Place and the New Collective Unconscious

NY - 3rd looking south toward Cooper Union

I'm going to change my city today. I'm going to change my town. This place is going to be different because of me.

If thoughts like these belong to anyone, they're traditionally seated in the realm of architects, landscape engineers, maybe gardeners and farmers and the like, and dreamers. Beyond conventional aspirations to prominence: corner office, staff, celebrity, there are fantasies about effecting change by influencing hearts and minds. There are the Madison Avenue types and the VC folk in San Mateo county, people who build buildings and create dreams, but, without dwelling on outliers, arguably the recently deceased Steven Jobs, they are not dreamers. Not this kind.

Waking, facing skylines, walking to work in reverent fantasy, reshaping physical and cultural space - dreamers of this kind are rare and subversively hip. They touch the fringes of psychopathia, if you agree with Norman Mailer on hipster psychopaths - his subjects are not privileged pseudo-rebels in black pants and vintage boots, not exactly. Certainly not in clothing or speech affectations, his article was published in 1957, some adjustments are necessary.

For Mailer, a hipster is an enfant terrible turned inside out, a thief and a criminal who can't be interviewed or recorded because he or she would stand apart from a society that homogenizes or destroys itself with equal irreverence for the individual. The internet changed that. Open access. No censorship. No curation. We differentiate as we record.

We project ourselves in text, pictures, sound and video into the online environment. Identities remain fixed in lapidary statements of self and intellectual property is dispersed at unimaginable speeds to incredible distances. The collective unconscious has a bibliography, updated and referenced by millions hourly. The forum is both present and timeless.

In a sense, the internet has made hipsters of us all (in the developed world, where, increasingly, the cost of web access is absorbed as essential) or, at least provided an avenue for self and group acknowledgement void of any conventional social restraints. Mailer's hipster, psychopath, not psychotic, product and author of an unidyllic cultural theater, has been turned inside out again, and set free.

We are able to source our identities from the freely published content of others, from the personal lives, creeds, activities and ideas in the miasma of the super-organic supersphere of collective consciousness plotted online. We are changed physically, neurochemically, by the transmigration of self experiences and self consciousness. The process of osmotic absorption of identity is individually and communally observable, and may well apply to place.


Places have identities, physical and cultural, now just as public as our own. Today, videos from Berlin are streamed in Pretoria. Someone in Sao Paulo can be intimately familiar with life in Barcelona without traveling farther than a computer screen. Organizations like FUTURECITY in the UK actively employ "place-making" techniques to shape culture through the development of new physical spaces. It's conceivable that we may be changing physical space by recording cultural space.


One might say this about any place, but: New York is special. The city is a modern marvel less for it's physical stature, which coruscates with cosmopolitan and prurient wonders, than because it is a global focal point for creativity and the expression of that creativity. This aspect of the city's identity attracts the creative elite, who then draw future creatives in a kind of helical symmetry perpetuated through time.

With online sharing enfranchising claims to places and connections to their uniqueness, and as place identity is documented and accessed over and over again, the powers conjured by uncommon imaginations - those dreamers whose minds seize on the shameless, unjustifiable, awesome reveries of altering their environments - may have been disseminated through the collective unconscious.


If anyone can read The Village Voice online or read, see, or watch what's going on in New York in real time via Twitter, is the city losing some of what makes it ineffably attractive? It's a disheartening prospect for anyone who loves where they live, be it New York or Newfoundland, and the physical consequences of the dissemination of place uniqueness is yet to be seen.

The sharing of information concerning places shouldn't be, were it possible, stalled. Transparency provides the foundation not only for education but for understanding, and if we're sanguine, a future of more peaceful coexistence with anyone who is "other" - even as cultural lines may blur.

Still, twenty, fifty, a hundred years from now it seems possible that New York's creative adrenaline will be less palpable, perhaps less visible on the ground. A good enough reason to live presently, be hip to the now, experience the city, any place, for what it offers. I'm going to live in my city today. I'm going to be where I am.