According to Wikipedia "parkour" is at least a century old. But I doubt the founders would have envisioned the hair-raising acrobatics as practiced on some of today's high-rises:
Such footage reminds me of scenes from the movie Strange Days. The plot pivoted around a technology that might be best described as a "brain VCR," where the sensory experience of one person can be played back by another. We don't have tech like that, but parkour athletes fill in with wearable GoPro cameras and some of the slick, new hobby drones.
Does the technology then become part of the reason to do such acrobatics? Look what I did? That was one of the themes in Strange Days. Sharing the experience of an extreme sport is one thing, but some people also indulge in the Strange Days-like act of recording one's own crimes. The difference is that in the movie selling the recordings was an underground thing, and perpetrators of thrill crimes kept their IDs secret. Some of the perps today are stupid enough to post their crime videos on their own social networking accounts. And that's not a smart stunt.
