The Image Megalopolis
I got into NYC at noon and, upon emerging from the subway at Canal St saw a guy taking a TikTok. His camera pointed across the street at a couple of women with different bright hair colors. "I like your shoes," the girl with pink hair yelled to the guy who had the phone pointed at her. The guy replied, "I love you too," and the girl turned to her friends, who were giggling and went, "aww." The sad thing is that this type of random interaction is such a New York moment that it's not even worth mentioning or writing about.
Everything I see when I go to New York has already been written, seen in a TV show, or seen in a TikTok. New York's high density and reliance on public transit offer a kind of voyeurism that writers love. You can disappear into the crowd and stand close enough to people to overhear conversations and pick up narratives happening all around you. No other American city offers this to the extent that New York does, and because of that, there is an argument to be made that most fictional characters you see on American television until now are probably some version of someone the writer saw in New York. To take it one step further, most modern writers who did not have access to real New York probably based their characters on characters they saw on television (including yours truly).
Later in the evening, I went on a stroll around SoHo and Lower East Side, and upon stumbling across the bar, Lucien's realized I was in Dime Square, the part of town I know exclusively through memes. The infamous headquarters of a hyper-specific, hyper-online scene as the Daily Beast called it. I texted my friend Drew1 about this and took a picture of the bar that would seem unremarkable to anyone unaware of the online lore around Dime Square. I was participating in a spectacle not much unlike how in the Don DeLillo novel White Noise, Jack and Murray goes to see the most watched barn in America. They arrive at the barn after passing several signs that say "most photographed barn up ahead." Upon arriving, Murray watches people take photographs of the barn and says, "We are not here to capture an image, we are here to maintain one. Can you feel it Jack?." I wonder how much of New York is people maintaining images so that people like me can come through and keep maintaining the image. This type of image maintenance is much more decentralized and invisible now. Each online subculture has its own physical spectacle that is invisible and unremarkable to anyone unaware of it. This is also an inversion of early 2010s social media, where online spaces served as the place to highlight the special interactions that you had offline. Now, there are places in the physical world that signal which online subculture you belong to or follow voyeuristically.
This superimposition of online ways of making sense of the world upon physical spaces can also be seen elsewhere. On the subway, I saw an ad for a supposedly Muslim app that led with the line, "2023 is the year of the short Muslim king". The Ad went on to say "88% of women say they would marry a man under 6ft". Notwithstanding that, I would have led with the line, "Not since Genghis Khan have short Muslim kings stood a fighting chance", I thought this ad offered an interesting insight into modern dating. If you met a person in real life at a bar, stats such as height and job might not be the first things that someone considers to decide whether to continue the interaction. Since those are the most legible things in an online profile, it seems that those legible stats have bled into the real-world hard preferences of people when picking someone to date2.
Marshall McLuhan predicted this when he talked about cities of the future being less huge hunks of concrete and steel and more of an information megalopolis. The information in the physical world is beginning to communicate to us with the proper assumption that we spend most of our time online. It used to be that we used physical metaphors such as Information Superhighway to describe what being online was like. The day is not far way when we will use online metaphors to talk about the physical world.
Kneeling Bus who I highly recommend reading
I’m 6’2” , not that you asked