Hold Fast, Tweak Hard book preview

01.

“Internet penetration was really, really low at that time, so hardly anyone saw what we were doing. But there were diehards all around the world who picked up on it.�

- Calle Eriksson

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* Calle Eriksson driving his beetle in Stryn, Norway

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*Anders Hagman in Alagna Photo: Calle Eriksson 16

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By Anders Hagman, Method co-founder

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n 1994, a web-based ‘zine, quickly baptized “Method Mag,” sprung out of a bed of four equally important ingredients. One could easily assume our roots grew out of skiing or skateboarding.

However, this would only be looking at the surface. Scratching deeper you find the real factors at work: technology, nature, altruism and art. You also find, from the very beginning, an attempt to define and answer a core question: “How far can we go, from the edge of what we know?”

Whoa, Major Tom! Let’s get down to Earth some! What really went down back in those early days? Well, 25 years ago is a long way back, so it is all a bit hazy, but it did start in a small rural town in the middle of Sweden called Borlänge. It’s a town with a few small ski areas in the surrounding area, and was home to some passionate wanna-be-Yetis, including a pair of geeky young adults who’d met on-slope and had started hanging out together in a two-bedroom apartment: Calle Eriksson (apartment owner) and me, Anders Hagman (leecher).

You can read our bios on page 18.

There was not much special about either of us, apart from an extra string of curiosity hard-wired into our brains and souls. At times this curiosity drove compromises beyond what most would consider fully sane. Our “hanging out” quickly escalated into 16-hour sessions, usually hunched over hot, humming computers, or - when the room ran out of oxygen - brainstorming on the living room sofa. Kindly, Calle’s girlfriend at the time kept us alive, as we’d

often forget to eat or drink for long hauls.

As soon as we’d pressed the last “save” button, and a new “issue” of Method went live, we would pass out for a good sleep.

When we awoke we’d either go fishing for pike or to a techno rave. We repeated this weekly for a few years, often while being “on the road” to another slope, all across the planet. At times we lugged hundreds of kilograms of gear along to make it happen.

Method’s bleeding edge gathered the attention of the global snowboard community, at least those who knew how to get online.

By 1998 our fledgling site saw between 5,000 and 10,000 visitors per week, many interacting with our stories and with each other. Most of them we still have never met, while others have become friends for life.

In order of significance, I will detail Method’s four core ingredients, and finally, address the question about how far from the edge we can go. You wanted the roots?

Then let us trace them!

Technology: Possibilities through digital engineering In the early ’90s, Calle started to learn photography and followed the local snowboarders around. All four of us. His work got us all published in national snowboarding magazines. One time, on a T-bar ride, he started to explain the early internet to me. I had been quite busy chasing girls and playing all kinds of sports for a few years, but I had also written my first lines of code at age nine. Having written a few stories

for physical snowboard magazines myself, the potential for doing something around snowboarding on the ‘net soon dawned in our conversation.

Together we figured out how to plant the first digital seeds of Method on the newly launched World Wide Web. Before its launch, the internet’s user interface was text-based only, and super geeky. No snowboarding existed online, aside from the occasional story in IRC forums. (This was the first social platform, all text-based). WWW was a new standard supporting the transfer of images from a server somewhere to a screen somewhere else. It also had links to hop between pages. It was about two years old and you needed to hack away on some tooling to make it work. Only a fraction of people could connect from their homes, and no one was logging on from a mobile device. Connections were made via a noisy modem over your telephone wire, which meant no one in your house could use the phone. It’s likely that half of you reading this will never fully understand what I just wrote, so let’s move on.

Was Method the first to bring snowboarding onto the internet? Nope. We got early inspiration from Heckler Mag in the U.S. (they had a West-coast style, or “hella punk,” as they’d shout it themselves) and nearby Swedish Beauty Magazine (cute, but sadly, only had a few occasional stories).

As far as we know, Method might have been the third snowboarding site to go live. No brand or major snowboarding mag had any online presence. It’s all quite hard 17

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to imagine today, when anyone can post anything in two shakes of a mobile phone.

Just getting something - anything - online, demanded a number of technical skills.

Methodmag.com was, however, the most active site in those years, mainly because we started adding community features early on, like the ability to comment on stories, as well as a chat function. We loved the feedback from our users, and at times all we did was chit-chat with new friends in unknown locations when we really should have been producing more content. But when we did post something, say results from a World Tour event, it was often live six months or more before any other outlet published similar coverage. The rest of the snowboarding world was paper-based.

People loved fresh content, and we had a speed advantage.

This early site could get hard to navigate however, since we redesigned all the menus on the site every other week. Surely this was “amusing” to people who repeatedly got lost trying to locate articles they wanted to interact with. This was about five years before working search engines existed (like Google), so all users basically had to rely on clicking links to get around.

But we kept moving the links…

In the process, I learned to shoot and edit digital video, which meant we could get nuggets like that famous clip of Ingemar Backman at Riksgränsen in 1996 (this book’s cover image) online within the hour.

In summary, Calle did all the infrastructure, graphics and photography. I did all the coding, writing and video. Our skills fit well together.

So was all our passion in technology? Nah. Luckily, we had great content right in front of our noses to add to the mix. I was a rider in the up-and-coming “Scands posse,” and both of us loved to explore our wild, wonderful world.

Nature: A playground worth exploring Both Calle and I were brought up in outdoorsy families. Independently, we learned how to ski in all kinds of ways and how to take care of ourselves in the wilderness. Calle even worked as a lumberjack for a few years, while I mainly spent time hiking, fishing and picking berries. We grew up reading skiing magazines while living amongst 200-300 meter hills, so naturally, larger, more powder-covered mountains were added to our bucket lists.

Calle did his winter excursions mainly on skis, most often on a monoski, sporting fit-

ting, colorful gear. He spent a few winters in Chamonix in his later teenage years.

Thanks to good luck he survived those early years, dodging both avalanches and malnutrition along the way.

Myself, I bashed alpine gates until I spotted a thumbnail-sized picture of a snowboarder on a yellow fishtail in a ski magazine. I then promptly built a snowboard in seventh grade wood-working class and retired from alpine skiing after having tried my new board out once. My quitting skiing caused my coach at the time some despair, but my parents had already realized that all I wanted was to ski off-piste anyway.

Of course, there is no better way to do this than standing sideways.

Nature itself is something not often described explicitly in snowboarding magazines or websites. That is what we have National Geographic for. But it is always there, setting a backdrop to every story. We are often struck by its beauty, getting a quick adrenaline rush as we see an image or clip of someone dropping into a line or sailing across the sky. The question and challenge of what exactly is accessible, is rideable, in the natural world around us poses an intrinsic temptation for us humans that resides a bit up Maslow’s hierarchy.

Method was a way for Calle and I to access bigger, deeper mountain ranges, while often acting as “guides,” coaches, and at times, stand-in parents for the rest of the young Scandinavian posse. We simply decided to share our adventures with the world at no profit at all.

Altruism: A kind part of human nature There was no intention, or need, to make money from Method, at least not directly. It was all about exploring that curiosity and sharing our passion with others. We had no revenue flows figured out; we chipped in ourselves to cover all our costs. Neither of us were born into family money so growing up within Sweden’s social welfare system helped some. We simply did not care for getting rich at a young age as much as we cared for sharing stuff with like-minded people the world over. We somehow knew that if we did what we loved, the money would follow.

When we received our first payment for running some advertisements on the site, an animated GIF banner running at the top of the main page, the compensation was actually a few bags of magic mushrooms. Mushrooms were also the product advertised for. It was still a surprise, to say the least, as we had no idea what it was. At

least it was legal at the time. Those banner ads were later replaced with ads for the first snowboard brands coming online. Often we were hired by these brands as consultants, which was profitable work that kept the Method’s servers running during those years. We often re-used content for several purposes, selling images and stories to various print titles. Method Mag was sort of just the hitchhiker coming along for free.

We managed to stay very low-budget while touring, getting a hand from the International Snowboard Federation’s (ISF) press office during its pro tour. We’d often use their phone lines for hours, sometimes days. We even used the resources of local universities, often via a local snowboarder who happened to be a geek as well as a rider.

To some degree, we unconsciously copied a pattern from our friends within the rave and punk cultures, where people would work for months to prepare for an event, often feeling lucky if it broke even in the end. Luckily, we never counted the hours we spent learning and producing during those years, or put a dollar value on them. If we had, we might have come to our senses and stopped. We somehow managed to turn all the positive feedback and thank yous we received from readers into enough energy to keep on pushing it. It was a free and challenging learning process in so many ways, supported by a whole community sharing all kinds of ideas.

But just being kind to others is, well, not all that kind, actually. An altruist embraces the importance of helping people grow.

This can be done by asking challenging questions, evoking reactions and feeding new emotions. This brings us to the final ingredient.

Art: Provoking minds to expand This is a fitting section to explain why we chose the name Method. It was mainly because we humans tend to remember classics, and thus, it is an easy name to remember. It is also because you can do an endless variation of methods. A method is easy to learn, yet difficult to master. And every hit will elicit a different one from you.

(Adds Calle: “The idea was that the method is one of the basic tricks of snowboarding, one of the cleanest tricks you can do, but also, one you can always work to perfect throughout your life. It’s an iconic and stylish trick.

Method, literally, is a way of doing things - as in, ‘What method are you using?’ There is a kind of philosophical aspect to it. And

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aesthetically, it was a nice word to look at. It connected, and checked, all the boxes.”)

Curiosity and art have moved together throughout the ages, holding hands in many different shapes and forms. Expressions of emotion through art have, to a high degree - along with influential historical events like wars, natural catastrophes, and engineering breakthroughs - crafted our species. Art has been instrumental for expressing what is going on in our minds.

Art provides us with a well-needed kick in the butt when we’ve become complacent.

Modern forms of expression, like those prevalent in punk and rave cultures, have flourished in recent history, and many ideas inherent within these movements influenced our early thinking about Method in numerous ways. We subscribed to attitudes of levity, modesty, self-reliance, non-conformity, anti-authoritarianism and anti-conservatism. We stood firmly against corporate avarice, and vowed that we’d never, ever sell out. Method still embodies these values at its core, which makes Calle and I very proud parents.

As a teenager I nurtured dreams of becoming an author, and Method was an avenue to get my unfiltered words out there at rapid speed. The inspiration drawn from writers like Jack Kerouac and Hunter S. Thompson is easy to spot. Calle worked in

colors, fonts and digital visual tricks, such as stitching together image sequences, drawing inspiration early on from his mother, a designer, painter, political activist and much more. (*Ed. note: Calle, to the best of our knowledge, was the first in action sports to build and publish a stitched sequence.) Method became a platform where Calle and I could provoke, gather feedback, and interact with others through our preferred formats, often in some sort of combination.

Today’s Method remains provocative in many ways, and the values remain the same. This brings us to that central question: How far can we go, from the edge of what we know? This very useful question makes up the first spoken words on a track called “New Morning” by Acid Pauli. Don’t listen to it if you are afraid of minimal techno. It would be Method’s theme song had Calle and I gotten to pick one.

In some ways, Method was about finding out how far away we could go from our small, Swedish hometown. After all, we had an urge to travel the world. In the end we not only went around the world a few times, but also deep into it. We hooked up with locals, sleeping on their couches, trying to understand their way of looking at the world. And not just local riders - often it would be with the homeless, the shop owners or the bartenders.

In as many ways it was a mental journey, discovering who we wanted to become and daring others to take one extra step into the unknown. This dare led to a dead end for some. For others, it helped them redefine who they were, and what they sought in life. They became greater people, or at least had a good laugh immersing in the Method experience.

It was a group process in those early years, with Calle and I trying to unite and push the snowboarding community by providing digital injections, and the community providing feedback, pushing back, or asking for more. Naturally, no one knows the answer to the question we set out to answer, but we found out a lot more by asking it together.

Our roots have now hardened. The beast of a tree above them stands real and tall, well connected with Mother Earth. Bits and bytes are still used to share our passion, like fresh powder shared with your friends.

With every winter, new people join in and new issues are printed, just like leaves fall off only to regrow with the following season.

Long live the beast that will never be killed!

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ANDERS HAGMAN Then: During the day, a professional snowboarder in the top half of all pro tour disciplines.

Passionate for halfpipe, boardercross, as well as backcountry. About 220 days on snow per season, the rest travel days. By night, coded the front end of Method, wrote all stories for the first three years, and titled himself “Creative Director.” Often raved until early morning, yet seldom missed the first chair up. Left Method around 1998 to pursue studies and surfing.

Now: Father and husband who preps both skis and boards for his family on a regular basis. About 70 days on snow per season, and just booked his 10th trip back to a freeride paradise in Italy called Alagna. Coaches kids’ snowboarding at the local hill every Tuesday. Works with massive scale software and IT infrastructure, making sure music and podcasts stream to our ears. Raves until early morning just occasionally. Uses ultra-distance running as a therapy and a way to indulge in nature in northern Stockholm.

CALLE ERIKSSON Then: During the day, a photographer for all of the major snowboarding magazines, occasionally slashing pow on a monoski. By night, built all backend infrastructure that made Method accessible to the masses. Also shot, developed and scanned all images (before digital cameras existed). Then raved on until early morning.

Moved with Method to Innsbruck, Austria in 2003 to expand it into a real company. Left Method mid-2000s, but has kept a lot of the backend alive on modern servers.

Today: Father of a nine-year-old boy who is a crazy BMX-er and traceur (one who does parkour).

Operates and performance-optimizes backends of some web sites you are likely using, supports the local arts and social community. Acts as a digital philanthropist. Raves until early morning quiteoften in southern Stockholm.

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* Anders Hagman

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* The mobile office Photo: Calle Eriksson

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Anders: We would bring two PCs, the really big, tall kind. Usually, Calle would work on them. I had a really early, ridiculously expensive laptop with the first color screen available for a laptop. I would use it to write all the time when I was in the car and on planes and so forth. And Calle would bring a mobile photo lab to develop the film. Then we had the scanner, this microwave-sized thing that connected to one of the stationary PCs that we would put slide after slide through and then, well, you’d have digital images. That was our setup for a few years.

My sponsor, SIMS Snowboards, would lend me a car, like an Audi 100, and we would just pack it up with equipment. We’d also squeeze in our boards and all that. It was so heavy. We’d usually have at least one monitor in there as well, often two. Calle would have the biggest kind you could ever have, weighing like 30 or 40 kilos.

* Jacob Söderqvist and Anders Hagman in Riksgräsen, Sweden Photo: Calle Eriksson

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Calle: You have to remember that laptops were rare, and expensive. Basically, we had to travel with desktop computers, CRT monitors, modems… The computer alone weighed, I don’t know, 30 kilos. RAM was also really expensive back then. I remember paying around 100 euro per megabyte of RAM, and I had 128 megabytes of RAM in my computer. Then we had hard drives of maybe 40 to 50 gigabytes. As far as photography goes, everyone was still working with film. Since we had to develop film on the road, I had a portable Jobo color lab - a big, black box - along with maybe 30 liters of chemicals.

We had hockey trunks to carry it all in, and we were basically car bound. We couldn’t fly with all this stuff. We’d also carry rolls of tin foil and gaffer tape so we could black rooms out when we arrived at hotels.

There would be an event or something going on, I would develop film and Anders would write stories. We’d scan the images and then go to the press office where we would set this whole thing up. All press

offices provided phone lines for people to fax in their stories and make phone calls home to their news desks. But we would just set up our computers, kind of in a sneaky way, and hook up our modems to make international phone calls up to this modem pool in Sweden to upload our stories and videos. It could take hours.

*Calle Eriksson, room unknown

They (hotel employees, event officials, etc.) didn’t understand what we were doing. I guess later on they likely received phone bills for thousands of dollars for our endeavors. Sometimes we would push for FTP upload and the phone line would disconnect in the middle of the night, and we’d have to start the upload over again.

The whole process was quite tedious and really fragile. It required a lot of patience and dedication. It was interesting. The whole publishing process was really kind of hardcore in comparison to today. But we didn’t know anything. There was nothing to compare it to. Back then, it felt amazing just to be able to do it.

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* Nicola Thost boosting during practice at the 1997 U.S. Open in Stratton, Vermont Photo: Calle Eriksson

* Good times at the ’97 U.S. Open. Couple classic stickers hiding in there Photo: Calle Eriksson

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* Christoffer Rhudin drinking a 40 Photo: Calle Eriksson

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alle: The website was called Method Mag all along, but in the beginning it was not MethodMag.com. We didn’t own the domain from the start; we would register the domain later in the ‘90s.

Anders: The original URL was http://www. dalnet.se/method-mag. The dash likely kept a few people away.

Calle: I think there were less than 1,000 domains in the world at that time, so it was not something that you just went out and easily set up. There were no proper search engines like we have today. Things were more based on portals, so AOL, for instance, would have a portal where they would curate link sections. We were inspiring a lot of people around the world. I have had many people come up to me throughout the years who saw the stuff we did in the early days and told me that it inspired them to do something similar, or that it put them on some kind of career path, including the guys who developed and launched AOL’s first snowboarding site, Snowboarding Online, in 1996.

Anders: Every issue would have three or

four different features. There would be a travel story, usually some sort of road trip story, like going on a powder trip something. I was competing on the pro tour, so there would be a competition piece that covered the highlights and results of the competition. At the time, people had a really hard time getting access to that kind of information and data. It would show up in the mags at the end of the winter, so I think that was one of the main attractions to the magazine. Then there would be an interview with another pro rider, usually one of the Scandinavians. And then there would be something at the end called “Fear and Loathing on the Pro Tour,” which would be a bit more of a sleazy, party kind of story. It was like a sex, drugs, and rock and roll kind of theme, and that would round out every issue. That was the general format. Maybe we wouldn’t have content for one or two of those sections, and we would skip it for an issue if needed. But roughly, that was the size, which was kind of massive. We still wanted it to feel like a magazine, with quite a bit of text and pictures.

Calle: I can remember we did small personal profiles of people, like interviews

with Ingemar (Backman), Daniel Franck, Terje (Håkonsen) Jennie Waara and Jenny Jonsson. Weird interviews, really Hunter S. Thompson-inspired. It was all gonzo journalism that we were doing.

Internet penetration was really, really low at that time, so hardly anyone saw what we were doing. But there were diehards all around the world who picked up on it.

We were mentioned in print media and rumors were spreading. The snowboarding community was, and still is, a quite small and viral community where people kind of know each other.

Anders: We didn’t have a set publishing schedule. We’d end up publishing more often in the winter as we were traveling.

We’d gather those handful of stories and we wanted to get them out while they were fresh. That was the whole idea, that people wouldn’t have to wait for the mags to come out the following winter to get the competition results. I’d say we published weekly or biweekly in the winter, and then monthly in the summer, maybe taking a break for a month or two, if needed. That didn’t happen that often because we would 27

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* The “Sex on Tour” column continued in the early print editions. German version of Issue 4.1, the first print issue

* Daniel Franck at a thrift shop in the States. 1994 Photo: Calle Eriksson

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* Contest at Riksgränsen. 1997 Photo: Calle Eriksson

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* Site design brainstorm for Santa Cruz

always do something from Riksgränsen in May, and we’d be in Stryn (Norway) and in Austria in the summer. Lots of good content there. Then we would be in Saas Fee in the fall.

five-or ten-second clip. We couldn’t do one halfpipe run in one clip with like seven or eight hits, that would take too long. [laughs] People would never wait for two hours to download it.

I kept a log book on how much I snowboarded. I snowboarded around 220 days per year for three-to-four years when I was a pro rider. I didn’t spend much time at home.

Calle: When Ingemar did his famous backside air, we had videos, pictures and stories online the same day. It was really limited how much you could do and the video size was extremely small. The quality was comparable to early mobile phone quality I guess, like really, really pixelated.

But it worked! It was showing what was happening.

Calle: It was the ISF tour that we were traveling on a lot of the time, a tour run by some serious party animals. We were traveling to, and covering, all these events - the U.S. Open, all the Euro legs of the tour, going to Japan. It was a circuit that went around the whole world, pretty much.

Anders: Then we started doing video quite early. I got one of the first mini DVs and Calle figured out how we could work with the video. I think that was around ’96. We started doing lots of video, but it was just clips, nothing streaming. We would upload a clip and then people would download it over really low bandwidth. They would have to wait like 10 minutes to watch a

There was really good money in competitions during this time. I can’t remember if it was an ISF event or not but the Gerlos Grand Slam had a $100,000 first prize one year. Anders was a sponsored pro, so he had his finances covered.

I financed my part by selling shots to companies and to mainstream media outlets, like tabloids. Snowboarding was starting to make a bit of noise, and here in Sweden we had Ingemar Backman and Johan Olofsson, who were kind of high-profile names. They

were winning events, and tabloids wanted to report on these events and the people from their country who were winning them.

I was also selling photos to Sports Illustrated. They were interested in buying snowboarding images and I think I was one of the only ones covering snowboarding from a core perspective. Reuters and outlets like that would come and shoot the events too, but their photographer would shoot the classic “floating-man” images, or a close up on a hand or someone’s face. [laughs] Because we had our mobile studio I was the only one sending images instantly. It was important to me to portray snowboarding the right way in mainstream media, and it bankrolled my travels and all that.

Anders: We started helping all these other brands with websites as well: Santa Cruz, SIMS, Völkl and other companies. Those projects all paid. We hosted those sites and got sort of a regular monthly fee for that, and then we would do a major update like every six months. I guess those projects just sort of payed the way.

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