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@h2o
Will Self wrote an article expressing, in his peculiar way, how fixed wheel bikes were the antithesis of the passive, automated, utterly dehumanising and stultifying culture of the motor vehicle.
Iain Marshall wrote an article in which he pointed out that front brake+fixed wheel = road legal (more or less), and offered some basic, but accurate advice on the perils of running too low or too high a gear.
Both of them wrote article for mass-market papers which probably count a large number of non-cyclists amongst their readers (but yet still try to offer cycling-specific content).
Of course, neither of them captured the whole of it. They couldn't. They didn't have enough word count and weren't involved enough in the actual scene.
Which basically goes to prove: if you want something true to what you believe the scene to be, don't read the mass media. Read something niche written by someone who knows it well.
Accept that the mass media will always be superficial and will often be wrong.
But be grateful that some of those who write for the mass media have gone to an effort to portray the subculture in a sympathetic way, and try to support them in that.
It's not like either of them called for cyclist registration numbers, mandatory back brakes or compulsory helmets. They said how much riding fixed fascinated them, not how it appalled them.
Be reasonable, basically.