Just Read It?
After all, there is No Finish Line
Actual Source Books (2024)
Reviewed by Elizabeth Stice
After all, there is No Finish Line is a 2024 book created and published by Actual Source. According to their website: “Established in 2015, Actual Source is an American publisher, brand, and book store that collaborates with contemporary artists and designers, to release limited edition books, fonts, clothing, and objects.” The aesthetic is somewhere between a streetwear blog and Assouline. The books are not just conveyors of content, but aesthetic objects themselves.
After all, there is No Finish Line is all about Nike, as you should know just from the cover, in Nike’s signature orange. Inside, the book is in black and white, with almost an old school zine vibe, which contrasts greatly with the futuristic contents. The book was made in collaboration with Nike and includes essays and fiction. Written on the 50th anniversary of the company, the book emphasizes Nike’s history of visionary work and speculates on Nike’s future in a way completely in accord with futurism.
The back cover of No Finish Line reveals its vision. No Finish Line “invites everyone to imagine the infinite possibilities of design—and sport.” No Finish Line “draws on 50 years of advancing human potential to move the world forward.” No Finish Line “describes Nike’s culture is innovation via the athletes, designers, and scientists at its cutting edge.” No Finish Line “celebrates design not as an outcome, but as an endless journey.” No Finish Line “suggests we can shape a better future by simply daring to create it.” It is driven by optimism and futurism and possibilities.
What defines Nike? No Finish Line emphasizes Nike’s commitment to creating goods that satisfy the needs of elite athletes—with cutting edge technology, performance labs, and customization—while reinforcing Nike’s position that everyone is an athlete. Bill Bowerman once said that “if you have a body, you are an athlete.” No Finish Line also emphasizes the ways in which design has always been at the heart of Nike’s mission and products. More than many other brands, it has been design-driven. And this is a book for people who love design.
Many of the essays in No Finish Line engage questions about the future of brands. The book asks “what is a platform?” and suggests that a platform, “as a kind of interface, implies and relies upon the experience of interaction” (104). Will Nike and other brands expand and work to connect with us in the ways that Strava and Instagram do and then go beyond that? Will the data that our futuristic gear increasingly collects be customized so that Nike will also be where we turn for health advice and personalized coaching? The goal is to offer customers seemingly everything. “The transactional relationship of the past—you buy our product, we take your money—isn’t enough” (123). People want community and shared values and meaningful life engagement from their goods and services providers.
The fiction in No Finish Line tends to be future-based. We see a world in which there are sports in space. We see a world in which Nike has indoor skiing ranges so massive that you cannot see the ceiling and you can fly helicopters inside. The weather can be manipulated and the mountains can be adjusted to taste. We are shown a vision of running courses that can gather useful data on runners to provide helpful feedback, while also being adjustable to the individual runner. No Finish Line: “Given the rate of technological change, certain science fictions could soon become science realities: flying, invisibility, self-repairing tissues, underwater breathing, and synthetic memory are all possibilities in the earliest stages of development. As Nike considers what the future may look like, its designers and innovators are pondering how to unlock new senses and experiences as we retrain ourselves for an entirely new definition of sport” (177). Everything is cutting edge, and, with apologies to Adidas, impossible is nothing.
In a book like this, there is a certain amount of jargon and the fantastical. Are we that close to invisibility, with any practical application? No Finish Line emphasizes environmentalism, accessibility, recycling, evolution, the metaverse, and many other words intended to pique your interest about the possibilities of the future. Nike as heritage brand is hardly considered. The desirability of a future in which Nike business cards read “Perception Explorer, Insight Architect, Sports Neuroscientist, A.I. Linguist, Motivational Psychologist, Sensor Designer, and Nutrient Coach” is assumed (77). What will be the point of sports if every course is so easily personalized? That is not considered. We are offered a future in which everything is possible and inclusive, but also exciting and still competitive.
No Finish Line reads almost like dream state speculations on the future of Nike as a brand driven by design. What won’t we and our shoes be able to do, if we dream a little bigger? If you love design and/or speculative fiction, this book is a thrill ride. If you love books, Actual Source books are an incredibly vivid reminder that a book is an object. If you peruse their catalog, the covers emphasize the power of design and beauty. These are not just books on interesting topics—typography, chess players, hi-fi, and many artists—they are books that you would like to hold and probably own. The speculations in No Finish Line may not be to everyone’s tastes, but the book is intriguing enough to sustain the interest even of readers who do not understand the appeal of its predicted future. If you are a design nerd who listens to 99% Invisible, you will enjoy thinking about the contents of this book.
The existence of a book like No Finish Line is also a testament to the power of brands in our lives. Americans, not exclusively, over-identify with brands. We are Coca-Cola people or Pepsi people, almost no one is indifferent to that divide. Android people face routine commentary from iPhone people. Macs and PCs were personified in early 2000s Apple advertisements and it made perfect sense to viewers. Some of us would never wear Nike shoes with Adidas socks. Michael Jordan will allegedly throw out your non-Nike apparel if he is your friend. He takes it personally if you want to wear Reebok. So, the future of brands is very much our future, because we orient ourselves among and by brands. A brand-free future is exactly what we get in our dystopian imaginings. Fortunately, Actual Source offers hats and merchandise along with the books, so you can make your allegiance known.
Elizabeth Stice is a professor of history and assistant director of the honors program at Palm Beach Atlantic University. When she can, she reads and writes about World War I and she is the author of Empire Between the Lines: Imperial Culture in British and French Trench Newspapers of the Great War (2023).
