I am on deadline for a journal article so, naturally, I thought I would take a few minutes to do something completely unrelated. My short essay "Time Traveling in Troy, NY" has gotten some traffic and I am noticing that some readers (specifically some of the users of lifeinbkln.com) have understandably mistaken my pessimism for alloofness or detachment. As one of the lifeinbkln commentors said, "His perch high on the hill, at RPI, is a good symbol of his attitude towards what's going on down below. He never connects to anyone, it's all literally 'above it all.'" I can certainly see how someone would get that from the article, but I never wanted to convey such a notion. Rather- I am intensely hopeful that cities like Troy are the future for innovative political, social, and technological change.
I agree with fellow Capital Region resident James Howard Kunstler when he says,
Today these places [the small and medium size towns in the upper Hudson and Mohawk river valleys] stand gutted, half-vacant, idle, hopeless. Paradoxically, they may be the kinds of places that have the strongest chance of surviving the challenges of the Long Emergency. It won't be esay. But they have the potential of coming back to life at the scale that new economic realities will require. And as populations decamp the suburbs and the metroplexes, these are places that might attract them.
Kunsler and others have argued that the Long Emergency mentioned above is coming to pass. The consequences of peak oil and global financial meltdown are wreaking havoc on the sociotechnical systems that shape our built environment. The quote above is particularly precient because it was written 2005, several years before the global financial collapse that halted major suburban construction projects and the financial milieau that allowed for their physical existance. In many ways, Kunstler is dead-on. I think Troy is benefiting immensely from out-of-control rent prices and the need for a cheaper, more grounded lifestyle.
The problem I alluded to in my original piece, and what is probably the source of readers' criticism, is decision-makers uneven acknowledgement of this reality. The Hedley project still exists and still dictates the actions of government and private enterprise. There is not nearly enough concern or effort being put into shoring up the resources we already have. Perhaps the solution is financial: how do banks and municipalities make as much money off of restoring old buildings as they currently do from building new ones? Perhaps the soltuion is rhetorical: cast those that look to build new as wall street fat cats detached from the realities of Real People. Maybe we need a little bit of both?
And finally, on the subject of Real People, one Cyborgology commenter noted: "More stuff appears to be going on, in a cultural sense; more small, hip, culturally-aware businesses have opened up since the earlier 2000s; the experimental electronic music scene has come into its own a bit more." This can also (and probably should) be read as gentrification. The poor are being priced out of downtown, and those parts of Troy to the north and south that do not have Business Improvement Districts are severely lacking in resources. The blatant segregation, while not new, is getting uglier and much more apparent. I must admit that I benefit from this gentrification, and I love the wine bars, coffee shops, and other local businesses that make downtown Troy so much fun. But Troy needs to do better. It needs to --and indeed can-- be a model for city revitalization that does not include marginalizing the poor.
If my original post appears despondent, it is because I fear that this opportunity will be lost. I fear that well-meaning activists and public officials will be duped by the same progress narratives that gutted Troy just a few decades ago. That white progressive elites will build up little enclaves of boutique shops and artists' lofts and never work to make the current residents of Troy the beneficiaries of local prosperity. Again, I say this with full acknowledgement that I am guilty of supporting this kind of redevelopment. When I say "we" in my post, I am certainly not including all residents of Troy. It is only when inequality is abolished that we can all truly have safe streets and vibrant towns.
Thursday, February 28, 2013 at 9:11PM 
Just about every one of our contributing authors has written a piece that challenges or refutes the claims made by tech journalists, industry pundits, or fellow academics. Part of the problem is technological determinism- the notion that technology has a unidirectional impact on society. (i.e. Google makes us stupid, cell phones make us lonely.) Popular discussions of digital technologies take on a very particular flavor of technological determinism, wherein the author makes the claim that social activity on/in/through Friendster/New MySpace/ Google+/ Snapchat/ Bing is inherently separate from the physical world. Nathan Jurgenson has given a name to this fallacy: digital dualism. Ever since Nathan posted Digital dualism versus augmented reality I have been preoccupied with a singular question: where did this thinking come from? Its too pervasive and readily accepted as truth to be a trendy idea or even a generational divide. Every one of Cyborgology’s regular contributors (and some of our guest authors) hear digital dualist rhetoric coming from their students. The so-called “digital natives” lament their peer’s neglect of the “the real world.” Digital dualism’s roots run deep and can be found at the very core of modern thought. Indeed, digital dualism seems to predate the very technologies that it inaccurately portrays.
