According to the New York Times:
Something new is happening in the Silicon Alley night. A decade ago, a typical party for New York techies would be held at a glitzy club to celebrate the start of a Web site. There might be minor celebrities, go-go dancers, an open bar and pricey giveaways all to build brand-awareness, which, it was believed, would somehow, someday, lead to profitability.
But when the Internet bubble collapsed, so did the Silicon Alley 1.0 party scene. What remained was more buttoned-down and sedate. Cybersuds, a low-key monthly networking party, started in 1994 at a TriBeCa bar, evolved into a formal technology conference and then around 2003 disappeared.
Now, young Internet entrepreneurs, some holdouts from the old days and a few members of the city’s creative class (and underclass) are engaged in a new type of party, which mashes together Silicon Alley 1.0’s camaraderie and optimism, meetup.com’s spontaneity and informality, Burning Man’s home-brewed creativity, and a technology conference’s devotion to unveiling ideas. These days many of the ideas are about producing and delivering video content.
I sure hope so. In the past decade or so, nightlife has been dumbed-down and commodified beyond imagination - with mega clubs and Las Vegas and, well, the Meatpacking District. Today’s shift sort of reminds me of the shift in the late 1970s from the mindless consumerism and style-fetishism of disco ala Studio 54 to a more intellectual melding of art, music, dance, and design with the rise of new wave and alternative clubs from the Mud Club to Area and Dancetaria. One can only hope this more recent era of mindlessness is reaching its end.
What say you, dear readers?
August 20th, 2008 at 4:31 pm
It’s worth noting that along with the relatively high-profile Ignite events, there is a groundswell of lower profile events as well, in a lot of places you wouldn’t expect them to pop up.
This reflects the continuing radical lowering of the cost of organization itself, such that many of these events are volunteer-run and free.
Take a look at the places hosting BarCamps:
http://www.barcamp.org/
And, on a more entrepreneurial note, Startup Weekends:
http://startupweekend.com/
August 28th, 2008 at 5:00 am
Dear Richard,
This may interest you:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/travel/2008/aug/27/warsaw.poland
It’s about the colonisation of an old “no go” area of Warsaw, Poland, with hip young things along lines of providing an antidote to the bland, shiny, corporatist new build that is sucking the soul out of Warsaw’s city centre.
So maybe the article’s got a point. Here in Birmingham, UK, there’s the usual meat-market “vertical drinking sheds” that serve the mainstream nightlife market in the city centre, and which “creative types” shun in favour of smaller, independently-owned bars and clubs on the edge of the centre and further out in suburbs: but isn’t this also about snobbery, as well as being “edgy” and “creative” - or does that matter? There’s been snobbery in nightlife since the concept began, surely?