Steamy New York summer evenings are for frenetic but laughter filled catch-up dinners with East Bay friends at a Forsyth Street basement Thai joint accessible only by the steepest of rickety older-knee-joint-unfriendly metal stairs. We reminisce about NYC when we couldn’t really afford to live here. How these days they see the same shops and can nosh the same snacks whether in Singapore, Oakland or Park City. Going to bed after the sugar crash from a slice of blueberry Petee’s Pie, I have this dream where I'm in every city at once. London bleeds into Los Angeles bleeds into Tokyo, and I'm standing in the middle of it all, holding a Hokkaido Milk matcha latte fundamentally identical to one I had on other street corners of other metropoli, the groundhog-day-ness of it all triggering uncertainty of whether I've ever actually been anywhere at all. Welcome to everywhere and the death of the specific.
I saw a stat about a data center down the road from my early career Internet 1.0 job near Sterling Virginia that consumes 5 million gallons of water daily. That's like the same amount as a town of 50,000 people? I learned this while doom-scrolling on the device that necessitates its existence, and the irony wasn't lost on me. We're living through a great flattening, where so many cities becomes a suburb of nothing, a playground for algorithms and venture capital, while the actual humans get priced out of their own lives.
This is what's been called global homogenetic culture on Substack. But maybe we should call it CTRL+V Civilization. It's the reason you can buy a Labubu in Omotesando, Gangnam and Hackescher Markt. It's why every high street looks like LEGOs with logos: Zara, Aesop, Lululemon, repeat. It's why the TikTok algorithm serves you the same outfit worn by seventeen different people in seventeen different cities, all of them thinking they're unique.
Let's play copy-paste culture Carmen San Diego...
Gangnam is Roppongi Hills is Pudong is Marina Bay is Cyber City.
Hudson Yards is King's Cross is Zuidas is HafenCity is Seaport District.
Williamsburg is Prenzlauer Berg is Palermo Soho is Shimokitazawa is Tianzifang
Tech-ified, gentrified neighborhoods are the ground zeros of cultural death, perfected in the 2010s and now the only model anyone seems to know how to extrude and 3D print. The smooth, frictionless surfaces we've created are literally drowning us. Each neighborhood identical, each experience optimized, each 100-word ChatGPT prompt drinking another bottle of water.
Here's the thing about friction: capitalism hates it. Friction slows transactions, creates inefficiencies, makes scaling harder. So we spent decades removing it. One-click ordering. Seamless checkout. Frictionless sharing. But what if friction was never the enemy? What if it was the thing keeping our cities human?
The plot twist is that the younger generation is starting to rebel in the most paradoxical ways. While older millennials were out there trying to optimize their personal brands, Gen Z is spending actual money on "dumb phones." Sales of flip phones doubled in 2023. A third of us say we want to downgrade our tech. We're so desperate to escape the digital panopticon that we're literally buying Nokia bricks and bedazzling them for TikTok.
Remember BeReal? That app where everyone posts at the same random time daily. It exploded to 73.5 million downloads before crashing because watching your friends sit at desks isn't actually that riveting. But the desperate grasp for "realness" speaks volumes. We're drowning in performance, suffocating on our own digital exhaust.
Meanwhile, the physical world burns. Digital nomads, funded by remote tech salaries, flooded into Lisbon, Barcelona, Mexico City, turning them into playgrounds for people who think "experiencing culture" means finding the best wifi for their Zoom calls. Water pistol protests in Barcelona. "Digital nomads = forced nomads" signs in Lisbon. Locals literally spraying tourists with water guns because they can't afford to live in their own cities anymore.
The numbers are staggering: Barcelona rents up 68% in a decade. Northern Virginia data centers consumed 2 billion gallons of water in 2023. A 63% increase from 2019. We're literally drinking the planet dry so someone can ask AI to write their dating profile. The frictionless digital world has a very physical cost, measured in gallons and evictions.
Jenny Odell's "How to Do Nothing" captured part of this. The attention economy is eating us alive. But bird-watching in city parks is a luxury when doing nothing costs $3,000 a month in any city worth considering.
Cities are finally waking up. Amsterdam capped Airbnbs. Florence went full Renaissance and banned them outright. But Paris? Paris!? Paris didn't just fight the algorithm. It hacked the entire urban operating system.
Under Mayor Anne Hidalgo's 'La Ville Du Quart d'Heure,' Paris is doing something bonkers: actually making it possible to live where you live. The concept, dreamed up by urbanist Carlos Moreno, goes like this: all your daily needs — shopping, education, health, leisure, even work — should be within a 15-minute walk or cycle. Not a 45-minute subway-car-pressed-against-someone's-armpit commute. Fifteen minutes. On foot. Like humans used to do before we all became delivery app cyborgs.
This isn't some consultant’s PowerPoint fantasy. The city now has over 1,000 kilometers of cycling routes. They turned parking lots into gardens. School playgrounds become weekend parks for wine-drinking neighbors. The Minimes barracks, military infrastructure from 1925, now houses apartments, a daycare, workshops, and a café where you can get an actual espresso made by an actual person who might actually remember your name. Oh, and for the first time in a century, after a $1.6 billion investment, the river Seine is safe and open for swimming.
When COVID hit and we all became shut-ins, Hidalgo's team saw opportunity in the apocalypse. Those emergency bike lanes everyone thought were temporary? Surprise, they're permanent now. Paris has reported a sharp rise in boulangeries. Real ones. The kind where madame behind the counter judges your pronunciation of "pain au chocolat" while her husband in the back makes croissants that would make you weep.
The city encourages diverse local businesses and kiosks where neighbors meet and share services. They're literally engineering serendipity, building luxurious lag into the urban fabric. Making it easier to stumble into your neighbor at the corner café than to order another sad desk salad from your delivery app of choice.
Of course the conspiracy theorists lost their minds. British politicians literally laughed at the concept in Parliament, probably while their own cities turned into identical outdoor malls. "They're restricting your freedom!" they cried, as if freedom meant sitting in traffic for two hours to buy the same stuff you could get anywhere else on Earth.
Smart people warn that walkable neighborhoods become unaffordable ones. No shit, making places nice makes them expensive. But instead of throwing up their hands and letting the market devour everything, Paris doubled down on social housing in the transformed quarters.
Every pandemic bike lane that survived, every local baker who can now pay rent because 10,000 neighbors can walk there for lunch. They're all tiny acts of rebellion. Urban insurgency through infrastructure. Speed bumps in the matrix. Glitches in the paste function.
The algorithm wants frictionless commerce flowing from fulfillment centers to your front door. Paris is building a city where the front door is worth walking out of.
Compare that to Austin’s “Keep Austin Weird” campaign. A vibe that got swallowed by venture capital and now lives mostly on bumper stickers affixed to Teslas. The difference? Paris made proximity economically viable. They didn’t just protect neighborhoods; they rebuilt the entire urban metabolism around them. They added friction back into the system — bike lanes instead of highways, boulangeries instead of delivery apps — and the system thrived.
Let’s imagine another twist. What if… some communities subvert these same tools to fight back?
Imagine in Seoul, @banchancore2026 flooding TikTok with hyper-specific neighborhood memes that only make sense if you’ve survived Line 2 at rush hour. Like the “Gangnam apartment elevator test” videos where locals rank Raemian vs Xi vs Prugio complexes by their elevator wait times and judge your social status by which button you press. Or the “Jongno 3-ga grandfather fashion week” series documenting the impeccable style of elderly Korean men who’ve been buying the same hiking vest from the same underground shopping center stall since 1987. Or the viral “Noryangjin study café mukbang” where exam preppers rate which convenience store kimbap tastes best at 3 AM while crying over civil service exam prep books. Content so specific that even Korean diaspora kids in LA are like “what the f is a goshiwon?” The account could go viral, but only locally, creating "un-exportable content."
What if in Detroit, artists used Discord servers named after specific cross-streets ("7 Mile x Woodward") or DMEF DJ sets, where you could only join if you could prove you've physically been to that corner or heard that set live? They'd coordinate pop-ups and parties that last exactly 47 minutes. Long enough to sell out. Too short for the algorithm to catch up. "We're using their tools to build things they can't commodify," they'd say.
Picture the Welsh government funding an AI that communicates in regional dialects, occasionally refusing to translate certain concepts. Usage could explode among young Welsh speakers who finally had tech that didn't feel like cultural erasure. "We're teaching machines to be as stubborn about local culture as our grandparents were."
This isn't the clean, efficient AI that Sam and Mark and Arvind promise in the ever-escalating PR war of social posts. It's AI with an accent, AI that makes you work for it, AI that says "no" to your request for the "best coffee shop near me" and instead tells you about the bench where the senior señores play dominoes and drink cafecitos at 3 PM. It's inefficient, maddening, and exactly what we need: technology that adds grit back into the system, that makes certain places harder to consume, not easier.
The thing is, we wanted the frictionless world. We clicked "add to cart" on this entire reality. Every time we chose convenience over character, every time we let another local business die for same-day delivery, we voted for this. And now we're trying to buy our way out with dumb phones and digital detoxes, as if the solution to hypercapitalism is just... different capitalism.
But maybe that's too simple. The kids trying to make "newtro" happen. That aesthetic of nostalgia for times we never lived through. Are maybe onto something deeper. They're not just bedazzling flip phones and shooting film. They're adding happy sludge back into their lives, making things harder on purpose. They're learning that perhaps the answer isn't to optimize our way out of this mess but to corrupt the optimization itself.
I can’t stop thinking about those data centers, humming away, drinking their 5 million gallons while we argue about paper straws. Every frictionless transaction, every seamless experience, has a cost measured in water and displacement. But I also think about Welsh teenagers teaching AI to be difficult. About kids in Detroit selling art for exactly 47 minutes before vanishing into the night.
So here we are, living in CTRL+V Civilization, every city a suburb of every other city, all of us suburban in our souls. We paved paradise for a server farm we can't even see, trading our futures for two-day shipping and infinite scroll.
But the paste is starting to fail. The copy function wearing out. Kids in Korea making memes that don't translate. Every Discord server with a geography quiz for entry, every AI that refuses to translate, every 47-minute pop-up that vanishes before it trends. They're all adding drag back into a world that capitalism wants to be frictionless.
Maybe we can't return CTRL+V Civilization like an unwanted Amazon Prime purchase. But we can smudge the file, one local blip blip blip at a time.
The next time I have that dream where I'm in every city at once, perhaps it flickers and feel fuzzier. Sometimes São Paulo tastes different from Seoul. Sometimes the algorithm stuttttters and shows me something that won’t make sense unless or until I'm actually physically there. Sometimes the paste... just fails to paste.
And in those glitches, those moments of turbulent static like the old-school extra hard durometer, loud as f**k, skateboard wheels of my youth, I catch glimpses of cities that are more than suburbs of nothing. Cities with paper-cut-threat-edges, with resistance, with the beautiful inefficiency of being stubbornly, expensively, impossibly themselves.
