Ok, I’m going to sound the luddite alarm. Beware! The following text makes me seem like the grumpy old man complaining about the invention of the abacus or pacemaker.
The new DA electronic group is cool, but really – I mean just really. Ok, I understand this is cycling and that we buy all kinds of stuff for any kind of nominal gain (I love my carbon fiber brake levers!). And that’s totally cool. The electric group has a couple of major advantages with perfect, faster shifting and never needing to adjust the trim on your cables. I like that, really I do. But isn’t there something lost in that kind of perfection? I mean, we ride and race bicycles for god sake! A sport where the raw fundamentals are relatively unchanged, a sport where the terrain of the Paris-Roubaix is protected and the race itself is one of the most covetous prizes in all of cycling. Is this shift (‘scuse the pun) the same as making the leap from downtube shifters to brifters? Or, from DA to Red? Or is this working group a signal that cycling is falling down the rabbit hole of technological ridiculousness…or ridiculous technology?…whatever. To sound old and crotchety I must ask the same damn question every other stone wielding hominid asked when bronze was first tooled. What the fuck is next? Will we be able to program our shifting based on our power profile of the race course so then all we need to do is pedal and not ride up the RD of the pedal pusher in front? Or, to take an evil slant I like to be one of the first to bemoan a crazy scenario where if this technology becomes wireless, will I…ahem, I mean someone, be able to hack into a competitors group and exact a kind of 21st century version of team Cinzano brutality we all fear most? Or will the suffering we all love and hate take on new meaning?
“HAL, let me in…shift me to my 11 HAL. HAL?” 
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