My suspicion seems to be (I had to write Chronic...

Thursday, January 5, 2012

“My suspicion seems to be (I had to write Chronic City to know I felt this) that Manhattan, the great secular-commercial metropolis, the world’s first and greatest city founded on concepts other than religious or national identity - and therefore a kind of science-fiction city, a conceptual project, a place unnaturally subject to the distorting forces of capital, ideology, projection, wish-fulfilment and so on - has become in effect the human tribe’s dry run for virtual reality: a place both persistently real and unreal. Or, an unreal place where real people are living out their existence. So, now that the rest of the world is becoming partly virtual, we’re the canary in the coal-mine here in New York. What’s gone wrong and right in this place has a special amount to tell us.”

Jonathan Lethem (New Statesman).

Thanks to Will Wiles for that quote.