faster, stupider

I have no knowledge of this complex by Brookfield Zoo, but you know Marina City was built with the idea of a self-contained community.  Except for the employment part.  I don't see how how you could do that without having some kind of company town like Pullman and that didn't work when times got tough.

Speaking of Marina City here is a YouTube.  When it gets to the 1.11 time you can see my balcony with its sunflowers, tomatoes and morning glories.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PL2joBSBovm0srkBNQ9erCfppn6ufCLWXe&v=wH37z8b51A0

Purty huh?  But back to building complexes.  Some recent city developments chiefly on the edges of iffy neighborhoods undergoing gentrification, are built like fortresses with limited access in and out, and I guess they have space for some shops and restaurants within, but not that much.

There has also been a movement in the burbs to take their downtowns back.  Many of them were their own little cities, but they they got absorbed into the city and vast tracts of houses around them were built for commuters who did all their stuff in the city or in the shopping mall of some nearby burb so the local downtown faded away.  Now they want to have a nice 'walkable' little downtown where they can dine by the sidewalk, browse quaint little shops, maybe go to the library or church and then get back into their car and drive back to their dismal soulless house in the tract among all the other houses that look just alike.  I hate the burbs.

But I have to agree, as Old Dog had opined, that where I grew up, a couple miles west of Midway Airport, has a suburban feel.  There is the occasional two flat or a small apartment building, but mostly it is one block after another of twenty-five bungalows, but every four blocks there is a busy street with taverns and drugstores.

Time seems to go much faster with three commentators.  I believe a few posts ago we were talking about the internet.  Was it just a development like the printing press, just a matter of degree or was it something qualitatively different?  And then I was proposing that the duper phone was a further development because now you had phone and computer together.  And now that I think of it don't fb and twitter sort of combine the two?  You send out a message and it goes to the web.  I was talking to a couple of people last night and Instagram came up.  I almost asked what was up with that, but it was a pleasant evening down by the river and I wasn't up for a long stretch of boredom. 


But for all this, all this revolutionary development, doesn't most of it just go to gossip?  Aren't we just doing the same stupid things we always did, only now we are doing them faster so we do more stupid things?