one of the strangest things about moving from sf to new york was realizing how little new york gives a fuck about whether what you’re doing is actually important i lived in sf for four years. people were building an ai scheduling app in rooms surrounded by people dressed like they had just lost a fight with a laundry basket new york is almost the opposite you can spend an entire day moving icons around in powerpoint, but if you do it forty floors above manhattan, wear the right jacket, and have dinner somewhere impossible to book, nobody really cares what the powerpoint was about the actual economic activity may be negligible, but phenomenologically you are inside the late roman empire the west village is full of people whose primary productive activity is having extremely specific preferences about lamps the city is not especially interested in the distinction between substance and spectacle i've been to parties where almost nobody had built anything used by millions of people, but everyone behaved as though they had personally resolved the crisis of modernity in sf, someone will casually mention they built the database underlying half the internet and then ask if you want to split an uber in new york, someone runs a substack with 3,800 subscribers and enters the room like hegels spirit has finally become conscious of itself this is not criticism. quite the opposite new york understands something sf does not: no one gives a fuck importance is not an intrinsic property. it is produced through ritual, architecture, clothing, proximity, lighting, reservations, and a sufficiently difficult door policy sf still clings to the naive enlightenment belief that value should correspond to some underlying productive reality. very protestant. very embarrassing new york on the other hand, does not gve a fuck a 26-year-old wearing margiela tabi boots and saying "we're thinking about doing something in media" has already achieved symbolic capital equivalent to a series b sf still wants to know whether something is important new york doesn’t give a fuck it just wants to know if it’s interesting