Many different ways of looking at the Swarming.
New Paul Graham essay on Cities and Ambition is interesting. Predictably a little depressing for those of us stuck in cities that don’t really send a coherent message to their inhabitants, except perhaps the suggestion of a muttered “fuck you”.
Really, is Colombo even a city in this sense? Sure, a lot of people live here, but it seems to lack a certain urban cohesiveness or identity, just lots of little groups of people, generally divided on class lines or ethnic lines or both, who don’t really inhabit the same city at all. This could be my jaundiced view of the matter, but I think this is why it’s hard to say that Colombo has any kind of message or unifying metaculture at all. There are of course a lot of people who think it does, but they don’t seem to agree amongst themselves on what that metaculture or fundamental organizing principle is.
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May 31, 2008 at 12:58
Eh. Notice that all his examples (perhaps unsurprisingly) were cities in the US of A? His passing throwaway reference to Oxford and Cambridge just said the message isn’t as strong.
Methinks in that sense, Colombo is a lot like London. The message is almost always going to be mixed; because lots of things happen here.
Optimism. Let me show you it.
May 31, 2008 at 15:37
Outside of America, he mentions Paris, London and Florence -the man is obsessed with Florence- but yes, it’s generally very Ameri-centric. Graham usually is, isn’t he? Startups, the Valley, yadda yadda.
Still, I don’t think that this “message” he’s talking about can be mixed just because “lots of things happen there”. What, lots of things happen in London but not in New York? Unless you mean that London is home to more disparate subcultures than New York is and that London lacks a unifying metaculture? Surely, both highly debatable positions. Graham suggests hipness and aristocracy, I think, for London’s metacultural message, suggesting that they are in a limited but relevant sense the same thing -that might be enough to bring together the old London and the new London, perhaps, the central message being that you should above all else strive to belong to an upper class or a cultural elite. A somewhat more… normal message, for cities in its age and weight class, than an obsession with physical attractiveness or entrepreneurship or whatever.
Also, “metaculture” is not the right word, but I’m grasping for something more like “underculture”, a shared root system that feeds all the nested subcultures built on top of it, rather than some sort of all-encompassing “uberculture” that manages to resolve the inconsistencies. A set of shared assumptions that this kind of Grahamian master message (”make more wealth”, “be better-looking”, whatever) can be built on.