Escape from "New York"

This spring we're finally seeing the last gasp of the media's over-the-top fantasy of consumption-fueled, glamour-filled "New York." What began in 1998 with "Sex and the City" the show will come to an end, this May, with Sex and the City: The Movie. Leading up to it have been the pale copycat shows "Cashmere Mafia" and "Lipstick Jungle" and now "The Real Housewives of New York City."

Ever since the media's "New York" debuted, real New Yorkers have bemoaned the disappearance of "real" New York (= affordable, creative, dirty, crime-filled New York in the 1970s). But now that "New York" is about to be over -- and the utter tiredness of the "New York" fantasy in these new shows leaves little doubt about that -- can "real" New York come back?

Well, I don't think so. New York today is very unaffordable, clean, safe, and, according to popular opinion, less and less creative as a result. And I don't think there's any going back. The problem is not New York itself, but the whole idea of the creative city: it just doesn't work anymore. New York is a great place to showcase creativity, because all the infrastructure, both physical and social, is concentrated here to support it. But that's all it is: infrastructure. And that infrastructure has gotten so big, established, and expensive that it's pushing out the creativity it was originally meant to support.

The infrastructure isn't just overgrown; it's obsolete. The art world is already moving onto the internet, and as this trend progresses the physical location of art and other culture will become not just irrelevant, but nonexistent. Marshall McLuhan predicted this outcome in 1967 in The Medium is the Massage:

The circuited city of the future will not be the huge hunk of concentrated real estate created by the railway. It will take on a totally new meaning under conditions of very rapid movement. It will be an information megalopolis. What remains of the configuration of former "cities" will be very much like World's Fairs--places in which to show off new technology, not places of work or residence. They will be preserved, museumlike, as living monuments to the railway era. If we were to dispose of the city now, future societies would reconstruct them, like so-many Williamsburgs.

Isn't fantasy "New York" just such a "Williamsburg"?  The only difference is that it, like the rest of culture increasingly, exists not in physical reality but in the virtual reality of media.

I predict that the creative work of the future, which will be aided more and more by technology and the internet, will be done by people scattered across the remote, affordable, natural, and beautiful rural areas of the country and world, as rural gentrification becomes the next "creative class" trend.  (Friends of mine are doing this right now in upstate New York.)  Major international cities like New York will become more and more expensive, sterile, and artificial, and the work done in them will become more and more abstract and business-oriented.  Perhaps a time will eventually come when the rural creative workers storm the rich cities, demanding their share of the glitz and glamour.  Or maybe the opposite will happen, and the new exciting passion will be not to make it in New York, but to make it out.