
from a man who runs off before they can
Photo illustration by Max-o-matic‘I bought
it for 10 euros ,’
one man says,
shrugging.2.27.