It's an idiosyncratic place to live, to be sure. They even seem content to live with the acqu'alta, the regular flooding. The houses are set up with barriers that prevent water, up to the height of about a foot. Any higher and the pressure would risk collapsing the walls, so they just let it in and clean up. Not pleasant, to be sure, but there are plenty of people who would put up with it to live in such a charming, beautiful city.
It really is the tourists that push it over to "unlivable". They massively outnumber the residents, especially during the summer. It's actually not as bad as you might think in the many parts of the city that the tourists don't go to, but you have to pass through them.
It might be AirBnB that really ends up taking it out. Whatever you'd pay to live that life, somebody else will pay more to spend a night in it.
Living in a place where tourists outnumber permanent residents will always kind of suck no matter what. The same type of issues impact beach towns in the summer and ski towns in the winter.
But only rich people can afford it.
It's kinda unfortunate, but Venice has basically been a museum of itself for centuries. It stopped being a world power and became a curiosity in the late 18th century. It took until now for tourism to ramp up from "part of the Grand Tour for British lordlings" to "cruise ships bringing tens of thousands of tourists per day".
Yep. Great way to put it. I've felt for a while that airBnB is the rot at the core of many previously great cities.
How can they create a community if they're nomads?
Communities are created over years or decades by people who stick around together (for the good times and for the bad times as well) to plant roots and build homes, lives, and businesses locally, sometimes for more than one generation, not by yuppie remote tech bros with MacBooks who come over to spend some money, have their fun, and once they're bored or life gets a bit unpleasant, leave.
> Venice authorities this year announced a plan to attract remote workers to the city, but it appears to have made little impact.
Hubs and communities are two vey different things in my book.
And major tech hubs with top paying jobs or a concentration of rich tech workers tend to score poorly at anything related to the sense of "community" as you have major gentrification issues from the giant wealth disparity and a caste system of those with tech jobs and money and those without. And the modern, compensation oriented tech workers, have rarely been great at forming any kind of community together, let alone with others, being more individualistic and preferring always to do things each their own way. Just ask them to unionize and see what happens.
>even if those are revolving doors
And "revolving door" communities are the worst. S-E Asia and Latin America are full of these gated communities of western remote workers and digital nomads and it kinda sucks, as everyone treats the place like a holiday amusement park. Not learning the local language, not integrating with the locals, not adapting to local laws, customs and traditions, they're just there to have their fun of being the top 1% earners there, consume, party, Tinder around, and once the novelty wears off, move on. That's the worst kind of community I can think of.
For me, community, is what I see in small european villages/cities with small family businesses going back generations and everyone investing back into the local community and in the local environment for the future generations in the long run.
That's not what I said and I feel like you've take this personally.
You have an idealistic view of tech communities, but the reality is that most communities of western digital nomads or tech workers, like those in S-E Asia and other parts of the world, are more like gated communities or private amusement parks and less like communities in the traditional sense that benefit the local environment long term, like you usually see in smalls European cities. Even techies in the west don't create great living communities when in large numbers in the same place since what you usually get is booming housing prices, NIMBYISM, elitism, and a constant pressure to keep up with the Jonses.
I'm not gate keeping anyone, I'm just telling it like it is in reality.
I've moved around every 3-4 years between being in the military and building a career in tech. I moved out of my home state because wages for tech workers where I lived were dismally low. I was rapidly approaching the point where owning a home was difficult, so I left and came out West. I'm here because I have to be. That hasn't prohibited me from joining and participating in communities. Maybe you'd be surprised to find out that most local communities are connected to larger communities; in fact, if you're someone who moves around a lot you often depend on these to land in places without feeling lost. All of what I've described here isn't unique to the states.
I did all of this so that I could actually afford to put down roots somewhere that I can sustainably have a job as well too. Turns out that's expensive and I'll go where I need to go in order to make that happen in the future.
You are gate keeping, you're just hiding it behind very charged rhetoric that sounds progressive.
If you read my posts, I wrote nothing that matches what you just wrote about yourself, so I doubt that. Plus, I cannot control how you choose to fit yourself to my descriptions as I don't know you.
>You are gate keeping
I'm not gatekeeping anyone. You are free to move wherever you want and do whatever you want.
I just said that large numbers of digital tech nomads moving to a place, especially one where the locals earn a lot less, doesn't improve the local community there, but quite the opposite. Whether this applies to you or not I can't say or control.
I will stop talking with you here, as I feel like you have an axe to grind and this conversation will never end.
> everyone treats the place like a holiday amusement park. Not learning the local language, not integrating with the locals, not adapting to local laws, customs and traditions, they're just there to have their fun of being the top 1% earners there, consume, party, Tinder around, and once the novelty wears off, move on.
I don't see how that matches your description of yourself in any way? It sure sounds like they're describing a very different group of people who have just a single thing in common with you, and then you've gone out of your way to misread that as an insult to you.
This is nonsense, community is simply about about shared experience and can absolutely happen with strangers or short term acquaintances. In fact I'd say that's the primary way I've experienced community from college onwards (now 30 y/o) and I expect many young people would feel the same.
More to the point, digital nomads often stay in a place for months on end. That's more than enough time to run into people in similar circumstances at a bar/cafe a few times and befriend them, creating shared in-jokes and opinions of your situation, passing them on to other people you meet such that they take on a life of their own—aka, culture. You need look no farther than major digital nomad hubs like Chiang Mai and Bali to see that there are extremely vibrant communities in these places, which is why so many nomads find their ways there.
Seems like you're mixing this with tech hubs and online communities. Or my understanding of what a real community is, is different than yours.
If you want to play "more community than thou", you're going to lose to the cohousing I spent my 20s in.
Yeah, a lot of things ca be a community. Even my board games or bouldering communities. But that has nothing to do with the type of city community in this topic.
>Your definition of community is too narrow.
It's not my definition here. In this topic we're talking specifically about digital nomads and whether they'd benefit the city of Venice.
>If you want to play "more community than thou", you're going to lose to the cohousing I spent my 20s in
I'm not playing anything against any community, but the topic was whether groups of digital nomads can form a community that would benefit the existing communities of the city of Venice and I gave my opinion on why that would not be the case, so please, let's stop changing goalposts to contrarian anecdotes (your community in your dorm from your 20's is not the same as the community of the city of Venice).
You are certainly in a community but you are probably not much of a part of the community you're visiting. And if my experience as someone who grew up in a tourist destination is any guide, the locals whose job it is to be nice to you probably swap stories about your cluelessness about the local culture, and a lot of the locals whose job is not being nice to you view you with vague disdain at best.
You are raw material for the local economy and, we will generally do our best to politely pick you up by your ankles, shake you until money stops falling out, and send you on your way, while making sure you have a good enough time doing this to come back again once you have more money.
I've known digital nomads though. One of them bought a house with the woman he met in that country and remains to this day. Maybe you should reflect on why you think so little of local people in the countries digital nomads visit that you can't imagine them connecting with or being genuinely interested in travelers.
That is an immigrant, not a digital nomad. Else by your definition, I'm a digital nomad in Europe for the past 7 years - which sounds ridiculous, considering I'm eligible for citizenship in 4 European countries by virtue of my stay.
Then you probably never actually experienced a real community.
I’ve grown up in a small town of about ~3000 inhabitants, who all pretty much knew each other. Random people knew my family, I could walk anywhere and meet someone who went to school with my dad or who had worked with my grandfather in the 60s/70s. I was often taken care of, as a small child, by people who I didn’t know directly but that knew my family, and who my parents knew. There was also gossip of course, and some darker patterns (early 90ies), but the core idea was thar everybody knew each other and had formed long lasting bonds over the decades.
This is what community means when we’re talking towns, not Internet forums.
And by the way: most natives will stick around when things are not so great too, nomads will just go somewhere else… in this sense digital normads are more like leeches than anything. They will make prices rise and only improve the pockets of few people (landlords, mainly).
x100 this!
When you end up in a rough spot a physical community can band together to help you, if your place burns down people on the internet will send you lots of thoughts and prayers and some very generous people might shell out a few bucks to help. In a physical community there a limits on what you'll do or say to a person because you have to see them, you share the same social space, and they can materially effect your life. In internet communities everyone outside of your group isn't part of your community and can't impact your life at all so there is no reason to hold back on your worst impulses.
I think the widespread societal decay we are seeing probably relates to the dissolution of real communities as they've been replaced by the internet, huge geographical mobility and a decline in family, ethnic/national, and religious identity at the same time.
People talk about communities when really they’re talking about users. Ideally paying users, more often users that someone has to keep engaged so that some other entity will give revenue (eg: youtube channels followers “communities”).
Take hacker news for example: we generally have zero saying in what the rules are, what is moderated fairly and what isn’t, what’s okay to post and what isn’t. We’re all strangers to each other and there isn’t an ounce of attachments between a random couple of users, again because we’re all strangers to each other. On average, we share very little with each other, except the fact that we all need oxygen to breathe and are somehow interested in technology.
That’s not how communities work. In true communities people can speak up, things can change, it’s rare to impossible for people to be banned.
And don’t get me wrong I’m only taking hacker news as an example but the same reasoning apply to most online “communities”.
Regarding the swap of real “communities”, I don’t think it’s entirely bad. I did it myself, because it’s effectively the only way to reach like minded people if you have interests outside what’s trending in your physical community.
> I think the widespread societal decay we are seeing probably relates to the dissolution of real communities as they've been replaced by the internet, huge geographical mobility and a decline in family, ethnic/national, and religious identity at the same time.
On this point i mostly disagree. Geographical mobility is good (where you were born is not a death sentence anymore), decline in family is okay (the old purely- and strictly-eterosexual family in a strictly religious form is essentially deprecated) ethnic/national identity is essentially bs and a source for unnecessary conflict (we’re all humans, it’s high time we start acting like that) and religion identity is the ultimate bs (there is no god).
I'm glad you got to experience this idyllic small-town community. That wasn't an option for me. My town was the poorest in my state, so I went to the best possible college elsewhere, and have since lived in other places for work. Incredibly, moving out of my shitty hometown has not prevented me from experiencing community. In fact I'd say I experienced more community in my few years living and working abroad than I ever have in America, where I now live. Frankly I'm finding it very hard to find community in a country full of people who have never left their hometowns and have no concept of people or ways of life that differ from their own. At least I still have group chats with the real friends I made from going to new places and doing new things.
Same for me, i grew up in rural south Italy.
> At least I still have group chats with the real friends I made from going to new places and doing new things.
That’s a nice thing you got there, I’m glad for you.
But we’re talking town level community here and not, again, internet forums and online chat rooms (slack/discord/whatever).
At a town level, communities form over decades and over shared struggles (mostly).
I literally just got back from Venice. You can walk across the whole city in a little over 30 mins. What sort of transportation do you think you need here? There are boats, trains, cars to get into and out of the city, but once there, you can just walk anywhere.