People seem to have the same attitude regarding cities. San Francisco exemplifies this to the extreme: many people will criticize any change to the city that has come after the end of their teens / the year of their moving to the city.
It's just general status quo bias, I'm not sure there is anything specific to technology. Technology makes it obvious because the pace of change is faster, but I've heard (vegan) people defending a drive-in McDonald in SOMA because it was here when they grew up.
True. I miss the way Seattle was when I moved here long ago when it was still a Boeing town. There was a unique Seattle culture that seems to have faded away. Fortunately, the local TV show "Almost Live" did a great job of capturing it for posterity. Few non-locals get the jokes in it, and in 20 years few Seattlites will, either.
It's a good question. It's a little hard to explain, it's more of a feeling. Some of the touchstones are Rainier Beer (long gone), the hydro races (kinda loved to death), the I90 "bulge" (gone), the Pike Place Market, the Bite of Seattle (loved to death), Bumbershoot (loved to death), Ivar's Restaurant's silly TV ads (Ivar died and is much missed), the freeway ramps to nowhere getting torn down, Bellevue turning into a glass towerscape, Ballard losing its norwegian flavor, Capitol Hill losing its counter culture due to escalating real estate prices, moldy waterfront cabins replaced by $5m mansions, the 1940s bungalows all disappearing, etc.
The Space Needle and the creaky squeaky Monorail and of course Sylvester are thankfully still there and going strong.
As a Seattle Norwegian I think it's too bad what's happened to Ballard! At least we still have our parade, although it's not as nice as it used to be (a lot more drinking and non-norwegian stuff) and my family isn't sure if we'll still go.
How does "loved to death" work in the case of an event such as the ones you mentioned? Are they still there but lost their culture due to volume, or did they somehow fail despite that volume?
Both of the events you mentioned still seem to exist, in some form.
By loved to death, I mean crushed by too many people attending. Some things don't scale well.
It's like when the NHRA top fuel drag racing comes to down. It lasts 3 days, with the finals on Sunday. I go on the preceding Friday. Far, far fewer people attend, and it's much more informal. You can park within a reasonable distance. You're not swimming constantly in a crowd. You can watch the mechanics at work, and even talk to them. There's no big crush in the grandstands. It's much more informal, unstructured, and with little need for crowd control. And yet there's still all the action.
Maybe Bellevue becoming a glass towerscape will lead to new cultural growth there. That Seattle feeling you described is beginning to plant itself in these new cities cropping up on the eastside.
Your article about sub-cultures strongly reminded me of the Tor project. I've been tempted to get involved, but it seems to me like the fog of war is all around it.
> The mops, when properly squeezed, produce liquid capital, i.e. money.
"liquid capital" -- such a sublime, apt description/definition of money. Surprised I've never encountered it before, in awe of its simplicity and insightfulness. So obvious I should have thought of it myself.
Abraham Simpson said it best "I used to be with it, but then they changed what it was. Now what I'm with isn't it, and what's it seems weird and scary to me. It'll happen to you..."
First, this Douglas Adams quote:
I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:
- Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
- Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
- Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.
The second was this very insightful article on the dynamics of the evolution of sub-cultures: https://meaningness.com/metablog/geeks-mops-sociopaths
For the record, I've never been to Burning Man, nor seriously tempted to change that.