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Fink Different: Keyboards as counter-culture.

Oct 6, 20241281 VIEWS

If you watched Star Wars for the first time, without seeing images of the Empire’s perfectly spaced thousands of goose-stepping minions in spotless white-lacquered armor. If you didn’t see the fleets of black and grey tie-fighters, the immaculately designed star cruisers, the evil moon-shaped flagship… you wouldn’t know that the rebels were rebels. After all, rebels don’t look like rebels if they don’t have something to contrast them against. They just look like normal people. That’s probably why when you see Luke Skywalker, Han Solo or Finn (all rebels) dressed in stormtrooper garb, they somehow seem even more rebellious then they were before. It’s not what they’re wearing, it’s how they wear it. Dirty, scuffed, broken. Helmet missing or askew. An out of place, beat up weapon slung diagonally across their body. It’s the simple act of defacing the uniform that identifies them in our mind as counter-cultural.

Funnily enough, it works in reverse. To the dismay of punks worldwide… the greasers of the 1950’s, new wave kids of the 80’s, juggalos of the nineties… all who look uniform and considerably less rebellious when you see them in numbers. In groups their non-conformity becomes a conformity of its own. Despite the fact that the rebels use uniforms in Star Wars, a rebel uniform is practically self-defeating in nature, and probably why the they look so bad. If the rebels were clean and orderly they would not be cool-ass underdogs, they’d just be another, crappier Empire. Splatter paint and Marilyn Monroe Jackson Pollock is an absolute rock star of an artist to me. Making mind-bending large-scale splatter art by dropping paint onto a canvas on the ground (and doing so in Iowa in the 1950’s). All while dressed like a 7th grade biology teacher. Jackson’s appearance was proof that the glamour and boundary-bending outfits of Andy Warhol and his “factory” weren’t necessary to produce shocking, counter-cultural art forms. (Andy after all, made his art on the back of the idea that the boring every day objects were art, and the most iconic personas in our society were just normal people.) Because it’s not what an artist, musician or soldier wears, what they make, or even what they say. It’s what they wear, make and say in CONTRAST to the world around them that makes them rebels. It wasn’t all that long ago that mechanical keyboards were anything but counter-cultural. Mechanical keyboards were the industry standard. The hallmark of mundanity. If you imagined what the hand-cuffs of office labor looked like in the 1980’s and 90’s, you imagined a keyboard. It wasn’t until the idea of the mechanical keyboard faded into obscurity, replaced by today’s hot garbage that parades itself as an office keyboard, the modern chicklet style laptop keyboard, or the all-glass "keyboards" displayed on tablets... that mechanical keyboards, kings of the past, have become more rebellious. That said, it isn’t the act of using a mechanical keyboard that is counter-cultural. A person using a keyboard from the past isn’t truly rebellious. It could be an indicator of many things. Take Jackson Lamb from the hit Apple+ show “Slow Horses,” who uses a 1980’s IBM keyboard covered in crumbs, dirt, and cigarette ash. Using that keyboard might hint that he’s a rebel, but it’s more likely to convey that he’s a dinosaur. An out-of-touch with the modern world, outdated mess.

In the Marvel show Loki, we see plenty of mechanical keyboards used by the mysterious Time Variance Authority (TVA), but as they’re combined with an eclectic and confusing amalgam of technologies, the keyboards become not a rebellion but rather an aesthetic of retro-futurism that labels the organization as one that exists outside of time. Using an old keyboard does not necessarily buck the status quo… but modifying one abso-f-ing-lutely does. It’s the idea of modifying, personalizing or building your own keyboard that sets you in opposition to a world of perfect glass rectangular phones that are edging closer and closer to being illegal to open or service. In a world of tech-conformity, filled to the brim with homogenous UX, standardized power cords, and file types… the idea of personalized tech is inherently rebellious. Kings of Kustoms I’m currently writing another article about the first customized keyboards. The Korean Kustoms of the early 2000’s, and I can’t help but be amused by the use of “k” in kustom. A reference I’m sure to their Korean origin, but also a (probably unknowing) nod to one of the great “kustomizers” of our time… Ed “Big Daddy” Roth. Ed hated Mickey Mouse. I mean, he truly hated Mickey Mouse. Ed was born in Beverly Hills in 1932 and grew up surrounded by images of Disney’s iconic rodent, the very paragon of excellence in animation. As an air-force vet, I imagine Ed sat through countless movie nights featuring Mickey and Disney’s fleet of characters as they defined, night after night, normalcy in animation and American life. Unlike the sexually deviant, violent, and often criminal characters drawn by artists like Warner Brother’s Tex Avery, Disney animators promoted standards of virtue, heroism and hard work in American culture through animation. Deeply influencing western ideas of comedy, wit and normalcy. It was against this image of conformity that Ed created his most famous hand-drawn character, “Rat Fink.” Fink, a green ungainly mess of a creature with grotesque features, sharp teeth, and giant bulging eyes is almost always portrayed hulking over Ed’s truly rebellious creation, the hot rod. While a talented illustrator and artist with a blossoming pin-striping business, Ed was first and foremost an automotive creator. His artistic, one-of-a-kind designed hot rods spat in the face of the largest symbol of homogeny America had ever produced, Henry Ford, and the assembly-line created automobile. It makes total sense then, that as a representation of his in-your-face modified cars would be an Anti-Mickey of sorts, and that’s exactly what Rat Fink is.

Rebels with a cause Customization, by definition, implies that what’s been given is not enough. Not good enough, not personalized enough. Not cool enough. The early days of cell phone jailbreaking had this nailed. It’s not that the base product is bad. In many cases, it’s absolutely fine… for the normies. For those that don’t want to take it further. But if taken far enough, if it gets popular enough… the custom does something insidious. It presents itself alongside the original as a viable alternative. Unique, one-of-a-kind modifications never do this. It’s not their purpose. One-off modifications rather, exist to better the life of one individual by tailoring a product to their needs. My neighbor’s lawn mower with a cup holder mounted on the handle leaps to mind, but like most modifications it's pretty specific. Most folks with a push mower don’t feel the need to have a beverage so easily at hand. That said, many mods become alternatives, and just as many supplant the original. It seems to me that one of the necessities for mods or customs to grow in popularity is that they need to be just as accessible as the original, or even more accessible. For example, jailbreaking worked because it was free and could be executed by anyone with a basic knowledge of computing. So how in the world did Ed Roth become a household name? How can painstakingly imagined and crafted, one-of-a-kind cars become accessible to the public? The answer was Revell models. Revell, an American-founded plastics company made their name in the mid 1940’s and 1950’s creating model trains, military vehicles, and automobiles. According to Wikipedia’s history of Revell “starting in the late 1950s, model kits began to veer away strongly from stock presentations and focus on customizing, hot rodding, and racing. The 1960s solidified this direction with almost infinite variations in how a kit could be built. This trend showed both the extensive new marketing reach of the hobby as well as the pervasive individuality portrayed in American car customizing. Model companies hired big name customizers to create new and striking designs. Just as AMT had hired George Barris and Darryl Starbird, Revell hired Ed "Big Daddy" Roth about 1962 as their new stylist… Roth created the bubble-glassed "Beatnik Bandit" (later made even more famous when produced by Hot Wheels), the double engined "Mysterion", the asymmetrical "Orbitron", the "Outlaw" (a highly styled T bucket), and the "Road Agent". Apart from wheeled wonders, arguably his most famous creation was the "Rat Fink", an anti-Mickey Mouse figure.” To put into perspective how successful Roth's hot rod models were, in 1963 Revell paid Roth 1 cent for every one of his model kits sold and that he was paid $32,000. 3.2 million models is nothing to sniff at.

So, are we cool? What’s interesting to me is that a handful of kustomizers, crafting unique creations, could inspire thousands of like-minded individuals who might not be able to afford the materials or know how to create their own car, but they could buy a model. That produced an interesting dichotomy. Their kustom creations weren’t a true alternative because the modification (a tiny cheap model) couldn’t present itself alongside the original (the buyer’s car). Instead of changing the actual culture, this created a sub-culture, or more accurately because of the rebellious nature of these hot rods, a counter-culture. Today, mechanical keyboards hold onto their counter-culture status through our rebellious prioritization of aesthetics/sound/quality over sleek/slim profiles and dirt-cheap pricing. The fact that mechanical keyboards are becoming more accessible through more and more affordable options means that it’s only time and popularity that can or will drag keyboards back into the mainstream. Until then, we can hold onto our coolness like late nineties Green Day fans. We can do better. All this said, our hobby is still too homogenous in my opinion. I scroll through seemingly endless cookie cutter keyboard videos on Instagram. There’s so much conformity and to be honest, use of keyboards as status symbols. Sure, there’s a thrill of owning a hard-to-find keyboard or expensive grail, but the boards that stop me in my shoes at meet-ups are the truly unique, trend-bucking hot rods. "Vomit" keyboards where every keycap uses a different switch... keyboards built into physical skateboards... 40% and smaller builds that push the boundaries of usability. Perhaps the most prevalent (and one I fall prey to) standard I find is that keyboards need to be “attractive”. I’d personally like to see more scratches, more dents, more grime, more punk. I’m thinking in this direction right now and look forward to sharing some of my creations soon. Not that I have the right of anything, I just want to see more innovation, and I think that sometimes we give “new and shiny” too much credence. A few years back, Bang & Olufsen asked its users to send pics of dents and scratches on their products with the story of how it happened. I don’t know if I ever loved a brand more than I did in that moment. Rather than using their platform to push replacement purchasing, they were celebrating usage. Oh that we might be more forgiving of signs of use in the products we love! Age ain’t kind. Scuffs don’t reduce something’s value unless we allow our perception of value to be skewed by newness. If seen realistically, scratches and dents are a sign of a product’s true value: Usability. As always, I want to kick it back to you. Your comments, thoughts and feedback may this a community space, not just a lecture. Tell us about your collection of counter-culter hot rods. Do your keyboards fit in more with the rebel alliance, or the Empire? Thanks again for giving me this platform to share my thoughts, and remember to keep finding the stories in everything you do.

(Edited)

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1.2K

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Nov 8, 2024

I always hear about people making keyboards and when I read the stories, they only build a keyboard using PCBs or PCB/Materials provided by someone in a kit form. "I built this but used this switch instead." I know a lot of people will hate me for this comment but for me that's not making keebs. That's assembling and modding. Even the word modding feels like too much. And that's because I've read about people really making and modding. People that don't like what's out there and makes the PCB from scratch, planning the position of every switch or the use of this or that microcontroller to make it work based in what they want from it. People that mod by cutting or melting or chemically treating the keycaps or the cases, cutting and mending the PCB, etc. I read about a steampunk guy that used a heated tube to cut the stems from an old IBM keeb keycaps to glue shirt buttons with brass rims to make them look like ancient typewriter keys and making a new case with brass and wood that looked nothing like the original. Now that's modding! Disruptive and rebellious! And that's what made me start making keebs to see how much I can push the boundaries. Not so much at the beginning but I'm improving with time. The very first I made was received with mixed reviews in reddit but I felt so good I keep making them. Disrupt and rebel, mates!! https://www.reddit.com/r/MechanicalKeyboards/comments/164iqaq/i_made_a_30/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

storyboardtech

490

Keyboard Club Member

Nov 13, 2024

AristarcoThis is awesome! Thanks for sharing. I'm totally going to check that out. Have a good one!

Aristarco

209

Nov 8, 2024

"...in 1963 Revell paid Roth 1 cent for every one of his model kits sold and that he was paid $32,000. Thirty-two thousand models is nothing to sniff at." 32K models? If my math is not that dusty and rusty, if paid 1 cent for every kit sold, to get 32 Grand, they sold 3.2 million kits, not 32 thousand. Now, 3.2 million models is nothing to sniff at, not at all!

storyboardtech

490

Keyboard Club Member

Nov 13, 2024

AristarcoThank you! I am deeply math deficient, and you're right. 3.2 million kits is amazing. From his website "Here is a very interesting note: During 1963 Revell paid Ed “Big Daddy” Roth a one cent royalty for each model sold. Ed brought in $32,000 that year in royalties. Now figure out the math. That’s how popular Ed “Big Daddy” Roth creations were."

(Edited)

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KeenKong

Nov 7, 2024

The irony of talking about counter culture artists while using AI "art" is astounding. C'mon Drop, do better.

Bear123

Nov 8, 2024

KeenKongImagine not realizing using AI to make art is counter culture. Try harder.

storyboardtech

490

Keyboard Club Member

Nov 13, 2024

KeenKongHey hey! Don't blame Drop, my guy. Entirely my doing. To be honest, this is the first of my articles where I tested out using AI art, specifically because of its' edgy, boundary-blurring nature. And my desire to not hand-draw or paint an image of Ratt Fink clicking away on a keyboard. Personally, I thought it was funny. I am curious, have you found the use of AI in art to be culturally acceptable or mainstream?

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