Technology changed everything, of course. Purveyors of the newer, sleeker 21st-century Internet were less interested in expanding people’s worlds than in what they euphemistically called “Disruption.” Per Bellafante: Not the goofy, glitchy, GeoCities, hippie-inspired “Net” of the 1990s that chewed up seed money and spat back little but instantly obsolete CD-ROMs, over-designed interfaces, and infinite argumentation on the old message board, The WELL. Gina Bellafante nodded to this in her recent New York Times column, about how the death of Prozac Nation author, Elizabeth Wurtzel, brought to mind memories of how a striving sliver of Generation X once believed, with some good reason, “that the right combination of talent, drive and intellectual privilege would sustain a long, materially comfortable New York life in the arts, in publishing.”Īnd then came the Internet. At a time when there is no end of (justified) diatribes about the current state of a certain slice of New York City-glass-shrouded, artisanal-choked, mushroomed with CVSs and Citibanks and pour-over coffee shops, art pushed even further to the margins away from the engines of money-it can be refreshing to remember the city as the dream it once was.
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