I’m curious if this is a USA-centric hot take, because at least in Europe, where I’ve lived the past seventeen years, very few folks within the metropolitan circles I frequent are preoccupied with what’s happening culturally in American cities. Hipsters are taking over in Europe, too, but it’s a much slower burn, in large part because there are many cultural aspects of European cities that don’t require much if any money to enjoy them.
The problem is that all cities, no matter where they are, are simply starting to look the same. So it's not really interesting culturally. And cities cannot be great incubators of culture anymore since they have become to expensive, as they say "gentrified". They all look like Disneyland props. I'm from Paris and we feel it.
I’m reading Paul Bowles and am mindful that there were many ex-pats who lived rich creative lives elsewhere (Tangier in his case). Which is another way of agreeing with Samuel’s take above.
Bowles is an interesting example. And then there was that large group in Paris--Hemingway, Pound, Stein, Ford, Sylvia Beach, Joyce, etc. I don't see that sort of thing happening any more. Is it? I mean, there was a bit of an uptick in the 60's and 70's--Cohen inn Greece and so on--but even here the "artists colonies" such as Soho, Carmel CA, for instance are gone and monetized. So, yes, maybe the internet is shaping up to be a place for a new café culture and creative dynamo with the necessary nitty-gritty, raw beginnings. Lord knows Bowles' stuff was infused with the nitty-gritty.
Prague had pockets of that place-based culture and creative community when I visited a few years ago, but it was also fast gentrifying and hipster-izing. Globalization has contributed to this. And the web is as much a factor in "gone and monetized" as anything else. There was no Airbnb in Bowles's time.
I don't want to get squeamish about it, but as of 2020 cities are now buzzing with 5G and soon to be 6G radiation. It's weird to think that as a recently as the 90s, major cities had little to no EMR except maybe the airport radar – but that was always several miles out of town and no issue to public health. As a physicist friend joked back in the mid-2010s, "4G is enough speed, what's the deal?" Your essay is spot on, but don't overlook the invisible electromagnetic fields!
Interesting. Substack is the one place I've found the most people with interesting things to say, read, and talk about--the closest thing to what I've imagined those cafés in artist enclaves might have been like terms of a wide array of artists and thinkers. Maybe a bit more siloed here in terms of a cross pollination of genres, but we're not bumping into one another physically here either. And then there's an awful lot more material here too. But, again, a lot of art has come out of a time and place of disorder. Thanks for this. Much to think about.
"I have this suspicion that the pandemic was a collective trauma that we still haven’t processed, and a great deal of the trauma was this — that at a stroke the city became outmoded and it became clear that the real movement of wealth and culture was through the web."
Absolutely. I feel like Ling Ma's "Severance: A Novel" however kitsch and pulp millennial nonetheless effectively expresses this trauma that ended the hipster daydream, forcing youth to not so much grow up but just GTFO of the metropolis as of the pandemic.
There's a salty clip of Eric Weinstein out there where he riffs on this general feeling along the lines of (my paraphrasing), "I have this saying that nobody likes, that it's over: 'Oh, I'm moving to Austin!' Yeah, it's over. 'I'm moving to Nashville!' Yeah, it's over. New York, LA – over." Personally, having lived in Boston for almost the entire 2010s, the idea of moving back is not appealing for so many reasons – definitely feels over. Friends who fled Manhattan during covid say the same upon visiting: "Feels like a theater with only the crew left, and no cast; no soul."
Thought-provoking and enjoyable as always, and a couple of comments from the upper end of the age spectrum.
A lot of culture has always come into the cities from afar. When we lived in NYC in the early 80s --, a low point economically for the city and now seen as a high-water line culturally -- I recall country music was invading the city, and an awfaul lot of "hip" New Yorkers were wearing cowboy boots. The bold even wore Stetsons. Alas, I never saw a pair spurs, but I was always hoping. I did not go to the neighborhoods where they wore chaps.
I think the death of the cities is partly due to the priviativization of culture. While you are right to identify the Great Books, encylopedias, and even several million listeners in the 1950s routinely tuning into the weekend rdio broadcasts of the N.Y. Metropolitan Opera, still an awful lot of culture was consumed by outsiders (suburbanites, and before that people from the outer rims of the cities) commuunally and in the city centers. Everything from movies (inculding so-called revivial theatres, which were the only reliable way in pre-DVD and streaming days to see classic movives), to theatre, to art galleries were consumed in the heart of cities and in much greater quantity. These have faded as routine entertainment. People stay home instead.
This atomization is both wonderful -- what we can access on our screens is inexhaustible -- or the end of civilization as we know it. Hopefully, the correct answer if both.
"High culture,’ almost by definition belongs to elites, while mass culture belongs to everybody else."
We absolutely must destroy this stupid lie.
They still teach a little Shakespeare in most public high schools. You can check out a copy of Moby-Dick from your local library at no charge. You can stream videos of performances at the Met Opera.
Meanwhile, the obscenely wealthy show zero taste. I grew up in Silicon Valley; I saw what they did to our town.
There has never been a better time for the masses to read and explore culture. If only we would stop repeating the lie that culture is not available.
The internet can certainly hold people's attention, but I don't think it can replace in-person interaction in the long run. Remote workers love the flexibility but remote work is correlated with depression.
I think a lot of it comes down to bobos. A person who's trying to be bourgeois and bohemian at the same time is typically actually bourgeois, but they think of themselves also as bohemian, which means they aren't fulfilling the critical urban bourgeois role of financially supporting the parasitic bohemians. The internet seems to make this worse, as people online tend to develop maximalist ideas of themselves, the kind of ideas that wouldn't survive much in-person social interaction.
The stereotypical big cities you're supposed to move to might be played out, too expensive, too phone-addicted. People should move to smaller cities. There's absolutely no reason Baltimore, Cleveland, St. Louis, and other affordable, second-tier cities can't be centers of bohemian revitalization. That's what hipsters are supposed to do: move to cheap places no one else will live and make them cool.
I hope we're moving away from the era of peak internet-mediated centralization in which local was out and national/global was in. I don't think peoples' behavior during this era can sustain interesting & dynamic local cultures, or really human happiness.
I don’t think it’s the city per se, but places where knowledge is required. The centres of culture in medieval times were the monasteries and some eventual castles - but not all of them. Fairs were also part of that. I think it has more to do with places where people congregate. The city now plays this role, but it can change, because I believe people are getting more selective.
There are good comments here. Kind of like a café bull session. It’s made my day.
Still, there’s something about being present physically at a small table having an espresso and bun, writing on paper with a favorite pen, and looking around to see others in your tribe doing the same, nodding an acknowledgement but not intruding. That silent human noise of artists at work.
Lord, I miss it.
When I returned to the U.S. on a “placement” cruise from Southampton the New York (they sold tickets to get ships from one port to another for seasonal cruises for cost to cover fuel but including three big meals a day, so very affordable even for a travelling hippie writer), I got on a ship’s elevator and in it was David Bowie. We nodded. The ship was pretty much empty, so we’d see each other here and there, usually sitting somewhere scribbling in a notebook. Never spoke, just acknowledged the presence of another scribbler. That sort of thing. Lawrence Durrell wrote about the presence of the person in the café corner watching—the writer. Another expat traveling and writing.
But a lot of these pockets were essentially villages, weren’t they? Villages ensconced within a city (the Village), or small towns like Carmel in the 40’s where Robinson Jeffers built his stone house on the beach, or Sausalito—small places with sparse and rustic houses where creatives could assemble, afford to eat, wear clothes that were wearing thin but nobody cared because it was about the art.
We look for something modest and human, perhaps, in hopes for something other than the rule of money.
Culture has been migrating online since the 2010s. The pandemic cemented this shift. I visited Tokyo in April - Harajuku, Shibuya, Akihabara are all culturally famous locations but today they only exist as location tags for tourists.
Cities are in transformation now are their purpose from the industrial era is being redefined.
It seems to me that you’re somewhat resigned to the web becoming the primary source of intellectual culture, and that the task now is for the rest of us to get used to it. I think there’s a deeper problem here. Increasingly, people are choosing to accept the web as primary reality, at the expense of direct contact with the world. That creates fertile ground for self-referential intellectual cathedrals and, ultimately, a kind of epistemic nihilism.
Your essay may be accurately describing a trend, but I don’t think it’s something we should simply adapt to. In that sense, the essay feels unfinished, because the harder question is still in front of us: how do intellectuals themselves preserve epistemic groundedness when so much of their perception, conversation, and cultural production takes place within the same recursively self-referential medium they are trying to understand?
Great culture requires great critics and we have none in the age of “good vibes only” and toxic positivity. It’s why people are lining up to see a piece of shit like Nolan’s Odyssey. Credentialism helped kill criticism—you can’t criticize freely and risk offending potential benefactors when you’re knee deep in MFA debt. The MFA is now the mutual fellatio association.
I’m curious if this is a USA-centric hot take, because at least in Europe, where I’ve lived the past seventeen years, very few folks within the metropolitan circles I frequent are preoccupied with what’s happening culturally in American cities. Hipsters are taking over in Europe, too, but it’s a much slower burn, in large part because there are many cultural aspects of European cities that don’t require much if any money to enjoy them.
The problem is that all cities, no matter where they are, are simply starting to look the same. So it's not really interesting culturally. And cities cannot be great incubators of culture anymore since they have become to expensive, as they say "gentrified". They all look like Disneyland props. I'm from Paris and we feel it.
Good point. Affordability is key. Especially for beginning artists.
Wondering if any of you read Vincenzo Latronico’s ‘Perfection’. It’s set in early/mid 00s Berlin and speaks to part of this.
Really fascinating piece, Sam. Thank you.
The notification ‘Is the City Finished’ popped up on my phone and it felt like Romulus was texting Remus.
I’m reading Paul Bowles and am mindful that there were many ex-pats who lived rich creative lives elsewhere (Tangier in his case). Which is another way of agreeing with Samuel’s take above.
Bowles is an interesting example. And then there was that large group in Paris--Hemingway, Pound, Stein, Ford, Sylvia Beach, Joyce, etc. I don't see that sort of thing happening any more. Is it? I mean, there was a bit of an uptick in the 60's and 70's--Cohen inn Greece and so on--but even here the "artists colonies" such as Soho, Carmel CA, for instance are gone and monetized. So, yes, maybe the internet is shaping up to be a place for a new café culture and creative dynamo with the necessary nitty-gritty, raw beginnings. Lord knows Bowles' stuff was infused with the nitty-gritty.
Prague had pockets of that place-based culture and creative community when I visited a few years ago, but it was also fast gentrifying and hipster-izing. Globalization has contributed to this. And the web is as much a factor in "gone and monetized" as anything else. There was no Airbnb in Bowles's time.
Sam this was a wonderful read!
I don't want to get squeamish about it, but as of 2020 cities are now buzzing with 5G and soon to be 6G radiation. It's weird to think that as a recently as the 90s, major cities had little to no EMR except maybe the airport radar – but that was always several miles out of town and no issue to public health. As a physicist friend joked back in the mid-2010s, "4G is enough speed, what's the deal?" Your essay is spot on, but don't overlook the invisible electromagnetic fields!
Interesting. Substack is the one place I've found the most people with interesting things to say, read, and talk about--the closest thing to what I've imagined those cafés in artist enclaves might have been like terms of a wide array of artists and thinkers. Maybe a bit more siloed here in terms of a cross pollination of genres, but we're not bumping into one another physically here either. And then there's an awful lot more material here too. But, again, a lot of art has come out of a time and place of disorder. Thanks for this. Much to think about.
"I have this suspicion that the pandemic was a collective trauma that we still haven’t processed, and a great deal of the trauma was this — that at a stroke the city became outmoded and it became clear that the real movement of wealth and culture was through the web."
Absolutely. I feel like Ling Ma's "Severance: A Novel" however kitsch and pulp millennial nonetheless effectively expresses this trauma that ended the hipster daydream, forcing youth to not so much grow up but just GTFO of the metropolis as of the pandemic.
There's a salty clip of Eric Weinstein out there where he riffs on this general feeling along the lines of (my paraphrasing), "I have this saying that nobody likes, that it's over: 'Oh, I'm moving to Austin!' Yeah, it's over. 'I'm moving to Nashville!' Yeah, it's over. New York, LA – over." Personally, having lived in Boston for almost the entire 2010s, the idea of moving back is not appealing for so many reasons – definitely feels over. Friends who fled Manhattan during covid say the same upon visiting: "Feels like a theater with only the crew left, and no cast; no soul."
This is about as good a description as I’ve heard of my experience of NYC now - “Feels like a theater with only the crew left, and no cast; no soul."
Thought-provoking and enjoyable as always, and a couple of comments from the upper end of the age spectrum.
A lot of culture has always come into the cities from afar. When we lived in NYC in the early 80s --, a low point economically for the city and now seen as a high-water line culturally -- I recall country music was invading the city, and an awfaul lot of "hip" New Yorkers were wearing cowboy boots. The bold even wore Stetsons. Alas, I never saw a pair spurs, but I was always hoping. I did not go to the neighborhoods where they wore chaps.
I think the death of the cities is partly due to the priviativization of culture. While you are right to identify the Great Books, encylopedias, and even several million listeners in the 1950s routinely tuning into the weekend rdio broadcasts of the N.Y. Metropolitan Opera, still an awful lot of culture was consumed by outsiders (suburbanites, and before that people from the outer rims of the cities) commuunally and in the city centers. Everything from movies (inculding so-called revivial theatres, which were the only reliable way in pre-DVD and streaming days to see classic movives), to theatre, to art galleries were consumed in the heart of cities and in much greater quantity. These have faded as routine entertainment. People stay home instead.
This atomization is both wonderful -- what we can access on our screens is inexhaustible -- or the end of civilization as we know it. Hopefully, the correct answer if both.
"High culture,’ almost by definition belongs to elites, while mass culture belongs to everybody else."
We absolutely must destroy this stupid lie.
They still teach a little Shakespeare in most public high schools. You can check out a copy of Moby-Dick from your local library at no charge. You can stream videos of performances at the Met Opera.
Meanwhile, the obscenely wealthy show zero taste. I grew up in Silicon Valley; I saw what they did to our town.
There has never been a better time for the masses to read and explore culture. If only we would stop repeating the lie that culture is not available.
The internet can certainly hold people's attention, but I don't think it can replace in-person interaction in the long run. Remote workers love the flexibility but remote work is correlated with depression.
I think a lot of it comes down to bobos. A person who's trying to be bourgeois and bohemian at the same time is typically actually bourgeois, but they think of themselves also as bohemian, which means they aren't fulfilling the critical urban bourgeois role of financially supporting the parasitic bohemians. The internet seems to make this worse, as people online tend to develop maximalist ideas of themselves, the kind of ideas that wouldn't survive much in-person social interaction.
The stereotypical big cities you're supposed to move to might be played out, too expensive, too phone-addicted. People should move to smaller cities. There's absolutely no reason Baltimore, Cleveland, St. Louis, and other affordable, second-tier cities can't be centers of bohemian revitalization. That's what hipsters are supposed to do: move to cheap places no one else will live and make them cool.
I hope we're moving away from the era of peak internet-mediated centralization in which local was out and national/global was in. I don't think peoples' behavior during this era can sustain interesting & dynamic local cultures, or really human happiness.
I don’t think it’s the city per se, but places where knowledge is required. The centres of culture in medieval times were the monasteries and some eventual castles - but not all of them. Fairs were also part of that. I think it has more to do with places where people congregate. The city now plays this role, but it can change, because I believe people are getting more selective.
There are good comments here. Kind of like a café bull session. It’s made my day.
Still, there’s something about being present physically at a small table having an espresso and bun, writing on paper with a favorite pen, and looking around to see others in your tribe doing the same, nodding an acknowledgement but not intruding. That silent human noise of artists at work.
Lord, I miss it.
When I returned to the U.S. on a “placement” cruise from Southampton the New York (they sold tickets to get ships from one port to another for seasonal cruises for cost to cover fuel but including three big meals a day, so very affordable even for a travelling hippie writer), I got on a ship’s elevator and in it was David Bowie. We nodded. The ship was pretty much empty, so we’d see each other here and there, usually sitting somewhere scribbling in a notebook. Never spoke, just acknowledged the presence of another scribbler. That sort of thing. Lawrence Durrell wrote about the presence of the person in the café corner watching—the writer. Another expat traveling and writing.
But a lot of these pockets were essentially villages, weren’t they? Villages ensconced within a city (the Village), or small towns like Carmel in the 40’s where Robinson Jeffers built his stone house on the beach, or Sausalito—small places with sparse and rustic houses where creatives could assemble, afford to eat, wear clothes that were wearing thin but nobody cared because it was about the art.
We look for something modest and human, perhaps, in hopes for something other than the rule of money.
Culture has been migrating online since the 2010s. The pandemic cemented this shift. I visited Tokyo in April - Harajuku, Shibuya, Akihabara are all culturally famous locations but today they only exist as location tags for tourists.
Cities are in transformation now are their purpose from the industrial era is being redefined.
It seems to me that you’re somewhat resigned to the web becoming the primary source of intellectual culture, and that the task now is for the rest of us to get used to it. I think there’s a deeper problem here. Increasingly, people are choosing to accept the web as primary reality, at the expense of direct contact with the world. That creates fertile ground for self-referential intellectual cathedrals and, ultimately, a kind of epistemic nihilism.
Your essay may be accurately describing a trend, but I don’t think it’s something we should simply adapt to. In that sense, the essay feels unfinished, because the harder question is still in front of us: how do intellectuals themselves preserve epistemic groundedness when so much of their perception, conversation, and cultural production takes place within the same recursively self-referential medium they are trying to understand?
Great culture requires great critics and we have none in the age of “good vibes only” and toxic positivity. It’s why people are lining up to see a piece of shit like Nolan’s Odyssey. Credentialism helped kill criticism—you can’t criticize freely and risk offending potential benefactors when you’re knee deep in MFA debt. The MFA is now the mutual fellatio association.