Kicking. Squealing.
Commenter Rivsdiary referred me to an essay by Paul Graham called “Cities and Ambition“. Graham has lived in New York City, Silicon Valley, and Cambridge, Mass and developed a feel for the status messages transmitted by these centers of influence. Some snippets:
That’s not quite the same message New York sends. Power matters in New York too of course, but New York is pretty impressed by a billion dollars even if you merely inherited it. In Silicon Valley no one would care except a few real estate agents. What matters in Silicon Valley is how much effect you have on the world. The reason people there care about Larry and Sergey is not their wealth but the fact that they control Google, which affects practically everyone.
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Maybe the Internet will change things further. Maybe one day the most important community you belong to will be a virtual one, and it won’t matter where you live physically. But I wouldn’t bet on it. The physical world is very high bandwidth, and some of the ways cities send you messages are quite subtle.
As a blogger and an observer of journalists, pundits, and meme-transmitters of all kinds I find this point interesting. The internet is democratic in terms of regular people coming into contact with a larger quantity of information and analysis, but it is perhaps less democratic in the sense that the powers-that-be interact in networks and spheres of influence that are made stronger by the internet. Look at Twitter and the way that all of these pundits and prestige pressers know each other and regurgitate each others blog posts and ideas. It’s all still centered geographically through the NYC/DC corridor.
So far the complete list of messages I’ve picked up from cities is: wealth, style, hipness, physical attractiveness, fame, political power, economic power, intelligence, social class, and quality of life.
My immediate reaction to this list is that it makes me slightly queasy. I’d always considered ambition a good thing, but I realize now that was because I’d always implicitly understood it to mean ambition in the areas I cared about. When you list everything ambitious people are ambitious about, it’s not so pretty.
On closer examination I see a couple things on the list that are surprising in the light of history. For example, physical attractiveness wouldn’t have been there 100 years ago (though it might have been 2400 years ago). It has always mattered for women, but in the late twentieth century it seems to have started to matter for men as well. I’m not sure why—probably some combination of the increasing power of women, the increasing influence of actors as models, and the fact that so many people work in offices now: you can’t show off by wearing clothes too fancy to wear in a factory, so you have to show off with your body instead.
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How many times have you read about startup founders who continued to live inexpensively as their companies took off? Who continued to dress in jeans and t-shirts, to drive the old car they had in grad school, and so on? If you did that in New York, people would treat you like shit. If you walk into a fancy restaurant in San Francisco wearing a jeans and a t-shirt, they’re nice to you; who knows who you might be? Not in New York.
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One sign of a city’s potential as a technology center is the number of restaurants that still require jackets for men. According to Zagat’s there are none in San Francisco, LA, Boston, or Seattle, 4 in DC, 6 in Chicago, 8 in London, 13 in New York, and 20 in Paris.
The whole thing is interesting.
I’ve been to all of the expensive restaurants in Atlanta and I can’t think of one that still requires a jacket, either.
chuck, glad you liked the essay, and thanks for the mention. paul graham is a amazing. some of the best essays i have read online have been his. “cities and ambition” in particular been a very important essay for me for because it really ingrained in me four insights:
1. we need each other. we can’t “make it” alone. if i want to be great at something, i need to put myself in the right environment (city) and surround myself with people who love the same things i love. that’s why i want to move to paris or berlin, because i want to become a great art photographer. yes, i could do it in cleveland, ohio — but no, i couldn’t. PG says it perfectly right here:
“No matter how determined you are, it’s hard not to be influenced by the people around you. It’s not so much that you do whatever a city expects of you, but that you get discouraged when no one around you cares about the same things you do.”
2. to me, this all relates to game, both inner game and outer game. of course, “it’s all in our heads” you could say, but again, our environments are so important, and as much confidence as we have, we do get discouraged. that is the reality. that is why it is so important to move to a city where you have the best chance to succeed — and this relates to game, PUA, and dating, because the truth is that so many american girls are such bitches now — i know, i know NAWALT etc — that sure, maybe i can find a needle in that stack of hay, but again, that is why i am living in europe, because the girls are much more feminine here, not as bitchy or entitled. yes, i am working on my inner game, but i am also moving to a city that has better girls. both matter.
3. for young people, move to a big, dynamic city asap. don’t waste your youth in bumblefuck, missouri, if you want to become great in life. surrounding yourself with ambitious people is the best way to achieve your ambitions too. like d&p says, you are the average of the five people you surround yourself with most. and keep on moving around, until you find the city that best suits you.
4. life is lived in person. online will never have the same bandwith as the real world. and the real world is always influencing you, in big ways and little ways.
“The physical world is very high bandwidth, and some of the ways cities send you messages are quite subtle.”
of course, all four points are related, and if you think about it, are pretty “obvious” — shit, every girl who dreams of becoming famous moves asap to either nyc or LA — but for me, this essay has helped me a lot in realizing that if i am deeply unhappy, yeah my mindset matters, but so does where i am living.
change is good.
“for young people, move to a big, dynamic city asap. don’t waste your youth in bumblefuck, missouri, if you want to become great in life. surrounding yourself with ambitious people is the best way to achieve your ambitions too. like d&p says, you are the average of the five people you surround yourself with most. and keep on moving around, until you find the city that best suits you.”
Sounds a little Blue State centric. I happen to like Bumblefuck, Missouri very much. People don’t get panty-wadded about having a weapon in the car, and women still know how to cook here.
Sounds a little Blue State centric. I happen to like Bumblefuck, Missouri very much. People don’t get panty-wadded about having a weapon in the car, and women still know how to cook here.
When whites cluster in cities and abandon ethnocentristm it drives down their birth rates and causes them to subscribe to all sorts of stupid and self-desructive ideas, mostly for the sake of the less intelligent groups who don’t value self sovereignty and reliance in the same way. Western greatness started way before urbanization.
When all the “important” people cluster into a few urban areas, that means the elites can basically tell the rest of the nation to go to hell. And they do just that by sending them all the blacks that get driven from the hip urban centers and housing them via Section 8 (hell for the towns that get them, a godsend for the cities that send them away). Flyover country also gets a heavy share of the Mexodus who happily snap up the jobs that white proles used to do. Not a problem in the hip cities, because after all Mexicans aren’t taking your job at the art gallery or your job writing for Gawker, so they can be worn as a shiny object on your Status Charm Bracelet.
And now, the elites want to take the guns away from the red state clingers so they can be utterly helpless in the face of black and brown aggression. It’s hunting season for white proles.
As for jackets in restaurants, thank god a few places still adhere to some standards. The jeans-and-t-shirts thing has gone way too far.
I’m not convinced people living in cities are any more ambitious than anyone else. At least that doesn’t seem to hold true with the people I know. The only reason it might seem that way is because there are many more unmarried men living in cities.
And now, the elites want to take the guns away from the red state clingers so they can be utterly helpless in the face of black and brown aggression.
Yes, Bloomberg can protect Manhattan from NAM crime through stop-and-frisk, but that won’t work for low density areas down South. There’s a reason that downtown NYC is far safer than downtown Atlanta. Or imagine trying to protect your home while you’re gone for work during the day in 33% black South Carolina if living in a rural area where law enforcement may be up to 30-40 minutes away.
13 restaurants requiring a jacket? In all of New York City with millions of people living here and maybe tens of thousands of restaurants? That’s not really a lot.
Although, the number may be higher if you include private clubs. I’ve been to private clubs here that require jacket and tie, and I don’t even get out all that much.
Nice. I riffed on the ‘Cities’ essay some 3 years ago. Between the lines I explain the whole Portlandia thing for those that have seen it on TV (a year prior to them making a TV series no less). Mine also serves as a working illustration of the “Leisure” chapter in Brooks’ “Bobo’s in Paradise” that Lion recently covered.
For those slightly confused, it explains/clarifies “Buzz” in Great Cities is not about ambition as typically used in the narrow, monetary sense. It is ambition in the broad sense, of the desire to accomplish something specific to impress your friends. Also it is not to say without being in the right city one can’t have ambition; rather, in the right city it’s easier to keep one’s ambition up over time and in the face of the trials that get in the way of achieving one’s goal.
In case the hyperlink gets munched, the URL is http://www.portlandsagwagon.com/Site/Blog/Entries/2009/10/14_Great_Cities.html
I don’t understand where all this status anxiety comes from. Am I the only one that’s OK with being middle class? I grew up middle class, and I’m happy with that standard of living. I don’t need a swank manhattan apartment. I’m fine living in my bumblefuck city in flyover country. And no, it’s not that I’m unambitious, or a “temporarily embarrassed millionaire.” I know a lot of intelligent, cultured, and very ambitious people who are not wealthy and are not the slightest bit bothered by that fact.
” if i want to be great at something, i need to put myself in the right environment (city) and surround myself with people who love the same things i love.”
Matters not one whit if you are an outsider to the gatekeepers of success in your field of endeavor.
I live in Seattle, and the government is largest employer here, and welfare dependency is about equal to those numbers. A large percentage of nominally ‘private’ companies here are also dependent on government contracts (bribes and handouts).
What I think that the study is missing is the growing, uneducated Underclass—which comprises elements of all races and is fueled by the divorce/out-of-wedlock birthrates—who are going to become a huge social problem for all major urban areas in the future.
Technological and high-status areas are likely to become concentrated more geographically in the future—similar to Mediaeval cities but with better sustainability.
Paul Graham’s writing always leaves me with mixed feelings. He’s pretty bright and is capable of some worthy insights (though really how shrewd do you have to be to notice that people in NYC like money, in LA they like beauty, in DC they like power, etc), but his writing is also shot through with naive tech boosterism that is unseemly in a man his age (one senses he spends a lot of time worrying about how to stay relevant to 20-something startup founders, hence the try-hard attempts to portray himself as a “writer, painter, hacker, philosopher, entrepreneur” Renaissance man). He seems to really believe that the most critical issue facing America’s economy is that not enough people are writing iphone apps or new web 2.0 websites, and that it’s possible to have a functioning modern economy consisting mostly of swarms of tiny 5-person companies. He also funded the creation of Reddit, which is a stain that can never be wiped from his record. I think his biggest contribution is as a barometer of the latest thinking inside the Silicon Valley nerd bubble.
I wrote about Paul Graham a couple of years ago:
http://www.vdare.com/articles/sailer-paul-graham
“Sounds a little Blue State centric. I happen to like Bumblefuck, Missouri very much. People don’t get panty-wadded about having a weapon in the car, and women still know how to cook here.”
do you have high ambitions, and are you achieving them? if so, congratulations. i didn’t mean to personally offend you. my point was just that people who have big dreams should seek to surround themselves with the best of the best in that field, which usually means a big city.
njartist49:
“Matters not one whit if you are an outsider to the gatekeepers of success in your field of endeavor.”
yeah, having connections helps, and it’s not easy to “infiltrate” a network. i remember roosh once linked to a diagram about how to infiltrate a network. it’s not easy. but talent, hard work, savviness, dedication – that shit goes far.