Brad Hargreaves | Building Things

If you haven’t read Paul Carr’s piece on his experience at New York Internet Week, go read it now. If don’t have time, I’ll summarize. Paul’s interaction with New York went something like this:

1. Media tool gets invited to New York by other media tools
2. Media tool goes to an internet week party populated by “identically unique hipsters”
3. Media tool only sees other media tools
4. Media tool goes back to the ‘burbs and writes shit about New York

Well. He argues that good content is dead, so at least he’s eating his own dog food. But he does get some things right. Old media is dying, and lots of people don’t understand how it’s dying. Many of those people hold on to false hopes that the bright shiny piece of technology of the day (social media, the iPad, Web 3.0) will save their shitty business models. Many of those people are in New York. He’s totally right on there.

But he’s the equivalent of a European tourist who visits Disneyland and thinks it is an accurate representation of America. He goes to an Internet Week party and thinks he gets it. Well, people who are actually creating interesting tech companies in New York don’t go to those hipster-filled digital / new media parties because they are clogged with PR reps, “content creators”, glassy-eyed social media strategists and starfuckers. Or they aren’t even aware of these panels and parties — as I’ve written before, the New York tech scene is huge yet strangely siloed, with founders aligning with particular industries rather than the broader “tech community”.

But — in Paul’s defense — the media world has used its superior resources to more or less occupy “high profile” NYC tech. If you go to a “tech” or “internet” event in the Valley, you’ll meet tech people. If you go to a similarly branded event in NYC, you’ll meet media people. And you’ll think there’s nothing to New York tech beyond hipsters and old media dreamers*.

Want to meet New York tech? Head over to Hackers and Founders or the Y+30 or NextNY. You’ll meet awesome people there, but they won’t fly you out. If you insist on having your ticket paid for, you’ll end up in the same media bubble-world you unfortunately fell into this time around.

* Many in nyc new media are great people, and quite a few are my good friends. But they aren’t what Paul Carr is looking for at a tech event, and those are the buckets he’ll throw them in.