Red Rooster

So, after a brutal progression of parties and fluff events over the past eight days, I’d like to share my thoughts on what I’ve experienced.

We were promised a culture conference. What we got instead were a bunch of marketing demonstrations for mostly irrelevant (despite being well-conceived) web services. Several companies who already throw occasional parties here in NYC provided excellent entertainment. Notably, those parties had no product demos, advertising flyers, or branded rubber toys to be seen anywhere. Otherwise, many people running interactive media companies here in New York communicated quite clearly that it will always be 1998 for them. It’s as if nothing happened in the interim. And, in execution, the whole set of events reminded me of the Tribeca Film Festival, another ineffectual and disorganized NYC industry event that seems to be more self-congratulatory than it is practical or productive.In one conversation over the course of Internet Week, a friend of mine who runs a creative agency agreed with this sentiment: it just might be time for some of us in “the scene” to drop out entirely in favor of working on a new generation of leadership and progress. It seems to be a waste to continue encouraging this nonsense. The bottom’s going to fall out on this set of ideas really quickly, and no one wants to be standing in the middle of it when that happens.

In another conversation, I agreed with a friend on a more drastic sentiment: we would actually leave New York City to find something better. She’d contemplated moving to Europe, and I was considering San Francisco. And it wasn’t just about the harebrained marketing ideas, the clueless venture capitalists, the arrogant trust-funders, the Eurotrash tourists, the greedy landlords, and the price of a pint of beer on the Lower East Side. It was about making a living; it was about finding a place in the world; it was about growing up, after all. We already know we’re not going to be famous or rich or successful, mostly because (as we learned after-the-fact) we didn’t come here already rich, famous, or successful. But we’re ok with that. We came here for creative ambition. We came here for opportunities to get involved with things that we couldn’t find anywhere else. And if we can’t have that, then we just want to work enough and make enough money to be comfortable. New York City was never a place for comfortable people. Not even the filthy rich are comfortable here. But sadly, NYC now also seems to be a place where nothing happens, ever. You could move away for a year and not miss a thing. Just read about everything on Bloglines, and chat with your buddies on IM. Why pay a four-figure monthly rent in Brooklyn when you could rent a whole fucking house somewhere for $700 a month? Oh, but someone’s creating a new system to deliver streaming video to your iPhone so that you can share recipies with people who are within the same 10-block radius. Who gives a fuck?

If the creative scene here is bankrupt, I’d rather spend my time in a place where you don’t have all of these irritants. I will give up Bryant Park, The Strand, dim sum, loft parties and 4:00 a.m. last call for that. Life is too short to sit around in a brutal and depressing city hoping for change.

That said, I’m here, and for the time being, I am not going anywhere. There is a lot of true cultural potential here in New York City. The blogosphere can be about more than bar meetups and bad gossip. I haven’t succumbed to the irritants, yet. But I clearly smell something foul around here, and it isn’t street trash baking in the 90-degree heat.

So let this be a call-out to anyone who thought that Internet Week NY 2008 was well-conceived or well-executed. It wasn’t. It was a big spread-out mess from the start, and for anyone who wore out cab brakes or Metrocards getting from one place to another, it was a shitshow with very little show. It clearly revealed that NYC is behind-the-times when it comes to hosting interactive media culture. We’re even behind Austin in this regard. I have many, many specific ideas on how we can rectify this, but I can tie it all together (and wrap-up this ungodly-long rant) by saying that, next time, you can sell all the advertising you want, but the actual content needs to be more about people and less about products. Because people are tired of being surrounded by desperate marketing bullshit.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 11th, 2008 at 11:31 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.