Machine Age

In December 2015, eleven-time world surfing champion Kelly Slater, forty-three years old and already the most influential surfer the sport has ever known, released a three-minute video with the potential to cleave surf history in two. The clip was the outside world’s first look at a development few surfers were even aware existed: a machine-made wave, light years better than what most surfers dreamed possible, built with financial and technical input from Slater himself. A fantasy wave to rival anything found in the ocean, the kind of wave daydreaming teenaged surfers have doodled in school textbooks for decades.

The video opens with Slater bouncing from one foot to another and laughing in childlike wonder as he watches the first demonstration wave unfurl itself across an inland pond’s mirror-smooth surface. Next, Slater paddles into a four-foot tall symmetrically perfect wave spinning hypnotically from right to left, slips into several long tube rides, then rips arcing turns across the wave’s mathematically sculpted face with a speed and