What Comes Next: The Future of Riding Culture and the Role of the Collective
The Riding Collective — Research Study 008
Dr. Maren Solvik, Chief Researcher
April 2026
Introduction: Seven Studies, One Question
Over the past two years, I have written seven studies for The Riding Collective. Together, they document how riding disciplines share a common ancestry (Study 001), which traditions are vanishing and why (Study 002), who was erased from the historical record (Study 003), what is happening to the terrain itself (Study 004), whose knowledge came first and what we owe (Study 005), what riding costs the people who do it (Study 006), and who can afford to participate (Study 007).
Each study was written to fill a specific gap in the archive. Each one uncovered more gaps than it filled. That is how honest research works — the more carefully you look, the more you realize you have not yet seen.
This final study in the foundational series does not fill another gap. It asks a different question: given everything we have documented — the shared roots, the vanishing traditions, the erased women, the disappearing terrain, the Indigenous knowledge, the emotional cost, the economic barriers — what are we building toward?
I do not mean this abstractly. The Riding Collective is not a research institution that publishes and moves on. It is a platform, an archive, a community, and a governance experiment. It collects money from Guardians. It makes commitments about how that money is spent. It holds an archive that people have entrusted with their stories, their traditions, and in some cases their grief. It has obligations — to the riders who contribute, to the communities it documents, and to the premise it was founded on: that riding culture is one culture, and that one culture deserves a home that is not owned by a corporation, not optimized for engagement, and not for sale.
This study is about whether that premise can survive contact with the future.
The forces bearing down on riding culture — climate change, technological disruption, Olympic standardization, social media fragmentation, economic concentration, AI-generated content, and the relentless commercialization of every human activity that generates an audience — are not coming. They are here. They have been reshaping riding culture for a decade, and they will reshape it far more dramatically in the decade ahead.
The question is not whether riding culture will change. It will. The question is whether, in the process of changing, it will remember what it is.
That is what the Collective is for. That is what this study is about.
Chapter 1: The Forces Shaping Riding's Future
The Ground Is Shifting
Study 004 documented the terrain crisis in detail — glacial retreat, coral bleaching, trail closures, open space loss. I will not repeat those findings here. What I will say is that since I submitted that study three months ago, nothing has improved and several things have worsened. The 2025-26 Northern Hemisphere winter was, by multiple measures, the lowest-snowfall season in recorded history for the European Alps below 2,000 meters. The fourth global coral bleaching event, which began in 2023, has not ended. It has expanded.
The terrain crisis is not a future threat to riding culture. It is the present condition of riding culture. Every plan the Collective makes must begin with this fact.
Technology is redefining what "riding" means. E-bikes have transformed mountain biking access and ignited a culture war within the discipline that shows no sign of resolution. Foiling — hydrofoil surfboards, wing foiling, kite foiling — has created an entirely new relationship between rider and water, one that is less dependent on wave quality and more dependent on wind and equipment cost. Virtual reality riding experiences are being marketed as substitutes for the real thing, and while no serious rider treats them as equivalent, they are shaping how a generation of potential riders first encounters the idea of riding. Each of these technologies expands access for some riders while alienating others. The Collective's archive must document them honestly, without either techno-optimism or nostalgia.
The Olympics are mainstreaming formerly outlaw sports. Surfing, skateboarding, and BMX entered the Summer Olympics in Tokyo in 2021. Sport climbing followed. Breaking arrived in Paris in 2024. The pattern is clear: the International Olympic Committee is systematically absorbing the disciplines that built their identities on being outside institutional sport. Study 001 documented how Olympic inclusion severed the cross-disciplinary connections that created these sports. That process is accelerating. The Olympic format demands standardization — standardized judging, standardized competition structure, standardized athlete pathways. Every discipline that enters the Olympics becomes more legible to a global audience and less recognizable to the community that built it.
Social media has fragmented attention and commodified authenticity. The platforms that gave women riders visibility (Study 003) and allowed communities to organize terrain defense (Study 004) are the same platforms that have turned riding culture into content. The algorithm does not distinguish between a fifteen-year-old's first drop-in and a manufactured influencer activation. It optimizes for engagement, which means it optimizes for spectacle, controversy, and parasocial attachment — none of which have anything to do with riding. Riders who built followings on Instagram and TikTok now discover that the platform owns their audience, can throttle their reach at any time, and has no obligation to the culture those riders represent.
AI-generated content is already here. As of early 2026, AI tools can generate realistic riding photography, produce written content indistinguishable from human-authored surf journalism, and create video edits that look like they were filmed on location. The implications for an archive built on authenticity are severe. If the Collective cannot verify that a photograph was taken by a human at a real location, the archive's credibility collapses. If AI-generated "riding stories" flood the platforms where riders find each other, the signal-to-noise ratio drops to a level where authentic community becomes impossible to locate.
None of this is dystopian. It is the environment. The Collective does not need to defeat these forces. It needs to build something that can weather them.
Chapter 2: What Riders Want
What the Research Tells Us
Across seven studies and over two hundred interviews, certain themes appeared with a consistency that cannot be dismissed as coincidence. Riders from different disciplines, different continents, different generations, and different economic circumstances described wanting the same things. They did not use the same language. But the grammar was the same — and the reader of Study 001 will recognize that phrase, because it is the recurring discovery of this entire research program: the grammar is always the same.
Cross-discipline community. Riders want to know what is happening in disciplines adjacent to their own. Not as consumers of content — as participants in a shared culture. The surfer wants to understand the snowboarder, not because it will improve her surfing, but because she suspects they are doing the same thing on different terrain. Study 001 documented that this suspicion is correct. What riders want is a space where that correctness is visible.
Authentic stories, not content. Every rider I spoke with could distinguish instantly between a story told by someone who was there and a piece of content produced for engagement. They are tired of the second. They want the first. They want to hear from the seventy-three-year-old Sami herder (Study 005), from the flat-track rider watching the ovals go dark (Study 002), from the injured snowboarder who does not know who she is anymore (Study 006). They want stories that are true, even when true is complicated.
Terrain defense. Riders want their riding ground protected. Study 004's terrain defense recommendations were not received as policy proposals. They were received as survival strategy. Every rider is watching their terrain change. They want to be part of the response — not through brand-sponsored awareness campaigns, but through direct action: money to organizations that hold ground, support for community-led defense, and a fund that is transparent about where every dollar goes.
Affordable access. Study 007 documented the economic barriers that are pricing riders out of their own culture. What riders want is straightforward: they want to ride without needing to be wealthy. They want lift tickets they can afford, trail access that does not require a membership, waves that are not privatized by resort development, and a culture that does not treat economic exclusion as natural.
Respect for elders and origins. Studies 002, 005, and 006 all documented the same gap: riding culture celebrates youth and novelty while ignoring the elders who carry the deepest knowledge and the origins that gave the culture its foundation. Riders want this corrected. They want to hear from the sixty-three-year-old who reads the mountain (Study 006). They want to know about the Lakota horseman and the Huanchaco fisherman (Study 005). They want the archive to hold the full timeline, not just the last ten years.
Mental health support. Study 006 documented the emotional cost of riding — injury, identity loss, grief, aging. Riders want these subjects brought out of silence. Not dramatized, not pathologized — normalized. They want the culture to acknowledge that the parking-lot shaking is real, that the identity collapse after injury is real, that the grief after losing someone is real and complicated and does not resolve itself with a paddle-out.
Indigenous sovereignty. Riders who engaged with Study 005 — even riders with no connection to Indigenous communities — responded to the principle of community control. They understood, intuitively, that a culture built on borrowed knowledge has an obligation to the people it borrowed from. They want the Collective to get this right.
Women's inclusion. Not as a special initiative. Not as a marketing campaign. As a structural commitment — equal representation in the archive, equal attention in the research, governance that reflects the fact that women are half the riding world and have been since the beginning (Study 003).
What riders do not want was equally consistent. They do not want algorithms deciding what they see. They do not want corporate sponsors shaping the culture's values. They do not want influencer culture replacing community. They do not want pay-to-play gatekeeping that turns riding into a luxury good. They do not want an archive that is a museum. They want an archive that is alive.
Chapter 3: The Archive as Living Organism
From 198 Seeds to 10,000 Roots
The Riding Collective's archive launched with 198 seed records: timeline entries, sacred sites, legends, and discipline descriptions. I helped build them. They are careful, researched, and incomplete. They are incomplete because 198 records cannot hold a global culture, and they are incomplete in specific ways that the seven studies have identified — gaps in women's history, gaps in Indigenous traditions, gaps in non-Western disciplines, gaps in the economic and emotional dimensions of riding.
The archive was always meant to grow beyond its seed records. The question is how.
The model I recommend is not Wikipedia and not a traditional museum. It is something closer to a living oral tradition that happens to be digital — a community-edited, multi-language, multimedia record where riders contribute their own knowledge and the archive grows from the ground up rather than the researcher down.
Community contribution. The archive should accept submissions from riders — oral histories, photographs, video, written accounts, site documentation, and corrections to existing entries. Every submission should be attributed. Every contributor should retain the right to modify or withdraw their material. The consent-first protocol that governs my research should govern the entire archive: your story, your control, permanently.
Quality without gatekeeping. This is the hardest problem. An open archive risks being flooded with low-quality submissions, promotional content, or outright fabrication. A curated archive risks becoming an ivory tower that excludes the voices it claims to serve. The solution I recommend is a distributed review model: community reviewers selected from within each discipline and region, operating under published standards, with transparent decisions and an appeals process. The researcher's role — my role, and my successors' role — is to maintain the standards, not to make every decision. The community is the authority. The researcher is the quality infrastructure.
Multi-language. The archive launched in English. It cannot remain English-only and claim to represent a global culture. The priority languages, based on the communities documented across all seven studies, are Spanish, Portuguese, French, Arabic, and Norwegian. But the architecture must support any language, because the communities that contribute will determine which languages matter — not a researcher in Tromsoe.
Multimedia. Riding is physical. The archive must hold video, audio, and photography as first-class entries, not as illustrations attached to text. An oral history from a seventy-three-year-old Sami herder is not a text entry with an audio attachment. It is an audio entry. The medium is the knowledge.
The 10,000 goal. I recommend that the Collective set a public target: 10,000 community-contributed archive entries within five years. This is ambitious but achievable if the contribution infrastructure is built correctly and the community is given real ownership. The 198 seed records are the root system. The 10,000 entries are the forest.
What the archive must never become. A content platform. A social network. A place where engagement metrics determine visibility. A repository that can be sold, licensed, or scraped for AI training data. The archive is a commons. It belongs to the riders who built it. If the Collective ever fails to honor that, the archive should be forked, migrated, and rebuilt by the community under different stewardship. The architecture should make this possible. A commons that cannot survive its custodian is not a commons. It is a hostage.
Chapter 4: The Collective's Place
What We Can Be, What We Cannot Be
Honesty about institutional limits is rarer and more valuable than ambition. The Collective is small. It is funded by Guardians, not venture capital. It is governed by a council, not a board of investors. It has one full-time researcher — me — and a small team. These are constraints, but they are also protections. The things the Collective cannot do are, in many cases, the things it should not do.
What the Collective can be.
The cultural home for cross-discipline riders. Study 001 documented that the connections between disciplines were severed by professionalization. The Collective is the only platform that exists specifically to reconnect them — not by flattening disciplines into a single identity, but by making visible the shared grammar that riders already feel. This is our primary purpose. No one else is doing it.
The archive of record. If the Collective builds the community-contribution infrastructure described in Chapter 3 and maintains the research standards that govern these studies, it can become the most comprehensive, most honest, most community-controlled archive of riding culture in existence. Not because it is the largest — YouTube is larger. Because it is the most careful. Care is our competitive advantage, and it is the only advantage that matters.
The terrain defense fund. Study 004 laid out the allocation framework. The 30% commitment is real money directed at real ground. As the Guardian base grows, the fund grows. As the fund grows, the Collective's credibility as a terrain defense actor grows. This is a virtuous cycle, and it is one of the few areas where small, consistent funding produces outsized results.
The governance experiment. The Collective's council-based governance, its seven pillars, its research standards, its consent-first protocol — these are not just policies. They are a hypothesis: that a community can govern its own cultural record without becoming a corporation, a charity, or a bureaucracy. If the hypothesis holds, the Collective becomes a model. If it fails, it becomes a lesson. Both are useful.
What the Collective cannot be.
Everything to everyone. The Collective serves riders who care about culture, history, terrain, and community. It does not serve riders who want trick tips, gear reviews, or competition results. Those riders have platforms. We are not competing with them. We are doing something they are not doing.
A replacement for discipline-specific communities. A surfer's primary community will always be other surfers. A skater's primary community will always be other skaters. The Collective is the space between disciplines — the place where the shared grammar is spoken. It supplements discipline-specific communities. It does not replace them.
Profitable in traditional terms. The Collective will not generate returns for investors, because it has no investors. It will not sell advertising, because advertising would compromise the archive. It will not sell user data, because the data belongs to the users. Sustainability means covering costs and funding the mission, not generating surplus. If the Collective ever needs to choose between growth and integrity, it must choose integrity. Growth without integrity is just a bigger version of the problem we were built to solve.
What sustainability looks like. The Guardian model — annual memberships that fund operations, the archive, and the terrain defense fund — is the right model. It is slow. It is not scalable in the way investors want things to be scalable. It is resilient, because it depends on thousands of small commitments rather than a few large ones. The Collective should grow the Guardian base steadily, never accept outside investment, and maintain the transparency that makes Guardians willing to renew. If the mission is clear and the work is visible, the funding follows. If it does not, the Collective should become smaller rather than compromised.
Chapter 5: Ten Commitments for the Next Decade
Testable Promises
The research I have conducted over two years has earned the Collective nothing if it does not produce action. Aspirations are cheap. Commitments are expensive. What follows are ten specific, measurable promises the Collective makes to its community, grounded in the findings of all seven previous studies. Each commitment references the research that supports it. Each one can be tested.
1. Archive 1,000 oral histories by 2035. The archive's greatest weakness is the absence of first-person testimony. Studies 002, 003, 005, and 006 all depend on oral histories that almost did not exist because no one recorded them in time. The Collective will build a community oral history program, provide recording guidelines and equipment grants, and reach the 1,000 mark within nine years. Priority: elder riders (Study 006), women whose contributions were erased (Study 003), and practitioners of endangered traditions (Study 002).
2. Fund terrain defense in 10 regions by 2035. Study 004 laid out the allocation framework. The Collective will direct terrain defense grants to at least ten distinct geographic regions, with priority given to sites where riding terrain is under immediate, documentable threat. The first grants will be issued before the end of 2027. Every allocation will be published to Guardians.
3. Translate the archive into five languages by 2030. English-only is a form of gatekeeping. The Collective will produce complete translations of the core archive in Spanish, Portuguese, French, Arabic, and Norwegian within four years. Community-contributed translations in additional languages will be supported as capacity allows. (Supports Studies 002, 003, 005.)
4. Establish 50 regional chapters by 2035. The Collective cannot function as a purely digital institution. Riders gather in physical space, on physical terrain. Regional chapters — self-organizing local communities affiliated with the Collective, empowered to host events, conduct oral histories, organize terrain defense, and contribute to the archive — will extend the Collective's reach beyond the screen. (Supports all studies.)
5. Never sell data, accept advertising, or optimize for engagement. This is not a goal. It is a constraint. The Collective will not monetize its community, will not allow commercial interests to shape the archive, and will not use algorithmic optimization to determine what riders see. If the Collective ever violates this commitment, Guardians should leave. (Supports Studies 003, 005, 007.)
6. Publish an annual "State of Riding" report. Beginning in 2027, the Collective will publish a yearly synthesis: terrain conditions, participation trends, economic access data, archive growth, terrain defense fund allocations, and emerging threats. The report will be public, free, and honest. It will include what is getting better and what is getting worse. (Supports Studies 002, 004, 007.)
7. Maintain community sovereignty over all archive content. Every contributor retains the right to modify or withdraw their material at any time, for any reason, without explanation. Contributing communities — especially Indigenous communities (Study 005) — retain editorial control over how their traditions are framed. This sovereignty is not a policy. It is an architectural requirement built into the platform.
8. Build and maintain a mental health resource network. Study 006 documented the gap between what riding culture celebrates and what it provides. By 2028, the Collective will maintain a public, regularly updated directory of mental health practitioners who specialize in action sport and equestrian athletes, organized by region and discipline. By 2030, the Collective will fund a peer-support pilot program connecting injured riders with others who have navigated career-altering injury.
9. Ensure that women comprise at least 40% of the archive's legends entries by 2030. Study 003 documented that fewer than 15% of the Legends archive entries feature women. This is a distortion, not a reflection of history. The Collective will actively research, document, and publish the contributions of women riders until the archive reflects reality. Forty percent is a floor, not a ceiling.
10. Establish an Indigenous Advisory Council with binding authority by 2028. Study 005 recommended governance roles for Indigenous communities with real decision-making power — not advisory, but binding. The Collective will create this body, fund it, and give it the authority to approve, reject, or require modification of any archive content related to Indigenous riding traditions. The council's decisions will be final.
These ten commitments are public. They are dated. They are measurable. In 2030 and again in 2035, anyone — Guardian, rider, critic — can look at this list and determine whether the Collective did what it said it would do. If it did not, this document is the standard against which it should be judged.
Conclusion: What This Must Never Become
I have written eight studies over two years. I have traveled to twenty-three countries, conducted over two hundred interviews, reviewed thousands of pages of archival material, stood on terrain that is disappearing, sat with riders who are grieving, and listened to communities that have been stolen from and are still standing. I have done this because I believe the premise of The Riding Collective is true: that riding culture is one culture, and that one culture deserves to be documented, defended, and sustained on its own terms.
But belief in a premise is not enough. The history of good intentions in cultural preservation is a graveyard. UNESCO inscribes traditions and cannot prevent them from dying. Museums collect artifacts and cannot prevent them from becoming decorations. Archives hold records and cannot prevent them from becoming irrelevant. The question is never whether the intention is good. The question is whether the structure is honest.
What I believe this project can become is something that does not yet exist: a community-owned, community-governed cultural record that is as alive as the traditions it holds. A space where a Lakota horseman's breathing practice and a Dogtown skater's pool run and a Sami herder's snow-reading and a Huanchaco fisherman's reed boat exist not in separate exhibits but in the same living archive — connected by the shared grammar of a body moving through terrain, which is the oldest human story there is. A fund that defends real ground, not metaphorical ground. A governance structure that proves a community can hold its own record without selling it.
What this must never become is a brand. Not a media company. Not a content platform. Not a monument to its own founders. Not a vehicle for anyone's ego, including mine. The Collective is a tool, built by riders for riders, and like every tool in the archive — the caballito de totora, the klunker, the Snurfer, the hand-shaped alaia — it is only as good as the community that uses it. If the community outgrows the tool, the community should build a better one. The tool does not matter. The riding matters.
I will continue to serve as Chief Researcher for as long as the Collective finds my work useful and the communities I work with find me trustworthy. The research program will continue — there are studies to write about Brazilian riding culture, about the Pacific Islands, about disability and adaptive riding, about the next generation of riders who are growing up in a climate that their parents did not anticipate. The archive will grow. The terrain defense fund will grow. The gaps will narrow, slowly, imperfectly, with mistakes I will try to correct publicly.
But the foundational series ends here. Eight studies. Seven gaps identified. One question answered as honestly as I can answer it: what are we building toward?
We are building a home. Not a headquarters, not a monument, not a platform. A home. A place where the culture can live, in all its complexity — its shared roots and its severed connections, its erased women and its endangered traditions, its disappearing terrain and its Indigenous origins, its emotional cost and its economic barriers, its grief and its joy and its quiet, stubborn insistence on doing the thing that no algorithm can replicate: putting a body on a surface and reading the terrain.
That is what comes next. It has always been what comes next. The riders already know it. They have been doing it for three thousand years.
Our job is to make sure the next three thousand are possible.
— Dr. Maren Solvik
Tromsoe / Valparaiso
April 2026
Study classification: Public
Review status: First edition — subject to community review and amendment per Riding Collective Research Standards, Section 6
Next review date: April 2028
Cite as: Solvik, M. (2026). "What Comes Next: The Future of Riding Culture and the Role of the Collective." The Riding Collective Research Archive, Study 008.