You’ve seen the meme, the evolution of man from chimpanzee to smartphone user, the latter turning around and with refined Homo sapien cynicism informing his simian ancestors that the future had let them down and they were better off back in the trees. Now, put a single-fin under the arm of the guy doing the U-turn and you’ve got yourself a pretty good metaphor for surfing today. Surfers have seen the future and are fleeing from what it’s becoming, fleeing back to surfing values from another time, eschewing their Darwinist obligation to surf faster, bigger, better, instead surfing cooler… impossibly cooler in some cases. But will this rebirth of cool and an obsession with surfing that’s already happened create a feedback loop where surfing will eventually devour itself, unwriting its…
