📝 pt. 2, weeks 1-10. setting the whole project into perspective.
hello! welcome. this photo i took roughly 24 hours after departing when i wasn’t feeling so great about the whole thing and i think you can tell from my face that this was the case.
Woah. Been a while. My first post about being on the road again. And it’s a long one. Oh, how happy I am that you’re here. You know what I think you should do? Grab a drink when you read this. You might not even finish it, that’s how long it is. But then at least you’ll have finished something: your drink. As always, I’ve tried hard to make reading it worth your time. Sometimes I give you some songs to accompany your reading- and viewing experience. Some book tips, that sort of thing. And generally, I recommend you to read these things on a laptop or tablet. So much more comfortable. There are some practical things I share in the end, like some questions for you, something about a book club in the Netherlands, a winter jacket and… yeah. You’ll see. Enjoy. <3, seb.
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OOoooOoo yeah, here we go, on the road again with a healed shoulder and around 15000 kilometers staring me in the face. It's been 3 months now since I’ve departed and I wonder whether you’ve thought of me. Not in any kind of attention-seeking way, just a kind of sweet wondering of how much this project is still on people’s minds, you know? I've been working on this project so long that perhaps by now it’s lost some of its specialty or relevance? Or the more humble realization might be that it was never that special to begin with (admittedly it really isn’t, plenty of white boys cycling halfway across the globe with the goal “to find themselves” or something lofty like that). I just want you to realize though that when I left home the first time in August 2024, I planned to be in India (still India then) in 9 (!) months, and it’s been almost 2 years now, and I still have more than 1 year to go. What a spectacular miscalculation and what a miracle the project is still alive.
Maybe now it’s time to turn on your speakers and start playing the song I linked. It’s pretty and I think it somehow fits. Anyways, I know I am not forgotten, because 📝🔗on my last post about my concussion and recovery period, a handful of you left some really meaningful responses: Vidar, Atys, Avril, Charlie, Andree. I especially liked how Andree connected the dangerous idea of “the big solo adventure to discover the world” to colonialism and toxic masculinity: “to put your name on the map, isn’t it the perfectly manly thing to do? Won’t everyone be so proud of us?” Traveling is also the perfect form of running away, because it allows you to experience "progress” and “growth” by sheer virtue of moving through different places without having to do any emotive introspection. Vidar added this quote from Seneca almost 2000 years ago: "Are you surprised, [...] that after such long travel and so many changes of scene you have not been able to shake off the gloom and heaviness of your mind? You need a change of character rather than a change of climate. Though you may cross vast spaces of sea, [...] your faults will follow you wherever you travel. [...] Do you ask why such flight does not help you? It is because you flee along with yourself." (Seneca, Letters to Lucillus, XXVIII)
Whether you remember the project or not is ultimately not of big importance. Luckily for me, I write these texts equally for you as I write them for me. Just like how making a book review forces me to wrestle with the ideas a book puts forward and to make them mine (there are now 15 videos about books up on my social media pages), writing these texts forces me to reflect on what I’ve gone through. Kind of like journalling, but then on a meta-level, squeezing an arc of 3 months in a small blog post like this one.
When I was texting with Fleur, who has translated lots of my English blog posts into Dutch and who wants to ask you something about a book club at the end of this blog post, she mentioned she had not been following my social media at all because she doesn’t want to be on Instagram. Immensely applaudable and impressive, obviously, but it also means she’s missed out on so much cool stuff that has happened over on the Instagram. And she isn’t alone in being absent from my shenanigans over on my @sebbiebikes page, I know for a fact that there’s a lot of you who are cool enough as to warrant not having social media accounts. It was a reminder that equally important as that Instagram page… is this blog! And I give a little apology to those who only rely on my website for updates, because, well, being on the road for 3 months without having posted anything about it isn’t a great track record. But it doesn’t mean nothing has happened. On the contrary. Let me set you straight again, with a special focus on the first few weeks. Why dwell on the first few weeks specifically? Because, through their difficulty, they set the whole project in perspective.
the surprising wisdom of “go outside and touch some grass” - a little excursion on our tendency to overcomplicate our psychic workings.
It shouldn’t be a secret by now that my second departure came with mixed feelings. Or… mixed? Is that the right word? No, not entirely. After spending months recovering from my accident and working very hard to save enough money together to finance the rest of the trip, leaving for the second time was actually strikingly unpleasant. Not at all this vast sense of anticipation before the start of (another) grand adventure one is, I think, supposed to feel. No, I immediately missed my mom, my best friends, the ferries running across the river IJ and the glister on the water when you cross the Amstel river while cycling on Sarphatistraat in Amsterdam. I missed driving my favorite bus lines (22, 35, 62) in the dark while getting entranced by a musical 🔗mix like this on empty Amsterdam streets and then coming home to my colorful little 10m2 room filled to the brim with trinkets and carefully ponder which of my three different types of incense sticks I would light before going to bed. I missed serving my house mates the infamous 🔗tofu scramble and I can continue for plenty longer with many other things I realized I missed when I was in the German ICE train transporting myself away from my loved ones.
But the fact was: I was choosing for this to happen. A lot of questions came at me at once: why am I really doing this? Am I ready? Do I have a massively inflated ego? What if I don’t want to share my life and thoughts for the whole wide world to see? What if the toll is too big on me? These thoughts came and went just as the German, Swiss and Italian countrysides appeared in my view and disappeared again. In less than 24 hours I was in Genova, Italy and I met my beloved Pietro for a night and spilled my heart out. I admitted to him I perhaps wasn’t doing so well and I wanted to disappear into some remote place for a while to gather my thoughts. Caring as he is, he suggested to bring me to a place some hour north of where he lived, to a mountain hut where he’d go as a boy, trampling around the grassy fields. The idea of it brought me to tears and that surprised me. I guess I really was tired, wasn't I?
We like to think of ourselves as infinitely complicated beings whose psychological workings are so mysterious and sophisticated that there’s no way we can even understand ourselves. As in, when I feel like shit, I tend to stretch that feeling over the indefinite future, reconciling with my newfound reality that this is how I’ll live the rest of my life. I overthink all the wrong choices that have led me to this point and I conclude that there is simply too much work to do on myself and I feel even more sad and deflated than before. And I think this points to something very interesting in how we conceive of ourselves. Somehow I feel that this way of thinking unintentionally gives complete primacy to our brains, assuming that they are the center of our experience in the world. Even the center of experiencing ourselves. My close friend Stijn recommended a book to me a long time ago and I’ve finally read it, called 🔗The Spell of the Sensuous by David Abram. It doesn’t neatly fit into a “reading list on borders” but it’s one of the most influential books I’ve read in a long time. Humans are not our brains, we are sensuous beings who are exceedingly suited to perceiving the world using our five senses, and as such cannot ever only reside in our brains. No eyes or ears and what would our minds have to ponder? The body is a smart organism with an intelligence of its own. A. body that receives, reacts, has an instinct, communicates.
Following this is an affirming conclusion: things can also be a lot more straightforward than our brains like to make us think. Turns out that when you turn off your phone for a few days in a row, sleep a lot, spend time in nature, do conscious breathing, write in your journal and eat proper food, you are likely to feel, at least a little bit, better. I ended up spending about a week camped close to this mountain hut of Pietro’s childhood and when I left the hut I again actually felt sort of ready for my adventure. Not entirely, but also not entirely un-ready.
cycling along the north-western coast of Italy this person sat contemplating the sea and I felt represented by the image
stuckness and the violence inflicted upon migrants by wasting their time
So, on I went, to my first major stop: Ventimiglia. A big goal of this cycling project is obviously to rethink “migration”. I’m able to move across the globe without much bureaucratic effort, picking up visa-on-arrivals along the way, getting myself all the way to Japan with relative ease. This situates me in the movement of millions of people doing the exact same, but whose experiences vastly differ from mine: their movement being declared “illegal” and thus suitable for punishment. While last time I cycled through the Balkans, spending time with No Name Kitchen at the Bosnian/Croatian border, and at the Bulgarian/Turkish border, this time I would expose myself to the Mediterranean sea border and share my learnings and reflections with you. Take a look at my route on the map to see how it differed from the first time.
No Name Kitchen has, as one of their eight bases scattered across Europe, a base located in Ventimiglia, a coastal border town between France and Italy. The five volunteers welcomed me, offered me food, a bed and a shower, and then it was time to get to work. Ventimiglia was a strange place. Crossing from Italy into France was almost impossible. There were 3 options:
the train: in every train there are border guards that racially profile everybody in essentially every train and kick you out before the train gets to France
the highway: same procedure, the border guards seem to racially profile car drivers and cars
the hiking route: passes multiple military checkpoints, and once arrived in Menton (France) the police is immensely strict with picking out people who look like they don't have the right papers.
But, next to those people making their way further, Ventimiglia is also a “stuck” place. A place where people, after having undergone the difficult illegalized migration journey, tend to pause for, or stop entirely (I’m still so impressed when somebody tells me they “illegally” entered Europe because it’s just so immensely difficult and dangerous and you need such a wide range of skills to traverse it successfully). In Ventimiglia the violence of bureaucratic procedures that ostensibly seem designed to waste people’s time became clear to me. I spoke to Abdul Zahir, a guy a bit younger than me who came from Afghanistan to Denmark when he was 11. He went to school in Denmark, got a job, a house, a girlfriend, and then, in the snap of a finger, the Danish government decided not to renew his residency permit and suddenly he was declared “illegal”. Denmark has essentially stopped giving out permanent residency permits to people like him, a move that The Netherlands and other European nations are now also starting to do. And it’s funny, because the language of borders sounds so clean and abstract but put into different words the violence of these systems becomes very explicit: these changing rules mean that some people live their entire lives knowing that at any moment it can all be ripped away from them. You can be tossed out at any point, certainty is not granted to you. So Abdul Zahir, along with Afghans across Europe, came to Italy to ask for protection there, since Italy is still relatively lenient towards Afghans (for the time being).
Man, the rage I feel. The utter disrespect of wasting somebody’s time like that. Imagine your life continuing in a place that you cannot return to. Your colleagues going to work with somebody who has now replaced you and you can’t return because if you return, you’ll be temporarily put into prison and thrown out again. This is the reality of our world in 2026 and it’s what Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor describe in End Times Fascism as the increasing trend of seeing the nation-state like a massive gated community: “to ethnically cleanse the bunkered nation of the people they blame for their troubles; to stockpile resources seized from other nations to survive the coming turmoil; and to fortress national borders against the coming Black and brown hordes” (page 28). By the way, an absolutely harrowing book with a disappointing final 2 chapters, might talk about it in a video or a blog post later. PS: let’s follow each other on 🔗TheStorygraph so we can see what books we are reading! It’s like GoodReads but then not owned by Amazon.
Back to the before-mentioned three ways to cross from Ventimiglia (Italy) to Menton (France). Together with another volunteer of No Name Kitchen we decided to hike the route across the hills which people take who don’t have permission to cross with train or car because they were born in the wrong place. Along the route, we stumbled upon plenty of artifacts that people left behind as they progressed: a very recent train ticket (somebody had tried that route but clearly didn't succeed), shoes, suitcases. I turned it into a video that you can watch (do pause the music though or it becomes a mess).
And here I want to briefly stop and reflect on the work that No Name Kitchen does. The team of five was there, in Ventimiglia, to mostly “be there” with whoever found themselves stuck there. In the current moment that seems to be a lot of Afghans whose time is wasted by endless bureaucratic procedures, pushed out of different European countries, looking to now get papers in Italy. The NNK team cooks for about 80-100 people every Saturday and distributes the food, and while that's ongoing, has conversations with whoever is there. In that way, it’s able to know what’s happening on-the-ground, thanks to the relationships the team has with the people. It's all relatively improvised, the whole presence of No Name Kitchen in Ventimiglia, but they somehow make it work. Their clothes warehouse is messy, but it's there. Sometimes they accompany people to appointments with government workers to lower the chances of racist attitudes. Sometimes they pay for people's train tickets to nearby villages. They await for people at the train station who were denied the crossing. And a very valuable part of the whole endeavor is that anybody can join No Name Kitchen and come face-to-face with the reality of the border. In that sense, No Name Kitchen is also a vehicle for gaining political consciousness about the reality of Fortress Europe. And you might be supporting that (currently with around €530 per 100km) and I just want to remind you that the people on the field really need the money that’s being deducted every month from your account.
excerpt from my newsletter on May 17th 2026
Even though the days at No Name Kitchen were hard work with little sleep, man, I felt so recharged after leaving. I know I’ve been doing unpaid activism stuff since I became an adult, pouring endless hours into grassroots organizing, fighting for an alternate version of the world, but good Lord, it just gives so much life-force to see people pour their love and attention into a greater cause? The spirit of determination in the team was awesome. This sense of like: we’re here in this random Italian town, together with our Afghan homies, and we’re going to make the best of it, trying in our small ways to fight the unjust border regime by insisting that these Afghans belong here, no matter what the rules say. There’s something really profound about that.
It was also at this point, however, that the meltdowns about my presence on social media (and with this whole project) significantly escalated. On my way to Sicily I stopped in Rome for a few nights where my niece lives, and one evening I confided in her that I was so utterly bored of seeing my face on my social media page all the time. Feeling a real bitterness towards the whole thing. I held a rant, about hyper-individualism, the social media algorithms, “main character syndrome”, and actually, you might’ve read some of my thoughts in one of my newsletters (excerpt linked to the right). Well, that rant resulted in some very fruitful ideas shared by her (thank you, Martha). About the need to “own” my hesitations and somehow incorporate them into the whole public journey, to get a new sense of ownership over the whole thing again. Shared these thoughts with you and you responded lovingly and thoughtfully and I felt encouraged.
a short interlude on switching sebbiebikes away from “Big Tech”
Some words on my slow attempts to switch away from Big Tech, spurred on by Yanis Varoufakis’ book 🔗Technofeudalism. For about a year I’ve been using 🔗Qobuz instead of Spotify, which has been awesome. It pays the artists a whole lot better and it doesn’t invest in AI weapon systems like Spotify does and while their playlist-generation is less sophisticated, it places a lot more emphasis on albums, which I really like. There’s a family plan for €26 which can fit 6 people, so that’s about €4,60 a person. I also just linked you to 🔗TheStorygraph, a non-Amazon alternative to GoodReads. I use 🔗Nextcloud instead of Google Drive, and here’s something great: 🔗switching.software is an overview of popular programs and platforms with open-source or not-for-profit alternatives for them. But now, let me introduce you to 🔗loops.video and “The Fediverse”, which is very relevant to this whole project.
The Fediverse is a collection of platforms that are like Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, YouTube, and Gmail, but then… not owned by Big Tech, and instead it’s decentralized and not-for-profit. These platforms can all communicate with each other, and I find it quite exciting and I want to be part of it. You can watch the little explainer video on 🔗jointhefediverse.net and browse the website of fediverse.info. My main platform has been Instagram (almost 200.000 followers now), so the platform I am interested in is the Instagram alternative of: 🔗loops.video. The video quality is lower than Instagram to save on costs and data center usage, but I’m happy to be a part of it. It also means that I can start incorporating videos from loops.video on these blog posts instead of having to upload them separately to YouTube to incorporate them here, like I did above. And the people who stay away from Big Tech could potentially also follow me on there to get all of my videos. Because you see, perhaps 10% of things I upload to Instagram I actually cover on these blog posts. There’s a whole part to this campaign that you miss out on if you’re not on Instagram. I guess especially in the coming months, going into Iran and Afghanistan, you might like to follow me more real-time and closely. So, yeah, there you have it. And: if there’s anybody of you who might have time to help me upload my catalog of videos onto there so it’s all gathered on there, reach out and let me know. I’d like to start posting as soon as possible, but I want to be up-to-date first.
Anyways, back to the journey. I have arrived in Sicily and I’m now on a “Search and Rescue” ship.
the ship that shouldn’t exist: working on a ship that plucks people out of the Mediterranean sea
Time for the next song. Enjoy.
I think it’s good to realize that a lot of the things we do really don’t need to be done. What? I mean that in two ways. Firstly in the way of Graeber’s ‘bullshit jobs’ essay (skip the book, the essay gets the point across too). You know, jobs like corporate lawyers or stock market investors or PR experts or telemarketers that take up people’s time without having much of a tangible positive result on the world, if any at all. And then the layer of dog walkers and house cleaners and pizza deliverers and bus drivers that enable the people who are busy doing pointless stuff to keep going. As Graeber puts it: “Huge swathes of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul.” But secondly, a lot of the things we, as people on the left, do, really also shouldn’t need to be done. It’s deeply absurd that I’ve spent 7 years of my life fighting for us to remain alive on this planet of ours. Why is it something we have to fight for? Jesus christ. And actually, so much work of NGOs shouldn’t need to be done. What do you mean Tata Steel shouldn’t put cancer chemicals into the air and into the soil? Isn’t that obvious? (it reminds me of Robin, the 9-year old child in the novel ‘🔗Bewilderment’ by Richard Powers. Robin looks at ecological devastation with such a sober and clear-sighted view that the whole situation of the world becomes rather absurd).
The pointlessness of what we do gets very palpable when you’re spending an entire day de-rusting a metal panel on a rusty repurposed fishing ship that only exists to take people in flimsy boats out of the Mediterranean sea who shouldn’t be there to begin with, which is what I did when I worked with “Sea Punks” in Sicily. With a few strokes of a pen we could make it so that these people on flimsy boats would be able to board planes from Algiers or Bafoussam or Cairo to places like Düsseldorf or Eindhoven or Florence. But we don’t. And so, people in Europe set out onto the ocean to “rescue” people (even that term I somehow feel ambiguous about, but I won’t get into it here). To me, the whole situation is remarkably stupid. And the whole operation of “search and rescue” not entirely innocent, either. In “🔗Whites, Jews, and Us” Houria Bouteldja writes about “the white immune system” as a collection of ways in which “white people” feel better about themselves while continuing to profit from a deeply unjust world order where profits flow to (among others) the countries of Western Europe. Humanitarianism is one of those mechanisms of the white immune system: “you [‘white people'] are the most sensitive to Africa’s “under-development”. Didn’t you pour tons of rice into that continent of misery? […] You are the most involved in humanitarian causes. Didn’t you sing for Africa?” (pages 43-44). Europeans get to go out at sea and be good humanitarians and rescue people who shouldn’t need to be rescued while the reasons these people are leaving their birthplaces remain relatively unchanged. We get to play the heroes in a situation of misery we ourselves create and uphold.
Thus, the world of “search and rescue (SAR)” slots into the territory of discomfort for me. I was struck by a deep sense of sadness at the pointlessness of my effort, and the efforts of the ten to twelve people who were on the ship with me. Some of these “search and rescue” organizations are also remarkably apolitical, refusing to mention, for example, anything of the escalated genocide happening on the shores of the Mediterranean onto the Palestinians until only recently (as far as I can tell, SOS Humanity posted something about Palestine 2 years after the genocide accelerated, on 🔗October 14th, 2025). For the purposes of exaggeration (I don’t actually fully think this) we can read the situation in a very bad light: German people (there are just a lot of Germans in the SAR world) who, by virtue of being born with the German passport, profit from global inequality, fly to Sicily and spend a few weeks fixing up an old ship and go home with a satisfied sense of “having done their duty” and might not even engage with any meaningful politics in their home town. OK, this is a cynical view of the situation, but also not one totally disconnected from reality.
A crew member at Sea Punks took three flights from Germany (it was cheaper) to Sicily to help on the ship, and for some of the people on board, upon asked about their motivation, told me they merely “wanted to do something good”. Again, this is not inherently evil, but it slots so easily into the “humanitarian paradigm” which we so desperately need to escape from. What we need is revolution, not an apolitical pressure release valve offered by humanitarianism to upkeep this global system of looting for the benefit of the Global North (check out 🔗The Divide by Jason Hickel). Looking at the media presence of some (not all!) of these organizations, any systemic critique on the whole system (the E.U., capitalism, border regimes, imperialist structures) is… absent. And this made me feel… queasy. I would hope that these organizations use the attention they get from what they do to engage in the broader political arena, like Smucker argues in his “🔗Hegemony How-To” book. To agitate, push the political discourse further. The primary goal of these organizations should be to abolish themselves because they have become unnecessary. Presently, I wonder if some of them don’t work to maintain and legitimize this situation, potentially also because some people in the organizations derive their livelihoods from it.
All of these thoughts were going through my head in my short 1.5 weeks on board of the Sea Punk I. But it wasn’t like I think it’s all bad. It’s complex! Here’s the part that breaks my brain, and I’m looking for input, so what are your thoughts on this: funding? The situation is such that there are people on the sea who drown. Tens, if not hundreds of thousands in the past decade. If there are no “search and rescue” ships, more people will drown: the more ships are on the sea, the less people will drown. The more politically outspoken organizations are, the more difficult it is to get funding, and funding is what allows them to be on the sea in the first place. That’s the logic, at least the logic that was presented to me. Do you agree? I’ve got questions, namely the assumption that speaking out more radically would reduce donations (UK’s Labour and the USA’s Democratic Party lost partially because they were not outspoken enough). But, yeah, I don’t know, I’ll leave it there for now. Please do share your thoughts because as you can read, I struggle.
sticking to my promise to no longer do the whole total self-sacrifice thing
Departed from the ship, still thankful for the whole experience.
Travel tip: make sure you plan in periods of nothingness between periods of intensity.
You know how, in my last blog post, I made this big declaration of:
“This project is no longer priority number one.
I have become priority number one.”
Yeah, well, I’m really trying to stick to that. After some challenging time on board the ship (apart from political doubts the group dynamics were also odd but I can’t be bothered to dive into that) I could choose to continue straight to Greece, but I didn't. Instead, I found this strip of forest next to a beach and set up my tent in it and stayed there for 5-6 nights. Absolutely chilling. Even had a full (!) phoneless day, which, as a boy who started (addictively) playing video games from the age of 10 and whose brain has thus kind of merged with computers and phone screens, is kind of a big thing. Yeah, it was wonderful. Really. I called some of my close friends (I’ve been a relatively good boy in keeping up with them), called my parents, did a lot of journalling, and pledged to plan in these kinds of moments in between periods of intensity. Recharged, I set off to Greece.
I’m trying to do the whole trip (back-and-forth) without flying, but I am also not rich, as evidenced by the fact that I sold my body to medical research in order to finance the whole thing. Trains are expensive so I figured to send the press team of Interrail an email. They agreed to send me a free pass in return for some small promotion on my page. I asked if the promotion could be political, they tentatively said yes. This is the video that came out, I’m quite proud of it. I haven’t heard from them, which I assume is a good sign?
my lunch in an amazing short train taking me into Athens
am i a tourist? am i wanted in Athens or would Athenians rather have me gone?
super applicable book to a place like Athens
I stepped out of the train in an Athens train station and in the first few minutes of cycling through the city I was hit with the realization that it’s like Beirut (Lebanon) but perhaps a little more organized. This is a huge compliment to Athens since the streets of Beirut possess some sort of magic and aliveness and I’m certainly not the only one who’s saying that. For those of you who haven’t had the pleasure of visiting Athens, I hope that one day you will. I say this to you, a niche leftist audience who, I assume, actually wants to engage with the city, its history and its politics instead of bolstering the crushing homogenizing force of tourism that makes every city feel the same. Because, you’ll walk around Athens and be greeted with plenty of posters proclaiming things like “tourists, get out” and you’ll feel quite guilty. I certainly did. But I think there are ways to be in the city and engage with it which aren’t evil and can actually bring funds from Western Europe into communities hit hardest by the intense waves of austerity put upon the Greek people, which was done mostly in benefit of banks in Central and Western Europe. You can contribute funds or labour to the Prosfygika squat, support groups like 50 Out Of Many, or check out Kinimatorama and visit one of the many events.
It was during this time that I started to read some Varoufakis and watched the 6-part documentary about what actually happened to Greece in 2015’s eurocrisis focussed around Varoufakis (I bought the documentary but I can share the login with you if you want, send me an email or text message). The usual pattern of state debt being used as a way to control countries in the Global South was now applied to Greece as well. A lot of the country was stripped off and sold to foreign investors to pay off the debt, which, in turn, saved Western European banks. This is a simplified version of reality but it is in essence what happened.
"There are two ways to conquer and enslave a country. One is by the sword. The other is by debt." John Adams, taken from “The Divide” by Jason Hickel.
Knowing this, and being in Greece, and hearing how Athens was changing, was rough. Chinese, Turkish, and Israeli investors were buying up all sorts of property: apartment complexes, houses, harbors, and it was changing the character of the city without the citizens of Athens having any voice in it. A follower hosted me (thank you, once again) and took me to a discussion evening about gentrification in a working class neighborhood. The citizens complained they had no agency over how their city looked like: how did the new buildings look like? Who would live there? What would the prices be? All of this was beyond the control of those who actually lived in these neighborhoods, and this is what happens when capital reigns supreme. Power lays not with the people but with those who have sufficient capital to bend the world to their will. They get free game. And we’ve got all sorts of systems set up to make that so! Buying up property is fully legal before the law even though it often has disastrous consequences on the communities living there and the state works to make sure the rules of the game stay in place, ultimately by using violence.. It’s actually one of the state’s main functions. Of course, this isn’t the most original of critiques of states that one can give; it’s a rather basic premise of anarchist thought. But, still, seeing it happen so viscerally in Athens, being in that neighborhood meeting with ages ranging from 10 to 80, I don’t know, it hit differently.
As if the city of Athens wanted to make sure I got the point, we also stumbled into a protest by the Albanian community against the ludicrous Kushner resort. Rich man buys up beloved island and there’s nothing people can really do about it apart from making it clear to the world that they never consented. The flamingoes never gave consent, either.
When we’ve got the whole loops.video thing up and running, you should go back and watch a few of the videos I made there in Athens. One about the fact that the infamous Prosfgygika squatting project will keep existing (for now) and that it needs helping hands, another about the changing character of Athens, especially after lots of ‘Israeli’s’ are increasingly buying up property there, and one about an organization supporting criminalized Sudanese people who cross the sea. I stayed only 3 nights but man, Athens was wonderfully intense.
exciting news: a documentary will eventually appear about this whole cycling project
By this time, I had started to settle in to the whole project again and the endless thoughts of self-doubt receded. Not fully, but enough to find video making fun again. I was making videos about topics that didn’t feature myself, and this felt good. I noticed that people increasingly enjoyed watching them, too. My page was doing well, I was leaving Europe, and it was time to start doing the thing I set out to do: cycling. This is where finally the narration of this blog post will speed up, I’m honestly impressed you’re still reading these words. Thanks. After Athens I took a ferry to Samos, stayed there for a week with a friend of MiGreat, and set off to cycle the 2000kms of Turkey (south-west to north-east). Given that this is an El-Nino year, it was hot. But that was alright. I was happy to be on the bike and have my daily task be so straightforward: bike. Get up early (4-5am) and stop early (13-14pm). When you’re cycling that much, there’s no time for silly things like “making videos”, so I mostly have photos to show you from this period, but also not many. The mission to pedal was on.
After a while, I met this Dutch man in a white rental car. Turns out he came all the way to Turkey to film a documentary with me. A film about a boy who grows up in a world that’s dying and who tries his very hardest to prevent that from being so, in this case by stepping on a bike, building a political platform, and fundraising for the freedom to move. That boy being me. And truth be told, having Stefan there was a blessing. Not only because him having a car made grocery shopping easier. His presence allowed me to embody more fully what I believe this project is about: to look darkness in the eyes, emotionally experience what that does to you, and to choose to fight. We were having lots of conversations about hope, resistance, camaraderie, meaning (both on-and-off camera) but also about political strategy and analyses. I could pingpong ideas off of him, and he could help me edit and compile videos. I didn’t really know Stefan before he came. I met him a few times, briefly, and we had been working together for a little bit. He likes the thing which I don’t: to get sent a bunch of scattered footage and distill it into a storyline. So, I’d sometimes pass video ideas to him and we’d work something out together (I try to reimburse him for this effort. It’s another attempt not to overwork myself by outsourcing some of the editing, and, Extinction Rebellion is so gracious as to contribute to this financially as well)
Anyway. It meant I had a car follow me for about 10 days. It meant lots of emotional conversations. Rants. Moments of connection. If he can get the funding together, he’ll see me again in a few months, in Tajikistan, and then again in Vietnam. The end result should be a Dutch documentary, and because I’m quite excited for it, I’ll be sure to keep you updated.
this might have to be it for now and even though you’re not caught up to the present yet a boy has to upload something at some point even when it is unfinished or else you will never hear something from me! - or something along those lines.
Yeah, that seems like a pretty accurate title to me. You know, as you read this I’m already in Armenia, struggling very much to get good enough internet to even work on this blog post update! Which, it turns it, is harder than you’d hope. I think we should finish with some sort of ‘huishoudelijke mededelingen’ (a Dutch term I really like for which there doesn’t seem an apt translation, basically meaning updates that are more practical/logistical in nature).
book club in The Netherlands? 📚
Fleur, the person who translates my posts sometimes and who doesn’t have Instagram, texted me. She asked if I could add this at the bottom of my newsletter. Be careful though, because before you know it, a book club could lead you to spend decades in prison (the US is starting to imprison people part of anarchist book clubs, listen to the 🔗This American Life episode about it)
“Hellohello. This is not Seb writing, but Fleur, a simple follower of our fav radical cyclist. I keep seeing titles of wonderful resources on Seb’s blog and keep meaning to listen to and read them all, yet struggle to get round to it. Relatable? Then maybe… do you want to be part of my anti-border book club? Ideally, I’d like to meet in person, in Utrecht, every two or three months. Hmu on signal: @Fleur.85 Would love to learn together!”
"biking against borders” stickers! 🖨️
The internet can be cool, like when followers Mato reached out and offered to turn the crappy stickers I made in Athens into actually good-looking ones! If you like them, you can print them too through 🔗this link (expires in 30 days). Mato’s instagram is 🔗@mattoka.l. There’s also the Amsterdam Collective “🔗lekker posteren” who’s working on creating a poster to spread around Amsterdam too!
jacket? anyone? 👉👈
Good news: I received my visas for Iran and China now, meaning there’s no more paperwork to be done and it’s just a matter of… cycling. By the way, does anyone have like a really good and warm lightweight puffer jacket I could borrow? With my China visa in the pocket ✅ I can traverse above the Tibetan Plateau, which means thousands of kilometers in nightly temperatures of -20C, and daytime temperatures that often don’t go above 0C. My jacket currently definitely isn’t up to the task, and since Stefan is visiting me for the documentary in Tajikistan, I figured somebody might have a good jacket for me to use that he can bring. Or maybe your boyfriend works at a fancy outdoor shop who wants to sponsor me? I’m open to all ideas which don’t cost me money, hihihi. While we’re at it: a snow-proof tent would be great, too! My current Durston X-Dome 1+ is great, but I don’t think it’ll hold much snow before collapsing.
some crazy sponsor numbers! 👛
The fundraising is going fantastic. 320 (!) sponsors, what a crazy number, isn’t it? To think that so many people put their trust in me and my silly project is very cool, thanks for that. You’re all making up a number of €531 per 100km. And sponsors keep slowly trickling in, I think because you guys are talking about the project? And also because people see it on Instagram? Regardless, MiGreat and No Name Kitchen are really grateful for it all. So thank you!
Bé (they help out with emails!) and me
kilometers for July 🚴
This one is for the sponsors. In July I cycled a record 1691 kilometers. That means a large deduction from your accounts! I hope you are prepared. And as always, if you are uncomfortable with the amount you’re sponsoring (be it too low or too high), just send me an email over at money@sebbiebikes.org. Bé is helping me out with managing the inbox so you might have already talked to them instead of me, though I also sometimes respond, hihi.
MiGreat still doing great work (and getting even better!) 📜
MiGreat has been, just, honestly, fantastic in the recent months. We’re going through an internal reorganization process that makes the whole organization more democratic and horizontal. More importantly though, they’ve been present at the Ter Apel asylum center in The Netherlands, which is constantly overflowing. The Red Cross isn’t particularly useful and MiGreat fills in crucial gaps. The new EU-wide laws that entered into effect on June 12th are… disastrous, and MiGreat wrote a lengthy report on the effects of the new laws on-the-field in Ter Apel. Just an example of the indispensable monitoring work they do. Their new strategy vision is also fantastic, but it isn’t totally finished, so I’ll link it to you in the next newsletter or post.
need a photographer? 🖼️
There’s a chance I won’t finish the journey alone. Sav (who’s very dear to me) is seeing if she can get enough money together to come to Vietnam and cycle the last part with me. It would boost my morale quite a bit. She also happens to be a 🔗phenomenal photographer. If, perhaps, you need a photographer for… anything (party, event, congress, wedding, portrait, idk?), consider her! I’m saying this with total self-interest at heart because I’d love it if she’s able to come to Vietnam with me.
amen. that was it. thank you for reading the whole thing, i'm super curious for your thoughts (as always). i wonder if, at some point, we could reach the magical number of €1.000 per 100km. it would mean we’d have to double the amount we currently have. it would have to be a serious effort from all of us.
also, remember that day i organized at my house? when 150 or 200 people came? maybe we could do another one of those when i’m back. using me as the bait to get people to come, and actually have a full program with all sorts of cool political movements in The Netherlands for people to meet and to join. what do you think? since i’m houseless, maybe we would need to do it at a different location though. OK. whatever. enough now. take good care of yourself, and i’ll see you next time.
<3, seb.
