Pontus Alv has released several interviews recently to coincide with the launch of Last Resort AB. His latest with Monster Children may be his most insightful yet. He addresses the elephant in the room with regards to the major dilemma of the Information Age: how does anything have value when we’re constantly bombarded with more of it everyday?

So, what’s next?

The new value in the world today is mystique. Not knowing, not sharing, not being out there. The Dane Brady example – you go off social media and it’s like you’re dead. What happened to this guy? He doesn’t exist! People ask me several times a week if he is alive. That’s the thing today: limiting information. The information you get should be high quality.

And it’s that restraint again.

Look at how many skate clips are out there every day, it’s just fucking killing our whole culture. It’s too big, too many videos, too many things. It’s not healthy; we’re flooded with information. That’s why I wait to put out something until it means something. When I grew up there were three or four years between videos. It’s not interesting to watch a video every year because nothing has changed. Guy Mariano was a little kid in Video Days, then you saw little things here and there and the next time you saw a full part from him was in Mouse. Holy shit! That makes sense to me, because you see progress. He grew up, he became taller, he changed his style. He became mature. It’s a little bit like how you see with Oski and those guys. He was a little kid, and you follow his progress over the company’s history.

Your stuff, the Atlantic Drift series, the John Wilson clip that came out recently. We’re all waiting for these things, and everyone can feel that they’re a level above.

Yeah, but why are you waiting for a new Polar video? Maybe it’s because you haven’t seen anything of it for a while. How can you miss something if you have it on tap? If I put out Polar in Paris and Polar in New York, Summer days in Copenhagen with the Polar team three times a year, you would not be excited to see anything from us. The guys are putting stuff out on Instagram and little snippets here and there, but you’re waiting for the full show.

So much time and money that goes into every video. To get those epic clips and those epic sessions, that magic only happens sometimes. If you go on a trip, maybe you only use three clips from that trip, if you’re lucky. You wait for those magic moments, because that’s what you’re trying to collect. You just don’t know when they’re going to happen. You just have to keep going out together skating, collecting those special moments. And in the end, you present them together and you get that epic experience and it’s worth all that energy and time. My problem is: where do you put it out?

That’s the negative side of the digital format. Everyone can put something out there and even if it’s really good, like that Johnny clip or that Fucking Awesome promo, it just comes and you don’t have the same respect because back in the day you went to the skate shop and you had to pay 20 bucks for it. You held it in your hand and you put it in a machine, and you played it over and over again. It’s a different feeling.

Every week there’s another sick thing to click on, then it’s just gone. Years and years of hard work, thousands of hours. And it’s just like, yeah, that was sick. Some stuff you go back and watch again, but where is it sitting? Where does all this magic sit? On a server somewhere.

Read the entire interview here.

Image Via Pedro Ramundo