The Post-Apocalyptic Tech Scene
A reflection on what happens when only the rich have a place in the world.
I spent the last week traveling around the Rust Belt talking with startups and entrepreneurs. We spent time in incubators and accelerators, in co-working spaces and rehabbed manufacturing complexes. As I wandered through the post-industrial landscape, I kept recalling something that author and farmer Novella Carpenter said at a panel she did with my wife at the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association a couple months back. Commenting on her neighborhood in west Oakland she said something like, “Where I live, the apocalypse already happened.”
It changed the authority figure. Crack cocaine was done so openly, and the people who were addicted to it, the fiends, had very little self-respect. It was so highly addictive that they didn’t care how they obtained it and they carried that out in front of children, who were dealing at the time. So the relationship of that respect, ‘I have to respect my elders’ … that dynamic shifted and it broke forever. It just changed everything from that point on.
“I was very aware of the dangers involved because there were people dying [and] there were people going to jail and it wasn’t a one-off. It wasn’t an occurrence where everyone was shocked. It wouldn’t be a shock like, ‘How could that happen in this neighborhood?’ It was really a weekly or monthly occurrence.”
When I was growing up in rural Washington, meth swept through in much the same way as the exurbs experienced wrenching economic change. The Multnomah County Sheriff south of us in Portland created a website showing how people’s faces changed after meth use: It’s no exaggeration to say that heavy meth use makes people look like zombies.
Point is: there are a lot of places where the apocalypse has already happened. Where “post-apocalyptic” is not a term for a new television show. Whole communities have been destroyed, predatory gangs and drugged out zombies left to roam the vacants as the locals hurry indoors before night falls.
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