Conversation

I’m mediocrely at home here. It’s the second best place in the world for everybody. If you can’t figure out the best place for yourself, move here and hang out till you either figure it out or run out of money.
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LA lives the future while the Bay Area and Seattle merely try to build it. If the physical world had a software/internet it would be LA. LA ate the world before software did.
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This is why every aspiring greatest city is so jealous. London, NY, Tokyo, Singapore… they’re all the number 1 for some primitive pre-modern group of homo pre-digitalis. Urbanism fetishists of one sort or the other. But the real prize is being number 2 for everyone else.
Replying to
LA doesn’t even pretend to be a city. It’s a parking lot in the desert in the interstices of highways, and a ridiculously terraformed hydrological landscape. Featuring a bunch of theme parks of regular cities. A bunch of architectural quotes pretending to be neighborhoods.
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Cars, planes, worlds biggest telescopes until the 90s, Hollywood… this VMWare among cities doesn’t really want to be earthbound so it ignores everything other cities think is important for a respectable city. That’s all just programming for the theme park game engine.
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Possibly the most poetic thing I’ve done in my life was to get the refactorcamp.com crowd to hold what was quite likely the 7th and last physical iteration of the event in LA, on the the theme “escaped realities” just before moving here myself 😎
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… and in my closing remarks (8 months before Covid) argue that future iterations should be fully online. I also argued that like LA itself, the event was (and ought to be) more airport than “community”
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I mean it has its dark side. They’re literally gaslighting and running a 90s pop star in an infinite loop to print money. The whole city is for real what the Vegas Strip presents as consciously crafted entertainment.
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