#93: Frontierland
The American frontier closed in 1890, according to that year's census, meaning that there was no longer a continuous line beyond which the territory's population density was less than two people per square mile. The United States still contained many pockets of empty space, as it does today, but they had broken apart into separate voids and no longer coalesced behind the visible limit of western population expansion. It’s hard to find a unifying theme for emptiness, which the concept of the frontier provided; once that narrative dissolved, the remaining uninhabited areas more or less disappeared from public consciousness. After the frontier closed, of course, it was still virtually impossible to travel to most of the places that had finally become populated, and in this sense there was a second closing of a more global frontier to follow: By the late 20th century, advances in individual mobility had made most of the globe relatively accessible from anywhere else on it (although, as with the original frontier, plenty of unacknowledged voids remained).
When I travel to popular tourist destinations—even the most established ones, like Florida—conversations with longtime residents reveal that there weren't all that many visitors until the past few decades, after which a transformative boom occurred. In support of those anecdotes, this recent article about “overtourism" confirms that the total number of international tourist arrivals worldwide has increased from 70 million in 1960 to 1.4 billion today. Overtourism is perhaps best symbolized by the image of a long, motionless line snaking upward to Mount Everest's summit, but you can probably think of more examples you've personally encountered. Although air travel has been relatively inexpensive for a long time now, overtourism seems to be intensifying: The article attributes that to rising global affluence as well as the broad technological streamlining of travel, as enabled by services like Airbnb and TripAdvisor as well as the internet in general. Of course, the internet is also indirectly culpable: Greg Lindsay, in his book Aerotropolis, coined Kasarda’s Law: Every technology that circumvents distance electronically will increase our desire to traverse it ourselves. Or: The more your friends post about Tulum on Instagram, the more frenzied will be your desire to go there yourself, until you finally make the trip and also post about it on Instagram in a spiraling process that ultimately overwhelms and ruins Tulum.
Increasingly, physical space is just more content the internet lets us consume, something we practically stream, another content flow delivered to us by a different set of platforms that massively expand the market for something by removing the friction that previously limited how many people could participate. When demand for digital content explodes, Netflix or Facebook can add servers to level up. Even Amazon can quickly ramp up its supply chain to deliver more physical goods. But what about places in the physical world, particularly the delicate few that people actually want to visit? If culture and information are software in the loosest sense, then Iceland and Rome and Mount Everest are the hardware that can't upgrade itself fast enough to run the new operating system (and in that analogy we are the bits being pumped through them). The overtourism article notes that many destinations "have no problem with the number of visitors they receive—would it even be possible for Orlando or Vegas to be over-touristed, logistically or spiritually?” No, but the logic of Orlando and Vegas is now being exported to places that already existed without it, making them feel like particularly realistic (but still crowded) extensions of those theme parks. After the frontier closes, you just return to what's already been built.
Reads:
Shannon Mattern on the implications of 5G cellular wireless. "The realization of a datafied dreamworld depends on physical stuff."
Why aggregate population density is a misleading statistic and how finer-grained measurements are more useful for understanding a city. Density is fractal.
Russia's toxic Instagram lake: "A newlywed couple posted a series of pictures by the blue water, so iridescent it seemed nearly to sparkle, as a backdrop for their new life together."