Spinner by Syd Mead

If someone shows up in a Spinner, you comply. At least, that’s the plan.

Below the numbing whir of Spinners, where overcrowded streets shook under the weight of an exhausted, hungry population and lights flickered between shadow and shock, constant surveillance provided an astounding view of the humanity that remained.

1s, 0s, and us. They used to call them digital fingerprints while we became hooked, quickly shedding too much data to run from, actual lives inexorably tethered to satellites, towers, and clouds, an inter-connected highway of elite, impenetrable, overlapping surveillance structures invisible to ignorant human eyes, yet beacons to artificially intelligent vision.

Ideas, hobbies, families, all of it; filtered through a sieve callously, gleefully, profitably constructed to manipulate our existence — less a finger on the scales, more so entire armies of self-anointed saviours, bureaucrats, brutes, boot-lickers, and chat-bots marching to a rotten old script sung with hateful contempt. You must comply.

Original concept art for the Spinner interior, showing a machine capable of both effortless transportation and surveillance • Syd Mead / sydmead.com

Up here, in flight, it is all beautiful. It always was, and will be.

Underneath is a whir; below that, collapse.

Removed from the work of investigating, subjugating, enslaving, and torturing others, flying is as close to heaven as any Spinner pilot can get. For a time.

Gravity pulls us all.

First appearance of a Spinner in Blade Runner • YouTube

The original Spinner logotype by Tom Southwell, created by artist for Blade Runner • Tom Southwell / Speculative Industries

Syd Mead was born in Saint Paul, Minnesota in 1933, 49 years before the release of Blade Runner in 1982 and 93 years before the 2026 murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretty in nearby* Minneapolis, Minnesota.

It’s my belief that Mead’s storyboard work depicting the incomprehensibly familiar concepts within the Blade Runner universe changed the real world forever.

The Spinner takes off and lands as its name implies, as if a bionic maple tree seed ‘key’ floating in a gentle, natural spiral toward the ground. Air is meant to have been redirected through the vehicle’s systems, like being sat inside a futuristic Dyson vacuum…that flies. Mead called them aerodynes.

Blade Runner 2049, with its awkwardly (and legally messy) Peugeot-branded Spinner, only served to expand how we see ourselves travelling through the future hellscapes of our own making.

As in fiction, we also construct the tools of our oppression.

Through the fictional purgatory of the Blade Runner universe, science fiction authors and real leaders alike were reminded with splendid luminance that neither misguided anti-hero nor audience will shy away from righteous suffering. We will stand and fight, bloodied, soaked in sweat, rain, grit, until breath stops and this damn spark extinguishes for good.

We are Deckard, and we are the replicants. Confused. Afraid. Yet unwavering.

As long as we believe, we can resist. Our biology and systems, flooded by chemical responses to fear, anxiety, and hatred do the rest.

“Freedom is never free,” as it is farcically claimed now, as if we didn’t inherit an entire planet of abundance. Comply.

Original Spinner concept art • Syd Mead / sydmead.com

A police-issue Spinner in flight • Blade Runner movie still

Like clockwork, those in power say any attack on prescribed rules must be met with the ferocious, decadent gore of defence — when it comes from a named threat. Interest rates. Androids. AI. Immigrants. Neighbours. Friends. Canadians.

Children.

Recent events in Minnesota remind us that, time and time again, our humanity cannibalizes itself from within. It is always better for them if we side with uniformed, planned, murder. Comply.

Make no mistake: humanity is not moral, it has no compass, or compassion, or innate sense of right and wrong. Humanity simply survives, the best and worst of it.

Make of that what you will.

K’s Peugeot Spinner from Blade Runner: 2049 • movie still

Just as all major cultures and religions sizzle, pop, and implode with brutality, we may now watch the U.S. eat itself from the middle, caving under institutionalized rot — fed by gall, ignorance, lies, cowardice, and the pathetic views of a murderous ruling class who fatten themselves using the same oppressive tools meant to extract profit from twisted truths.

Their offspring and sycophants will inherit the spoils, then raise rent. Comply.

Until I decide otherwise, Mead’s Spinner for Blade Runner will remain the last U.S. vehicle I write about as an official ‘Weird Car of the Day’ — for a time, this concept car will be an untouchable reminder of a bitter, charred history we’re actively choking on.

To my American friends and subscribers: I love you, stay safe.

To whom it may concern: resist.

* While Minnesota is vast, these two cities are less than 12 miles (19 kilometres) apart.