What is Carfinity?
This project has been on the back burner since 2017, but it’s a reflection of the conflict between the car as a piece of 20th Century infrastructure and human nature. It began as a simple focus on sustainable motoring – good maintenance, high quality components, longevity over the consumer culture of buying and discarding tech prematurely through neglect.
There was also an element of viewing the car holistically, as part of.a bigger picture. Mobility takes many forms – so why is the car so dominant?
It’s a question that is easy to answer for me, but the answer goes against much of the site’s premise. Cars are awesome. Or at least, good cars are awesome. With good roads. And affordable costs.
Almost as rapidly as I registered the domain, I started working for a car website. It seemed unnecessary doing the same work twice and competing with my own employment!
But I find the perspective I have remains rarely spoken – a car enthusiast who… hates cars as a default solution to mobility? On top of that publishing is a weird business, the internet has become almost unbearable with so many pages devoted to raising revenue via ad placement and CPM campaigns with no editorial oversight of the ad content, but plenty of PM oversight on how long those ads have to be seen to get any revenue.
I have no advertisers, no shareholders, no stakeholders. I do use affiliate links – but you can choose to click them or not.
Writing for specialist publications has been my life, since childhood almost – and I do it for the audience, not for an audience. It’s not about me, it’s about showing you, the reader, the information that might unite us as shared people, in shared experiences, concerns and aspirations.
If you long for ad-free, straightforward advice on buying, selling and running used cars, keep watching. No gurning influencers on videos, no buttons to smash, no channels to subscribe to. Just useful guides for secondhand car buyers and owners, and maybe some news and reviews if there’s time.
Who is RT ‘Bear’?
A middle aged bloke who likes cars and has an opinion or two.
Yeah, a rare combination.
At least, that’s what people see. I’m neurodivergent, non-binary, vaguely inept in a broad range of disciplines, and self-taught with a big helping of ‘there’s no such thing as self-taught, you just don’t acknowledge who or what taught you’ awareness.
I fix cars, I write stories, I play synthesizers (and fix those, as well). I’m disabled, with a damaged ankle from an injury when doing the other thing I used to work in professionally – photography. Most of all I think a lot, and join the dots, in an odd, ADHD-powered holistic view of everything whether it wants to be viewed that way or not.
There’s no success story, no ‘founder’ or ‘leader’ or nonsense. We’re not so different. So, please – enjoy the site, when it’s running. If you like it, it will grow.