Charlotte Has No Culture

I've been sitting with these two complaints that keep coming up. One about Charlotte and one about the internet. I starting writing about these individually, but I'm starting to think they're actually the same thing.

Complaint #1: "Charlotte has no culture."

Complaint #2: "The internet is dead, it's all slop now."

I used to just nod along to both of these. But lately I keep finding myself disagreeing.

What I've Been Finding in Charlotte

The "no culture" thing used to make sense to me until I actually started looking around, and by "looking around" I mean doing the kind of work that feels a little unpleasant -- going to a place where you might be one of a handful of other people, or in one particularly memorable case, being the literal only person in the audience at a live show.

But I've found stuff! The Pauline Tea Bar has no wifi, which is just delightful in that it forces you into this space where it's just tea and conversations. I usually bring a book and then inevitably don't read it while chatting with strangers. VisArt is this local video rental place with a little theater in the back for events. Lang Van might be one of the best restaurants I've ever been to, and they just earned a "Michelin Bib Gourmand" which feels like the external validation I needed for them.

What I've Been Finding Online

Same thing with the internet. I'll catch myself saying "the internet is dead" and then I'll remember I'm literally scrolling through Reddit comments or reading YouTube comments from channels with millions of subscribers, and the algorithm is showing me slop, so I'm consuming slop. So I come to the (unfair) realization that everything is slop, even though that's just what I've chosen to look at.

But then I'll remember the places I've been spending enjoyable time:

Pentadact's blog -- Tom Francis writes about game design but also about his dad's homemade barbecue controller and somehow both are equally compelling. The post about the Egg Controller made me tear up a little.

Ben Kuhn's blog -- Another Ben with a blog. Smart takes on systems and thinking and the kind of stuff that makes you want to be more intentional about things.

Dan Mall's posts -- Design industry thoughts that are maybe a little advanced for where I am, but I like the writing and sometimes it's good to overhear what people a few steps ahead are thinking about.

typeshit.fr -- A coworker's brother has been tinkering with this site using AI tools and I'm kind of obsessed. The design is weird and specific and the domain name alone makes me happy.

Neal(dot)fun -- My FAVORITE breed of internet weirdness. Go explore!

I have a habit forming of listing links to things. :/

I can understand the complaint, though. I had to find these, which means my roommate sent me Pentadact's blog, Ben Kuhn came from following a link from another blog, and typeshit came from a brief conversation with a coworker. Finding good internet takes digging now, and it's not hard exactly, but it's definitely not automatic either.

What Does "Culture" Even Mean?

When people say Charlotte has no culture, what are they actually comparing it to? New York? Austin? Portland? Because if culture means "things are densely packed enough that you stumble into them accidentally," then yeah, Charlotte doesn't have that. You're not going to accidentally wander into some incredible underground music venue on your walk home. The city is pretty sprawling, too car-dependent with pretty limited public transit options.

But if culture means "people are making interesting things and creating spaces worth being in," then I don't know, that seems pretty clearly happening here. It's just not loud about it. This is me just making space for the fact that maybe the complaint isn't that there's no culture, but that the culture isn't effortless to access. And to that point, I definitely agree.

The Thing These Have in Common

Here's the (slightly controversial) thing I'm actually trying to say: if you think Charlotte is boring, with peace and love, you might be boring. If you think the internet is dead, you might be looking in the wrong places.

I really, really get why people don't do the work. Curating your own internet takes effort, and curating your own life -- actually going places, trying things, talking to people -- takes even more. It’s so hard. And it’s so easy to scroll the feed and complain that everything sucks. It's easier to stay on the path and say Charlotte is boring. The algorithmic path of least resistance is right there, pre-chewed and ready to consume, and hundreds of thousands of engineering hours have been spent making sure you stay exactly where you are. I know that because I spend so much time doing just that.

But at some point you have to ask yourself: are you actually looking? Because I keep finding these little pockets of aliveness, both online and off, and they're all in places I had to seek out -- they didn’t come to me. The culture is here. The good internet is here. But you have to be the kind of person who goes looking for it, and that means being someone who does more than passively consume whatever gets fed to you.

The thing you're looking for exists, it's just not going to show up in your For You page. You have to actually go looking, and yeah, that's kind of a pain in the ass. But the alternative is standing in the Boring Slop forever, and at that point, the problem isn't Charlotte. The problem isn't the internet. The problem is you.