#51: City of a Million Basements
Paul Ford wrote a great essay a few years ago about the "big empty American room" that forms the backdrop of so many YouTube videos. Each appearance of the mundane domestic setting where another YouTube user records a monologue or stunt is an unintended glimpse into one more standardized, suburban interior, together forming an endless parade collectively viewed by billions of eyeballs after the cursory tidying that would precede a small gathering. Unlike most familiar architectural patterns, these rooms weren't designed or built to be seen, at least not by anyone but friends and family (and probably not even by most of them). If we've physically been in such a room, and most of us have, we weren't meant to think about them or even notice them, but now, Ford observes, the "YouTube room" has become a trope of its own, one accessed via rectangular browser windows rather than front doors, foyers, and staircases.
I can't help but imagine all of these placeless backdrop rooms as part of one byzantine, globally-sprawling building, a mazelike warren of hallways with no organizing logic, built from an ensemble of digital and physical materials and stitched together by the megastructure of the YouTube platform. Despite comprising the most private of American spaces, that assemblage of bedrooms and basements—the haunts of the proverbial loner—would be an extremely public setting, a place where things would happen (more so than anyone's local mall, at least). "Public space" is difficult to define these days, but urbanists, who think about that space the most, haven't really updated their definition, still largely conceiving it as a public square, park, or similar outdoor area. YouTube isn't quite a public space either, for several obvious reasons, but Ford's essay frames the internet as not just an alternate digital reality but a form of logic that rewires existing physical spaces in highly tangible and powerful ways.
The architect Robert Venturi cynically wrote in 1966 that "Americans feel uncomfortable sitting in a square: they should be working at the office or home with the family looking at television." Fifty years ago, in other words, that traditional idea of public space already seemed obsolete. Formerly vibrant American city centers were turning into dead zones while many who had the opportunity fled to the interiorized comfort of suburbia. Physical public space is alive and well in the present-day American city but it nonetheless relies on the internet to reach its highest potential. The grid-based street layouts that organized city growth in a bygone era implied that legible urban space would extend outward forever in predictable fashion, eventually coalescing to form a continuous, cosmopolitan City we would all inhabit. The grids that still exist usually stop at the edge of town, where an illegible landscape takes over and, like the internet, requires a larger infrastructural network to navigate. In this environment we don't have to choose between sitting in a square and watching TV at home; the sudden, accidental prominence of YouTube rooms in suburban houses suggests the two activities aren't incompatible.
Reads:
Ian Bogost on malls and why we'll miss them when they're gone. "Malls are prisons for commerce, but at least the commerce stays inside them."
The Age of Post-Authenticity and the Ironic Truths of Meme Culture. What will happen to truth as it decouples from authenticity?
Until next time,
Drew