Three-day conference produces 40-page report blaming shortboarders, longboarders, SUP riders, tourists, and unseasonably warm water

Laguna Beach Surf Culture Symposium Agrees That Everyone Else Is The Problem

LAGUNA BEACH, CALIFORNIA — The third annual Laguna Beach Surf Culture Symposium concluded Sunday with what organisers described as “a historic consensus” and participants described as “essentially three days of everyone blaming everyone else in increasingly creative ways.” The event, attended by 140 surfers, academics, industry representatives, and one county supervisor who arrived on day one and did not return for days two or three, produced a 40-page report attributing the decline of California surf culture to shortboarders, longboarders, stand-up paddleboarders, weekend tourists, Instagram photographers, the surf industry, the Airbnb-ification of coastal towns, the WSL, the state of the swell forecast, and, in one memorable afternoon session, the moon.

For related London satire and commentary, see Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat.

The Consensus Statement

The symposium’s official consensus statement, signed by 78 of the 140 attendees (the remaining 62 either abstained, objected to specific clauses, or had left for an afternoon session at Thalia Street that they declined to explain), states that “California surf culture is under threat from forces both internal and external” and that “collective action is required to preserve the values, traditions, and spirit of a practice that has defined Southern California identity for seven decades.”

The statement does not specify what the collective action should be. This was, the drafting committee acknowledged, intentional. “We couldn’t get agreement on specific actions,” said committee chair Dr. Andrea Santos of UC Irvine’s Marine Culture Studies programme. “We could get agreement that action was needed. We led with that.”

This is an approach to problem-solving that has a rich tradition in British satire, where the gap between identifying a problem and proposing a solution has long been fertile comic territory. The British word for someone who is excellent at expressing concern and less excellent at addressing its cause is, instructively, “prat” in the context of British politics and journalism — where it is deployed with particular frequency for conference participants whose output is declarations rather than deeds.

Day One: The Shortboard Panel

The symposium opened with a panel on shortboard culture and its effect on lineup dynamics, which was moderated with visible difficulty by Dr. Santos and featured four panellists who agreed on very little except that the other panellists were missing the point. The longboard representative argued that shortboarders’ aggressive competitive style had changed the culture of breaks that were once collaborative. The shortboard representative argued that longboarders’ use of wave priority to dominate sets on equipment that generates unfair positional advantage was a form of gatekeeping. Both arguments were made forcefully and simultaneously for approximately 25 minutes before Dr. Santos called a break.

During the break, a representative from the SUP community introduced himself to the room and was received with a silence that he described afterwards as “interesting” and that everyone else described differently.

Day Two: The Tourist Question

The second day addressed what several speakers called “the access problem,” framed around the question of whether increased beach tourism was compatible with surf culture preservation. This panel was the most contentious of the symposium, primarily because it required participants to confront the uncomfortable reality that the surf industry — whose representatives were present and had sponsored the coffee — is structurally dependent on the exact population whose presence in the water was generating most of the complaints.

Industry representative Cal Bridges navigated this tension by arguing that the problem was not new surfers per se but “new surfers without adequate preparation,” and that the solution was better education. He was not incorrect in any particular, and was received with scepticism anyway, because he was also the person whose company had sold boards to 40,000 first-time buyers the previous year and provided no mandatory education component with any of them.

The afternoon session produced what Dr. Santos called “the symposium’s most frank discussion,” which is academic language for a session in which people said things directly enough that the recording had to be edited before release. One speaker used the word the British use in this situation without apparently knowing it was British, which Santos found “linguistically interesting” and which several others found simply accurate.

Day Three: The Moon

The attribution of cultural decline to the moon occurred during a morning session on tidal patterns and their effect on crowd behaviour, in which a presenter from a surf analytics company noted, in passing, that crowd density at popular breaks correlated with tidal conditions in ways that suggested peak crowds occurred during the most photogenic surfing conditions, creating a self-reinforcing cycle of overcrowding at exactly the moments when the surf was best.

A participant from the floor suggested that this was “essentially the moon’s fault,” which produced laughter and was subsequently incorporated into the attribution section of the report, where it appears as a footnote that Dr. Santos acknowledges is “not entirely rigorous” but which she stands behind as a “gestural truth.”

The Report

The 40-page report is available on the symposium website. It covers, in thorough and well-cited detail, everything except a clear recommendation for action, which Dr. Santos says will be the focus of next year’s event. She is aware that this means the cycle may continue. “We’re building toward something,” she said. “These things take time.”

For those who enjoy watching the particular comedy of organised human response to self-generated problems, “prat” in print satire has documented this exact dynamic for centuries: the symposium that produces a report, the report that produces a follow-up symposium, and the follow-up symposium that produces a longer report with similar conclusions. The ocean, meanwhile, continues its own agenda, indifferent to all consensus statements and entirely unaffected by the lunar attribution footnote.

Registration for the fourth annual Laguna Beach Surf Culture Symposium opens in March. Dr. Santos expects strong attendance. The SUP representative has already confirmed he will return. The room’s response to this information, she noted, was “consistent with previous years.”

For more satirical commentary, visit The Daily Mash.

SOURCE: https://prat.uk/the-meaning-of-prat-in-the-uk-final-word-on-mafanery/