#52: The Small World Fallacy
The observation that "the world is small" has become a cliché by now, after decades (and really centuries) of relentless technological assault on the limitations of geographical distance. It finally feels like nobody talks about how accessible the rest of the globe has become anymore—we're used to it. At an earlier point in this adjustment process, Brian Eno coined the phrases "big here" and "long now" as contrasting ideals to the hyperlocal attitude toward space and time he observed living in New York in the 1970s: While attending a party at a multimillion dollar apartment in a decaying neighborhood, he realized that his host's idea of "here" didn't extend beyond the walls of her home. Likewise, "now" referred to days or weeks rather than longer time horizons. One would expect the opposite if the world was really getting smaller—our notion of "here" should at least be expanding, if not "now" (which has undeniably kept contracting)—but this was the '70s and the planet still had plenty of shrinking to do.
The size of the world is useful narrative material. There is a variously attributed adage that there are only two kinds of stories: a man goes on a journey and a stranger comes to town. While that oversimplifies things a bit, both situations obviously require a world large enough that it's possible for someone to go somewhere different than where they already are. In our present condition, this is still obviously possible, but it's hard to imagine distance as the measurement of any "journey" that stops short of outer space. Traveling between the United States and Europe, by now, is a mundane activity, at least in the narrative sense. Meanwhile, other kinds of distance still exist, such as the (now quantifiable) social distance between two people, but their decoupling from geography makes for less visceral storytelling.
Martin Scorsese's 1985 After Hours exemplifies the kind of movie that probably can't exist in any recognizable form today: A man meets a stranger at a cafe in uptown Manhattan after a tedious day at work and agrees to go to her apartment in SoHo later that night. During his cab ride downtown all of his cash blows out the window, trapping him in the neighborhood for the night and embroiling him in a series of nightmarish hijinks with people he would never normally come into contact with. The world feels huge in After Hours. Downtown and uptown New York City are presented as though they were separate countries, culturally and geographically. When was the last time you got physically stuck somewhere because you ran out of cash? Judging by the locations in the film, the protagonist could have walked home in less than two hours, but everyone somehow knows he can't. If anything, After Hours captures a time when we still understood the distance between distinct cultural realities in geographic terms, probably to an exaggerated degree. We can stray from our beaten paths just as easily now, but if we get trapped where we end up, it probably won't be for lack of cab fare.
Reads:
A reflection on the rise of TouchTunes digital jukeboxes and how they're "eroding the dive bar experience." A ubiquitous feature of the urban landscape that I've barely ever considered. This piece has some interesting thoughts about how these jukeboxes blur the distinction between public and private space.
Another Kyle Chayka piece, this time on Bjarke Ingels (now the chief architect at WeWork) as the quintessential architect of the generic global city. "The end result of this omnipresence is a kind of absence."
A former Coast Guard light station 34 miles from the North Carolina coast is for sale after operating as a bed-and-breakfast since 2010.
Until next time,
Drew