urban development

As cities like Austin cater to coastal transplants, their unique culture gets diluted, becoming more generic. Is cultural entropy inevitable, or is there a counterforce? As cities like Austin cater to coastal transplants, their unique culture gets diluted, becoming more generic. Is cultural entropy inevitable, or is there a counterforce?

The canary in the coal mine for me is the yuppie coffee shop (which admittedly I love). When you're in one of these shops - the ones with the $6 non-dairy cappuccinos, gorumet chocolate chip cookies topped with malden salt, in a room with lots of wood accents and pothos plants overflowing from their shelves, there's no way to tell if you're in Austin, or Williasmburg, or the mission district of SF or Shoreditch in London. 

While the internet enable infinte diversity and microcommunities, physical spaces seems to be converging toward a monoculture. I imagine fueled by things like increased global travel and social media. 

#DeepTakes

Some folks in NYC turned an apartment into a community space in a way that sounds (at least on the face of it) pretty delightful: https://supernuclear.substack.com/p/case-study-merlins-place

Makes me wonder about doing something like that in my home – but then i find myself getting antsy. I like having a haven of quiet mineness – might even need it.

But also, when I read that post, something comes alive in me. It feels really exciting to imagine being a part of a community/space like this. Having a village sounds really nice (at least when I romanticize it and ignore the fact that there's a reason for the phrase "village idiot").

(meta: this post is also an effort to see if I can make this place feel like that. Feels like it needs to be able to include this kind of half-baked personal missive in addition to "bridgy" expertise and conversations about civilizational well-being. Technically, it can, of course. But spiritually? I'm not sure. I mean, it might just be that I don't particularly gravitate towards being part of a mostly textual virtual space. :shrug:)  

I want a new archetype for libertarian well-being activist. Maybe it’s an old archetype and some German philosophers have been talking abt it for centuries…

My climbing gym is called Crux; the original location is moving because the rent is too high, and the landlord won’t work with the climbing gym…

The gym is in a part of the city that used be considered south, but now is centralish. I think all of austin loses when we lose places like this. We lose our character and our well being.

I want the landlord to be the libertarian well-being activist. My mom does this for the Relateful Studio. I didn’t ask and no one makes her; hardly anyone knows and she doesn’t get any tax benefits; we still pay her a good bit each month but it’s under market. She’s doing exactly what she wants to be doing with her money and investments: supporting her son’s vision.

The climbing gym landlord isn’t a bad guy, probably. Maybe he has loads of debt; maybe he has a wound from childhood that he’s trying to heal, but
Is the climbing gym landlord doing exactly what he wants?

I want endosymbiosis activists; where what they do is good for the whole and them, and they sacrifice neither. I want this to be a meme, that people strive to be. I want them to brag about it in their hearts, and try to remain undiscovered. I once heard that in Judaism the best mitzvahs are the ones no one knows you did.