SocialStay helps you travel smarter - check out the full article on dailytekk.com
The millennial affect is the affect of the salesman. Consider the other side of the equation, the Millennials’ characteristic social form. Here’s what I see around me, in the city and the culture: food carts, 20-somethings selling wallets made from recycled plastic bags, boutique pickle companies, techie start-ups, Kickstarter, urban-farming supply stores and bottled water that wants to save the planet. Today’s ideal social form is not the commune or the movement or even the individual creator as such; it’s the small business. Every artistic or moral aspiration — music, food, good works, what have you — is expressed in those terms.
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The Entrepreneurial Generation - NYTimes.com (via Ronen Glimer) I remember first having an inkling of this about a year ago while I was having dinner in San Francisco with my friends Mai and Alicia. At the time, Mai had a cult Twitter following as “Banh Mai, delivering banh mi sandwiches from her bike, and she and Alicia started talking about the latest gossip from the vibrant SF food cart scene. After listening to them say things like “Did you hear the Adobo Hobo is coming out of retirement for one night only?” it occurred to me that they sounded like they were talking about punk bands, not food carts. The more I thought about it the more the comparison between SF food carts and indie rock seemed apt. The scene has gone a bit more legit now that the city has relaxed some of its restrictions, but at the time the SF food cart underground was below-the-radar, loosely coordinated via Twitter, and ephemeral. Because of the low barrier to entry and perceived ease of skirting regulations, many new food carts would pop up overnight, amass a cult following, and then disappear just as quickly as they showed up—almost like modern day, culinary punk bands. Others, like Hapa Ramen or Mission Street Food, have grown up to become important mainstream parts of the SF restaurant scene. I was working for Square at the time, which made me think a lot about San Francisco’s “food carts as indie rock” scene as the harbinger of a much larger, technology-driven cultural trend toward personal expression through casual entrepreneurship. I think William Deresiewicz really nails this when he says “The characteristic art form of our age may be the business plan.” (via buzz) |
