Cities and Messages

Paul Graham

Paul Graham is a programmer (he made a lot of money writing the program that eventually became Yahoo! Store) who spends his time these days running Y Combinator, a company that gives seed money to tech start-ups and writing essays. Many of his essays are primarily of interest to computer programmers, but a few of them are general enough to catch the interest of a wider audience. His essay Why Nerds are Unpopular, which comes in both a full version on his website and an abridged version in Wired, is probably the one with the most general appeal.

One of the start-ups that Graham is backing is Infogami, a service that ” lets anyone put together good-looking easily-editable websites”. One of Infogami’s uses is to make blogging easy. Graham, who apparently believes in the maxim “eat your own dog food”, promised the Infogami folks that he’d start using it to blog the moment it was blog-capable.

“Boston” is Actually Two Cities

One of his recent blog postings, Paul Graham Eats Breakfast (Director’s Cut) (the title is both an inside joke about Paul Graham’s fanboys and a reference to “cheese sandwich” blog entries), covers his observations about cities, particularly the San Francisco/Bay Area urban clump and the Boston/Cambridge grouping, with some emphasis on his home base of Cambridge.

(I can’t explain why, but the discussion of cities and how they affect life has always been interesting to me. Had I not gone into computer science, I’d probably have gone into the field of “city design for living” or whatever they’re calling it these days.)

He writes:

One thing most visitors to Boston don’t get– and I didn’t consciously realize till I came back this last time– is that there are two towns here. There is a Boston of universities and high-tech companies, and there is a Boston of Archie Bunkers. No one calls them town and gown, but that’s the root of the difference.

Boston is one of only two places I am aware of where they make regular use of the terms “town” and “gown” to refer to the division between city and university populations. The other is Kingston, where we actually used “town”, “gown” and “crown” to refer to the division between Kingston, Crazy Go Nuts University and the nearby military academy, Royal Military College. In his blog entry, Paul Graham talks about how having a Boston accent clearly marked you as “town”, while having a more general American accent marked you as a resident of Cambridge, or “gown”. He remarks that there used to be a rich Boston accent; think Charles Emerson Winchester from M*A*S*H or Thurston Howell III from Gilligan’s Island. Even I have had personal experience with the whole class/accent thing: in the Philippines, you either have servants or you are one, and my “American” accent clearly puts me in the former group.

(Having the accent of a fluent English speaker pays off here too, but sometimes it pays to fake a “fresh off the boat” sound. This story will explain what I mean.)

The Metropolis is the Message

Another thing that Graham talks about in his blog entry is more applicable to Toronto in general. He concludes his entry with this paragraph:

I find every ambitious town sends you a message. New York tells you “you should make more money.” LA tells you “you should be better looking.” Rome tells you “you should dress better.” London tells you “you should be hipper.” The Bay Area tells you “you should live better.” And Cambridge tells you “you should read some of those books you’ve been meaning to.”

My question, which is especially relevant in light of my observations that the high-tech scene here is booming and considering the recent report from ICT Toronto is: What is Toronto’s message — or what should it be? (And by “Toronto”, I mean “Toronto and Region” — hey, let’s include the entire “Golden Horseshoe“.) I’ll talk about this further in the coming days, and you should too — tell me what you think in the comments!