30 years
It’s the 30th anniversary of Silicon Alley—always a specious concept, but a useful one. By merits of basic intransigence and inertia I’ve been here for most of it.
There’s a big, big party downtown and normally I’d be looking for a reason to stay home and mess with computers—but I wrote the intro to the cool-sounding oral history zine they put together, in my ceremonial role, and I want to see it. I’m part of the merchandise.
I’m writing this in the dark in bed because it doesn’t start until 8:30 and goes until 2am, which is so outside my parameters that I made myself nap.
I also just re-read the introduction I wrote—I filed it in October—and it feels like a missive from a different universe. It’s not wrong or anything. It just is an attempt to capture a moment in tech history and talk about the value of NYC—and after I sent it in and did my edits, things really started to…change. Trump slid into an exceptionally cruel madness, the country is committing suicide, the Valley became craven quislings, NYC elected a gleaming young socialist, Grok started undressing children, and computers started writing all the code.
Then again my essay basically said: We are temporary and the city remains. That’s true.
The other thing is, and I left this out of the essay, is that one day NYC will be gone too. The steel girder architecture would crumble into mounds over centuries. The subways flood in hours without pumps. This place desperately wants to be a wooded island if only we’d let it.
Everything is ephemeral without constant maintenance. Networks are the source of all power but networks are ephemeral.
Perhaps the Brooklyn Bridge has the best potential as a ruin. A big pile of stones. Probably our closest to the pyramids. We don’t have a coliseum (we did have a bookstore named after the one in Rome, now gone, and missed).
But that’s okay if it’s all that remains because the Brooklyn Bridge is the best idea in the city. It brought two cities into one. It will absolutely outlive everyone here. It could outlive the flag atop it. Thirty years of the Internet will seem like such a small blip to the future.