30 years update
Update: The fire marshal shut down new entrants. Six hundred grumblers in a big lobby. Six degrees outside. All of us in a huge snaking unmoving line. Oof.
I stood solo, and listened to VC murmurings.
Someone said: It’s a large fund.
Someone said: He’s not liquid.
Someone said: I never knew what Diplo even looked like.
My friend made it to the 41st floor. “I’m by the broken TVs,” he texted me. “It’s unbelievably crowded.”
It is very hard to do something for a truly large group in New York City. Event spaces are okay but at a certain scale you need to go through a hotel or a theater, or a museum. But then the costs explode.
Alas humans at scale are a liquid. You have to manage them like a liquid. We spill everywhere. A large group desperately wants to be a mess. Just like NYC wants to become a forest.
They kept trying to pack us into tighter cordons because the line wasn’t moving, to kind of compress the situation. People were running around with clipboards and yelling a little. But in 30 years I’ve learned to recognize a proper mess. Time to go.
In NYC the fire marshal is a sacred figure of total power. This is why we don’t have so much death. You have to go with it. They can set an equilibrium. Meaning I’d have to wait for three or four hundred people to leave.
Or leave myself. Ah well. No social validation for me. My friend got me a copy of the event magazine. I’m the foreword. Mayor Bloomberg is the afterword. So there you go. Paul Ford and Michael Bloomberg, bookends to 30 years of NYC tech. That’s diversity for you.
I love having a blog again.
No bars down that far east on Maiden Lane so we bailed to Brooklyn. After a drink, just one, I took a car home.
The thing I left out of the foreword—because it would have been very off topic—is that eventually this all will become the Anthropocene discontinuity, a few inches of plasticy rock in the geological record. I think constantly about that. The world craves to turn us into something very thin and mineral. At some level you need to welcome it.