Some cities reveal what I cherish about them much more immediately than others. I've noticed that what I love about SF can be hard for visitors to see. How do you visit "weird people taking ideas v seriously"? How to put that in a guidebook? You've gotta go to the dinner parties.
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Last Sat I met someone on their first visit to SF, at a small informal event. An attendee gave a lightning talk on computational theories of consciousness; I thought: aha, excellent! Weird, sure, but *now* this visitor got to see the SF I love!
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By contrast I feel like what I love culturally about LA and NYC are much easier to "visit".
(But maybe if I moved there I'd develop some more niche "taste" for the city which would be hard to "visit".)
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Somehow forgot: I absolutely got my heart broken when I visited SF for the first time at 16. I was quite isolated growing up, pinned my hopes on SF as a place where I'd feel culturally at home. As an outside visitor (who didn't know how to travel), I was so disappointed!
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Sure, great views, great food, fun to walk around, but… where was the magic? I couldn't find it!
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my favorite twist: you have to have a facebook account to know about a lot of these
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That is odd! I've noticed that this seems to be mostly true of younger invit-ers? Maybe it's a gen Z thing? Runs counter to the narrative that FB is dead among young people. FWIW I 100% ignored FB for years and still had a full calendar of events! But from different people.
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oh wow, definitely you have to be on FB these days to get invited to many events! rejoined for that reason. But I think it depends on events: small gatherings still tend to be email or groupchat-organized whereas bigger parties tend to be FB events
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Hah, jinx. twitter.com/andy_matuschak
Yes, that's probably fair to say. Parties and bigger indiscriminate events are on FB; more curated/focused events are (usually) not.
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Replying to @andy_matuschak and @maxkriegers
I notice that FB events seem to encourage a kind of maximalism—why not invite one more person!—and so they're pretty reliably much larger. That's good for certain kinds of events, and not for others, I guess.
event-only fb has def been a meme for nigh-on a decade. at this point i think there's enough of a vacuum energy floor of high-openness pseudo-ironics to provide for good clopen events
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thank u andrew I always appreciate the demonic details u bring to the discourse
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