New and Old #43
Friday roundup and commentary
The Nostalgic Beauty of Forgotten Pizza Huts, Vice, Alex Swerdloff, July 31, 2017
This seems appropriate since I just wrote about a Pizza Hut (though, as you’ll see, that was the reverse of this—a current Pizza Hut that wasn’t born that way.) This piece is an interview with a pair of artists who documented a number of old, repurposed Pizza Huts in the United States. (This is a different project from Used To Be a Pizza Hut!)
“Every business puts some spin on the building and sometimes we have to do a lot of research to confirm that a building was in fact a Pizza Hut,” they note. The sense of intrigue and mystery that can envelop such completely ordinary and mass-produced objects as postwar chain restaurant buildings is odd, but very real, and very cool.
Jewel-Box Heroes: Why the CD Revival Is Finally Here, Rolling Stone, Rob Sheffield, January 19, 2022
This is a really interesting article. The rising popularity of cassettes and vinyl could be dismissed as just an aesthetic, or a fad. But data showing CD sales starting to pick up complicates that, because CDs have very little of the same aura around them. The sustained increase in physical media sales seems like something more meaningful. Some of it is the tactile nature of physical media, and the sense of ritual in actually handling something and setting it up. Part of it is privacy or the sense of ownership and permanence. I’ve been watching this trend for a decade, and it’s only growing. What do you think it means?
Plus, I had never heard of a CD longbox before! I’ve never seen one either. They were large cardboard sleeves, in the early days of the CD format, that made the CDs harder to shoplift and also allowed them to fit into shelves and fixtures designed to store vinyl records.
This article got dragged on Twitter by, well, YIMBYs. Not surprising. DeBoer agrees with the YIMBY movement broadly, but writes, “there’s a complication: The social culture of online YIMBYism is antagonistic to the movement’s goals, in a way that’s become a common feature of politics in the internet era.”
This is the part people didn’t like. Some object to the idea that the right ideas need to be conveyed in the “right” tone. Others think it’s silly to judge an idea by the way some of its proponents behave online. It is silly—but it’s hard not to do that, especially if most of your exposure to those ideas is through the internet. As housing and zoning reform become more and more mainstream issues, I suspect this issue will lessen.
While I’ve had pleasant interactions with most pro-housing folks on Twitter, I do have to say that sometimes the tone is too smug and self-assured for my tastes. But I remind myself that people online are often talking to their own audiences, treating the internet as a living room or a casual conversation with friends. It’s very, very easy to feel personally attacked by a completely off-hand and not-meant-literally comment on the internet, and to fashion a whole, completely inaccurate view of a whole movement out of that reaction.
There’s this, as well, DeBoer quoting Darrell Owens, a prominent YIMBY figure:
The strong combativeness which gave YIMBYism its reputation stems from the shock at being a person who you thought could say ‘Why don’t we just build housing?’ during public comment, only to be deluged by jeers, boos and relentless slander. So YIMBYs built up a defense against that, by just being rude and combative in return.
This explains a lot. There’s a history and context as to why people carry themselves a certain way, but not everybody knows that context. If you come into this in the middle, all you see is pro-housing people being snarky and mean. It’s a bit like the divide between cyclists and non-cyclists. “Why are cyclists so angry?” “Why do cyclists want to damage my car?” “Why do cyclists break the rules?” Cyclists might ask, “Why do motorists so often almost kill me?”
At its best, this internet discourse can broaden your mind and force you to understand where people are coming from. I could easily have ended up someone who wrote off my entire line of work based on a few internet impressions. I’m very glad I didn’t.
How working from home threatens authoritarian regimes, Spectator World, Lewis Andrews, January 24, 2022
This is a neat take on the work-from-home debate. Andrews argues that working from home is a sort of liberty, and that it both promotes an attitude of independence and makes it harder for governments to surveil people. I don’t know if this is a significant aspect of working from home, really, but it well might be, and I’ve never heard this argument before. Read the whole thing.
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Pizza Hut was a great read. Thank you and keep at it. We love in Planning/Zoning love this stuff.
"But I remind myself that people online are often talking to their own audiences, treating the internet as a living room or a casual conversation with friends." Absolutely. Lots of preaching to the choir. It's sorta funny how many tweets try to be persuasive, but then only really pick up engagement from the people who already agree with them.