Manhattan and the Machine

I love New York, grubby humans and all

Last week, I traveled to Manhattan for a speaking event and I couldn’t stop talking. That’s typical of the city for me. People grumble about how unfriendly New Yorkers are, and that’s true at times. But in general, NYC is one of the most gregarious cultures I’ve ever encountered. It’s a town powered by gasoline, electricity, hormones, overclocked neurons, and a variety of chemical stimulants. More than two decades of fellowship have taught me that most New Yorkers love to talk and be talked at—even those too wired to actually listen.

I gave a speech about the allure of technology and its false promise of spiritual fulfillment. All my words—for the past four years, really—can be summed up as “Robots are bad, mkay.” If you don’t know that ol’ story, you ain’t from around here. This engagement was hosted by the New York Young Republicans Club. Maybe there was a time when you’d expect to meet country club types—polo shirts and khakis, aristocratic accents and sockless sebegos. That wasn’t the NYYRC that I encountered.

The crowd, packed into the stylish clubhouse in midtown Manhattan, offered a broad spectrum of personalities. Probably a third of those gathered were either black, east asian, south asian, or middle eastern—and they weren’t there because of some diversity quota.

Many joined because they’re pro-America and pro-business. Others are deeply religious and wary of the techno-secular swarm. Some are simply tired of liberal decay.

The next night, at a grimy little bar in Chinatown, I talked to all sorts of people who are bored with the Left’s stale virtue-signaling and PC pablum. It was a self-selected crowd for the most part, but alongside the sharp whiteys and cynical fashionistas, there was a black filmmaker who is as repulsed by soulless AI-generated art as I am, and a rightwing asian woman who’s too aggressive to ever play the victim. One fellow traveler had a flip-phone (my man!). The only lib I met, an Indian immigrant from Oklahoma, was open-minded enough to be bearable.

No one agreed about anything much, so it was a refreshing intellectual romp. Unlike the generic rainbow blobs dotting every city from Miami to Nashville, out to San Francisco and Portland—where white people get together to praise each other’s taste for diversity—this little cross-section of New York was truly diverse and actually interesting.

In the old days, I’d travel to NYC to meet unorthodox people. Most of the time, they were outside-the-box liberals. Back then, lefties weren’t so boring, at least not to me.

They would be amused at my caveman ways, and I would tolerate their citified cultural mutations. The first time I visited was just after 9/11. The WTC craters were still smoldering and tourists gathered around to snap pictures. (I refused to approach the site—that’s bad juju.) Soon after, America waged a War on Terror abroad and a war on freedom at home. It was the first mass roll-out of unmanned drones, airport nudie scanners, and a brain-like global surveillance grid.

In 2005, I returned to rig the stage for Billy Graham’s Last Crusade in Flushing Meadows Park. A million and a half people showed up for the televangelist’s final techno-religious ceremony. The zealous crowd merged into a single polyglot chimera, sweating under that rusty old flying saucer left over from the 1964 World’s Fair. Graham’s sermon, blasted out through speaker arrays and amplified by delay towers, was a plastic-wrapped slice of apple pie.

On election night in 2008, I was invited to a house party in Harlem. The minute they announced Obama had won the presidency, our prim and proper Afro American hostess abruptly shouted at the television, “This is the BLACK HOUSE now, muthafuckas!” Hearing the commotion outside, my Cuban friend and I went for a walk, just to take in the celebratory vibe. My buddy’s TV-amped enthusiasm was soon dampened by the hostile blacks who shouted at us from their stoops. More than one yelled, “This is our shit, now! This is OUR shit!!” Glancing around with a wary eye, it was obvious this wasn’t my shit.

The election night experience drove home the fact that, far beyond all the pretty words about racial unity, electro-tribalism is one of the Left’s most potent weapons. Those guns may be holstered for now, but they’re fully loaded and ready to pop off at any moment. I would return to Harlem the next day, and many times over the years. I never had any problems, but then again, I was no longer so naive.

In a subsequent trip, I got to meet the comedian Greg Giraldo just before he died of an overdose. A young Jamaican woman introduced us backstage at a Manhattan comedy club. Throughout his entire set, the woman shouted at Giraldo at the top of her lungs—as if she was in a movie theater and he was on the silver screen. In retrospect, that was funnier than his jokes.

Over the years, I also visited Catholic cathedrals, the old monastery up at the Cloisters, a Chabad-Lubavitch synagogue in Brooklyn, the bustling Hindu temple in Queens, and a small temple to Kali a few neighborhoods over, where I was welcomed to join a stranger’s wedding. The lovely couple embraced under the dark goddess’s bloody grin.

In 2016, I rigged the set for UFC 205 at Madison Square Garden. Before the fights, I strolled up to Trump Tower, where the rabble had amassed to vent their phase-one TDS. It seemed goofy to me at the time, but in reality, America had come apart at the seams. I suppose the fabric had already been torn eight years earlier, even if most of us couldn’t admit it.

That night, the young Conor McGregor wrecked Eddie Alvarez in the octagon, becoming the UFC’s first champ in two separate weight classes. “Backstage I’m startin’ fights w’ everybody,” McGregor confessed in the post-match interview, his Celtic eyes gleaming on the big video screens. “I’ve ridiculed everyone on the roster. And I just wanna say from the bottom a’ me heart. I’d like to take the chance to apologize... TO ABSOLUTELY NOBODY!!”

The crowd went nuts. That’s what crowds do.

I’ve been in and out of NYC many times since. I’ve had a few adventures, seen a few sights, met a few folks. As I wandered around NYC last week, one thing that stuck out is how much it all looks the same. Yeah, Manhattan has new Lego-block towers here and there, and many more have gone up in the outer boroughs. The classic skyscrapers look smaller to my eyes, too, like when you go back to your old elementary school and the lockers appear to be miniatures. A lot of the independent businesses have been replaced by megacorps, especially after the pandemic.

But it all feels about the same to my stranger’s sensibilities. The pedestrians are just as forward-focused. The women still wear the latest over-priced fashion accessories. The youth packs are still looking for trouble. The rats are still crawling around bags of trash piled on the street. And I swear, I think some of the same construction scaffolding is still up from my first visit in 2001. Does anything ever get finished in this town?

The one change that really sticks out, though, is mass digitization. The once static billboards in Times Square are now animated video walls. The subway tokens are long gone, replaced by digital kiosks that ping with each passing microchip, tracking your every movement. Instead of looking at books or newspapers, or, God forbid, at each other, people everywhere are staring down at their smartphones. Not all of them. But too many.

Flowing over these multiethnic masses are streams of data swimming with algorithms, extracting information and telling people what to think, who to meet, and where to go. The city’s soul hasn’t dried up. Not entirely. But this gleaming electric antfarm—built by human hands on a foundation of lofty dreams—has been thoroughly digitized. Pretty much every city has.

No one can escape human nature, no matter how urbane he or she becomes. And as one year rolls over to the next, it’s obvious that human nature can’t escape the Future™. This transformation is repulsive to my eyes, even if the people are still beautiful.

City folks have always looked like ants from the sky and acted like apes on the ground—which is great!—but now they’re guided by invisible bots. Oh well. At least we have something new to talk about.

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ICYMI

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