#71: Cities Are Getting Smaller
After the Amazon HQ2 announcement and subsequent hysteria that it will ruin New York (which I wrote about in the last newsletter), Justin Davidson wrote a good article about how Amazon's arrival is the kind of thing that has always happened in New York and that everyone should calm down because New York is pretty huge and can probably absorb it. Around the same time, Thrillist's Kevin Alexander published a widely-shared piece about how he bestowed the title of America's Best Burger upon Stanich's, a mom-and-pop restaurant in Portland, and unintentionally destroyed the place by doing so. The onslaught of new customers was too much for the store to handle. It turned out, however, that the owner's personal issues may have been more responsible for its demise. The fact that the original narrative wasn't entirely true but still stuck attests to how powerful that particular narrative is: Places—individual stores, neighborhoods, and entire cities—are fragile, and the internet makes them more so.
Why have we come to understand the physical world as so delicate, though, and not the solid foundation on which all this information and culture rests? If the lesson of the HQ2 announcement was that New Yorkers absolutely believe a large tech company is capable of ruining their city, the lesson of the Thrillist Best Burger in America is that people online absolutely expect the internet to crush good small things by overwhelming them with too much attention. And that expectation often proves accurate. We can probably all think of an example of something we liked that the internet ruined. Rob Horning made the useful point that tourist traps like the Eiffel Tower have served as "catch basins for attention and notoriety to protect things that weren't made to scale." Newer internet infrastructure, particularly social media, "imposes scale on fragile phenomena" and gives everyone the tools to impose that scale. So much of the world, which was built before that digital infrastructure existed, now sits vulnerably in its high-traffic thoroughfares.
The world continues to rapidly urbanize, but somehow cities feel smaller than they used to, dwarfed by the scale of the internet megastructure. One of the most famous statements about the relationship between technology and the built environment is from Victor Hugo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame: "This will kill that." The newly-invented printing press would kill the cathedral, because people would no longer need to communicate through architecture. An early case of a new medium hollowing out meatspace by abstracting its embedded information into a parallel domain. The internet did that too, but now it's sandblasting what remains with the same stuff it absorbed and distilled. Marshall McLuhan wrote that every new medium contained another medium as its content: Speech, for example, became the content of writing, as writing became the content of print. Cities, which grew independently for so long, might now be the content of the internet.
Reads:
Jenny Odell's investigation into a particular corner of the strange, spammy Amazon clickbait landscape, and the equally weird drop-shipping empire that is behind it.
Renee DiResta on the global-scale information war being waged across social media platforms and how the imperative to stop these attacks are likely pushing us toward digital security theater.
A library that straddles the US/Canada border has become a site of reunions for Iranian families separated by the US travel ban. The library's single entrance is on the US side but officials still let Canadians in without passing through an official port of entry.