Sam Liebeskind

What replaces it is not yet clear. My students do not appear to be nihilists (which is remarkable to me for reasons I will get into in another essay). They are animated by other things. By place rather than displacement, by community rather than mobility, by the slow and the local rather than the far and the foreign. Whether this is the beginning... See more

Bourdain is the figure (an avatar, really) where the lineage became a media product, where elsewhere stopped being a place the Western seeker went to and started being content the Western seeker consumed.

The social-platform layer offers the feeling of encounter with the friction surgically removed. As one analysis of Gen Z’s parasocial turn put it, online belonging functions as a “convenient, friction-free alternative” where users can “enjoy the feeling of belonging without the heavy lifting of real-world connections.” The institutions that used to... See more

The volunteer tourists inherited it from the backpackers and gave it a moral upgrade. Now you weren’t just searching for the authentic Other; you were helping them! The moral upgrade conveniently coincided with a period in which expressions of social conscience had become a powerful form of identity construction within precisely the demographics

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The reflex Rousseau articulated was not, fundamentally, about travel. It was about the location of the cure. Modernity is hollow; the cure exists wherever modernity has not yet reached; the seeker’s task is to go there, in whatever sense “going” is available to him. Rousseau’s elsewhere was conceptual, a primitive that lived more in argument than... See more

Protocol design is the art of defining which positions may be expressed, what rules may be defined (and, importantly, correctly and cheaply enforced), which information may be transmitted or on the contrary controlled, how positions can be assigned and withdrawn and, at least in the case of well-defined protocols, what constitutional options exist... See more