Welcome to the Age of Helplessness
We’ve lost control of the world, so we just keep canceling it
After six years of construction, New York City’s latest mega-real estate venture, Hudson Yards, finally opened in March. Reviewing the site, New York Magazine’s Justin Davidson summarized Hudson Yards as a “para-Manhattan, raised on a platform and tethered to the real thing by one subway line, has no history, no holdover greasy spoons, no pockets of blight or resident eccentricities — no memories at all.”
Hamilton Nolan, writing for the Guardian, went a step further. “Hudson Yards is urban glamping,” he wrote. He went on:
It is always a little sad to see what the people rich enough to have everything actually want. They do not want to participate in the world at all; they want to build their own simulacrum of it and float away forever, secure in the knowledge that none of the lesser people or things that populate the earth will ever be allowed to intrude. This is the promise of Hudson Yards — the same promise of the Titanic.
There is indeed a sinking feeling in the subtext of society since the Great Recession — a sense that not just extreme real estate ventures but pretty much everything is designed to give the wealthiest the opportunity for a clean getaway while the rest of us disappear slowly, without…
