Always worth posting Wallace's quote on the subject:
"To be a mass tourist, for me, is to become a pure late-date American: alien, ignorant, greedy for something you cannot ever have, disappointed in a way you can never admit. It is to spoil, by way of sheer ontology, the very unspoiledness you are there to experience. It is to impose yourself on places that in all noneconomic ways would be better, realer, without you. It is, in lines and gridlock and transaction after transaction, to confront a dimension of yourself that is as inescapable as it is painful: As a tourist, you become economically significant but existentially loathsome, an insect on a dead thing."
A similar phenomenon is happening in the outdoor industry. Instagram is (depending on your perspective) ruining everything or democratizing access to natural beauty. Most people I know practice some variant of a digital leave-no-trace rule: don't post photos in publicly-trafficked areas of the internet, or if you do then don't say where they were taken. It's not so much gatekeeping as ensuring people who want to experience that beauty have to put in the work - read terribly-designed websites, meet actual people and gain their trust, or even take a backcountry travel class which hopefully instills a healthy respect for the environment you're enjoying.
Another strategy is to delve further into mountaineering, where the obvious danger of the terrain repels everybody with a working survival instinct and ensures some degree of solitude :)
Animal-rights advocates frequently argue, not without some justification, that it's unethical and exploitative to capture wild animals and lock them up in cages so that we can gawk at them. So let's follow their advice in a hypothetical sense and get rid of zoos, circuses, even pet stores. Fast-forward a generation or two and let's imagine how that might turn out. The people from which those very organizations draw their membership will have never seen an elephant or a tiger -- or, for the city-dwellers among them, even a deer or a rabbit -- in real life. These are also the same people who vote for Congressional representatives to pass or repeal conservation laws.
In this hypothetical future, volunteers from the animal-rights organization will go door-to-door canvassing for votes or petition signatures, just as they do today... except no one will have the faintest idea what they're talking about. The activists will find that they might as well be asking their contributors to save the T-Rexes in Jurassic Park. What's the difference? They're all just pixels on a screen.
Tourism works the same way, IMO. It may have harmful aspects, but the effects of completely eliminating it will be worse.
And decrying "mass tourism," as Wallace puts it, is nothing but code for "Only a few wealthy people should get to experience this."
> And decrying "mass tourism," as Russell puts it, is nothing but code for "Only a few wealthy people should get to experience this."
"Nothing but" is an incorrect over-reduction. Like any high-volume human activity, mass tourism can have real impacts. Concern over those impacts is likely to exist entirely independently of wealth-favoring classism.
And whether the experience is limited only to the wealthy depends what mechanism is chosen to limit access. If it's determined by pricing mechanisms responding to demand, then, yep, you're going to largely skew access to the wealthy. If it's determined by assessing the number of visitors that won't destroy the experience, and then handing out access via lottery then the criticism loses some of its power.
I really appreciate you using the term “classist”. I think that term, and not “racist”, needs to be much more widely applied these days.
That being said, I really enjoyed the author’s post. If anything, the people who are going to these places are the social climbing, upwardly mobile middle class, determined to burnish their brand on Instagram.
Also the free flow of tourists is a problem that parallels a lot of other things in the world currently. Information, capital, trade, all these things have moved so much and so fast they have loosed control from national government sovereignty that used
to regulate them. As the anti-globalization train begins picking up speed, all these will be severely restricted, for better or worse.
I love travelling and I'm soured at how overrun places are.
But it's not a problem of the 'ugly tourist' it's a problem of just 'too many people'.
I don't go to tourist destinations, I just go to places.
Every French or German village is 'interesting' to those who don't know them. They are all full of history.
Same for so many other places.
The only 'non destinations' on planet earth are the suburbs, and places where there are a lot of Starbuckses, unfortunately, that seems to be what we are building everywhere. And I do mean everywhere. The suburbs of Toronto, Singapore and Istanbul are oddly similar in too many ways ...
The ugly tourist the piece refers to is all tourists being somewhere the wouldn’t otherwise have been except for relative affluence and the opportunity. Lots of people who just go places, which by definition become tourist destinations.
Actually, I read literally in the last few days that a survey indicated 'Instagramability' was the #1 issues for Millenials in their choice of destinations. I think it was the Globe and Mail, sorry I don't have the link. That kind of threw me a little, but I think 'it's a thing'.
There are many little tourist spots where 'selfies' are indeed a problem.
That said, we've always been taking photos on vacay. So maybe it's just that we can easily click-and-share ...
My parents did not even bring a camera on vacation; they considered it an annoying habit of tourists and that is 30+ years ago. It had the sideeffect that we did not get flagged as tourists but as locals/expaths which is better usually. With smartphones all of that changed ofcourse.
I don't believe your parents were the norm, and taking pictures is generally not considered rude in any culture, really.
Stepping into the fountain, doing something stupid, mobbing people, stepping 'over the rope', crowding a public space to get a picture - this is 'rude'.
Taking a photo of the Eiffel tower from the sidewalk is normal.
I did not mean to say it was considered rude; when people got robbed/pickpocketed it was not us as we didn't look like clueless tourists with huge cameras around our necks.
And is your claim that the vast majority of these users are curating a personal brand, as opposed to simply sharing with friends and family, actual corporate brands maintaining an online presence, or any other use case besides?
While your point about racism is kind of tautologically true from a purely semantic standpoint (in the same way that "primate" is a more widely applicable term than "human"), race and class are inextricably linked in the US, and the problems caused by it deserve focus on their racial context.
If you're using "class" as a synonym for "concerned specifically with the divide between poverty and not-poverty", then this is especially relevant. Colorblindness in anti-poverty solutions has been historically a way to aggravate problems problems caused by systemic racism that is not addressed (like Federal housing loan guarantees to jump-start an American Middle Class that "just happen" to only be available to people who meet a particular set of characteristics that "just happen" to correlate strongly with whiteness).
If you're speaking specifically about objections to how loaded the term "racism" is when speaking to people, thanks to an inability of our broader society to produce a distinction between individually non-complicit, systemically racist outcomes and individually complicit, "racist intent", then I would suggest moving the burden of the term to "classist" is a form of euphemism, and will generally only serve to make the word "classist" take the same emotional connotations in the future rather than solve the terminology problem it is presented to solve. We are probably better just trying to find a way to grapple with why the term "racist" makes us so emotionally charged than avoiding the subject.
"alien, ignorant, greedy for something you cannot ever have"
I find this hugely classist.
I thought the quote was going more for a "leave-no-trace" approach to interacting w the world. Clean up your physical and digital trash so that it doesn't destroy the experience for others.
Once on a hike I was passed by a man and his wife who commented they had to get somewhere further along to see it. This was along one of my favorite trails.
"Most people I know practice some variant of a digital leave-no-trace rule: don't post photos in publicly-trafficked areas of the internet, or if you do then don't say where they were taken. It's not so much gatekeeping as ensuring people who want to experience that beauty have to put in the work - read terribly-designed websites, meet actual people and gain their trust, or even take a backcountry travel class which hopefully instills a healthy respect for the environment you're enjoying."
This is sheer nonsense and IS ridiculous gatekeeping. Ensuring people who want to experience beauty need to put in work for it? Some people may never be able to visit these places, not everyone is so fortunate to be able to afford or have time off to travel. You might as well say they should never look at book of photos either, or they can never look at a painting without becoming an artist first. Maybe they would never gain a love of the outdoors if they had never seen some of these photos first and wanted to see more?
Now, I agree with the sentiment that there can be tourist overload on places, and that they should be managed well so they aren't destroyed. But 'digital leave no trace' is just nonsense. We should be sharing the beauty of the world, not restricting it.
I agree, the absurdity of the notion of digital gatekeeping of beauty becomes apparent if we think what the first pictures of our planet from space have done for the ecology movement. People need to experience to connect.
Take that away and living in air conditioned condos and driving big diesel SUVs to the next strip mall for your latte is just how the world is supposed to be.
It seems like you're assessing this in a very abstract way, as evidenced by your "what if we took this logic to the extreme" examples. I assure you your perspective changes once you have skin in the game and are invested in an activity which is substantially diminished by the introduction of a large number of uncaring people.
Literally the same argument was made when blacks tried to move into predominately white neighborhoods. “Oh it’s never been the same since, we had to leave to a more exclusive town.”
As long as gates break down new ones will emerge. That surfing spot down thr road is now 5x busy as it was a decade ago? Doesn’t matter, those with means already moved onwards to the better exclusive spot on some remote island.
Odd phrase. "Invested" in your own amusement? And that trumps others' right to be in the same place? The ones with "skin in the game" are the residents, owners, and/or official caretakers. If they want to let the unwashed masses in, as seems to be the case, who are you to overrule them? Instead of trying to exclude people, maybe we should educate people about what not to do and why not, providing facilities to contain the damage, hiring personnel to enforce rules and/or ameliorate damage as much as they can, etc.
I've been an active hiker, occasional backpacker, etc. for many years. Longer than most HNers have been alive. I've seen plenty of the damage that crowds can do. But I still realize that turning public places into private preserves for the most privileged is not an acceptable alternative.
1. You can indeed be invested in your own amusement, through sunk time & money for equipment & training, a social network of others invested in the same activity, and many things less tangible.
2. "Rights" have nothing to do with this discussion.
3. Unless you're talking about a national park, the residents/owners/official caretakers of the backcountry are often nobody, or at most a volunteer trail maintenance org.
4. Educating people costs money. Providing facilities costs money. Hiring personnel costs money. Ameliorating damage costs money. These things all happen, but they cost money, and nobody is champing at the bit to pay.
The approach many in the outdoors community take is indeed everything you suggest, plus an information diet to concentrate use on trails which have seen a lot of work and can handle the traffic.
> Rights" have nothing to do with this discussion.
Rights have everything to do with this discussion. You're trying to argue that other people have less right to these areas because they've enjoyed them less than you. One could easily argue the exact opposite, that you've exhausted your share and should stay away. It's not a very good argument, but it's still more morally supportable than the one you're making.
> the residents/owners/official caretakers of the backcountry are often nobody
The default owner is the government, the default caretaker is BLM. Or equivalent in other countries. They have the authority to determine who should or should not go on that land, for what purpose. You don't. Get over it.
I'm afraid you are mistaken. Under discussion is whether there is a moral imperative for individuals to publicly disseminate their personal knowledge of locations of natural beauty. Again, rights are not at all relevant, unless you're talking about the right of someone else to my personal knowledge. Given your wild misreading of the topic I won't engage with you further.
I completely agree with your comment about democratizing of our outdoors with mediums like Instagram. They provide a phenomenal view into the beauty of our planet, but open that beauty to a lot of bad actors, or, at least, ignorant actors. Fortunately, there are a few 'grammers who adhere to digital leave no trace and always leave a blurb about the real 'leave no trace' within each post. I would love that to be the norm.
From a personal level, I came to the same logical conclusion as you - push ever deeper into nature via mountaineering, bc skiing, etc.
At the end of the day though am I not just a hypocritical ass? I can explore further into nature due to gps, maps, synthetic materials, lightweight AT ski gear, etc. Are not the 'original' explorers just looking at me like I look at the wave of new 'for the gram' hikers?
Of course the original explorers feel that way! Heck, I sport climb, which at one point was nearly grounds for a beating in some circles.
I think people worry too much about hypocrisy. Arguments of the form "you believe X, but if we take X to its logical extreme then you yourself run afoul of X!" lost all weight with me a long time ago. Sure, in the long run all attempts to avoid the crowd fails, and of course you yourself are part of "the crowd" to some people. But human life doesn't take place in the long run, it happens in the time preceding it.
I can enjoy my favorite backcountry spots (which I learned about from someone else, and so on) for some number of years before they are overrun with crowds, but the inevitability of them being run over by crowds does not take away those years.
The hedonic rush of social media is an unfortunate aspect to modern travel. Vacations and trips have always had the aspect where the traveler plans how to tell friends/family about the trip after the fact. However, I've caught myself mentally planning out a social media post about something I'm seeing right at the moment.
I wonder how we would treat our travels differently if somehow we were not allowed to share anything visual with other people. There's something diminished that happens when it becomes so easy, so low-effort, to capture something about a place you're in. You don't have to observe or be in the moment; you just run from place to place collecting views you can horde in exchange for likes and clicks. It's a mechanization/industrialization of experience.
I go back and forth on this. On the one hand, I find it silly that literally millions of people take the exact same shot of things like the clock tower in the old town square of Prague and then post them online for a few cheap "likes."
But if I didn't shoot a few photos there, I might not remember the great meal I had seated at the base with a few friends that was such an enjoyable time. Small details fade, but photos I personally took jog the memory.
For me the fact there are 1 million pictures of that clock online is irrelevant. People follow others on Instagram either because they are interested in what the person does or they find the other places and pictures interesting which have been posted in the past and would like to see more.
No one can see everything in the world so it is more like curating it, you follow a bunch of curators, see a bunch of stuff, for some stuff a photo is enough, for others it makes you want to see it yourself.
I have had loads of travel ideas from Instagram and have visited lots of places after seeing posts on Instagram.
This tempts me to go grab a set of "Prague tourist photos" and just make up a fake trip. Just be upfront: I didn't take a trip to Prague, but here's what it would look like it I did. Just as curated, just as personal, just as compelling as any brochure. Oh look this guy who's into craft beer and chess history wrote up a hypothetical trip to St. Petersburg, check it out.
Or better, a startup idea: tell us where you're going on vacation and we'll produce your social media posts accordingly. You just enjoy your vacation and we'll get you all the likes.
Or tell us where you want to pretend you went and we provide a fake vacay with which to wow your pseudo friends.
Bonus points: You can market your service as "eco friendly" and actively encourage people to admit they used it. There can be footnotes cataloging how much smaller their carbon footprint is for having only pretended to go.
I notice that for 99% of the places we go, if we just hike 10 minutes from the ‘touristic entrypoint’, places are deserted unless you can get there by car. Even in extremely densely packed places like Hong Kong or tourist places where in the weekend many people go walking; if you just go a bit further, there is no one for hours. You do not need to go mountaineering for that. A lot of people like nature but abhor walking, so in places like in Spain where I go often you see hundreds of tourists on the picnic place deep in the forest on the mountain you can drive to, but, again, 10 minutes walk on a solid nice path which is forbidden for cars, you will find no people at all. Even or maybe especially in high season (walking in heat seems even worse for people; I love it).
> places that in all noneconomic ways would be better, realer, without you
Have you ever considered how the actual residents of those places feel? Even for a moment? I'm sure some of them would prefer a return to a more "authentic" condition, but I'll bet the great majority are pretty happy for the $$$ that tourism brings in (or in some cases for the public goods those $$$ buy and that they enjoy). They don't have some duty to maintain things in a pristine state, at cost to their own quality of life, so that those oh-so-precious few who have the money or time to "make the effort" can come see them without the hordes of less privileged following.
I am sadly very familiar with your second paragraph.
Wilderness areas which were once quiet most of the year now hum with activity from even before the snow is completely melted to after the first fresh flakes of autumn arrive. These areas can be remarkably sensitive, and most lack the trail and human-waste infrastructure to handle the new crowds. These new users often lack training in leave-no-trace principles and result in blown-out trails and piles of used toilet paper behind every nearby tree. I suspect that our cash-strapped parks and forest services will impose visitor limits instead of expanding infrastructure. For those with the skills to navigate confidently off trail, there are still many quiet corners of our ranges to explore. For the rest, the future looks a lot busier.
> These new users often lack training in leave-no-trace principles and result in blown-out trails and piles of used toilet paper behind every nearby tree. I suspect that our cash-strapped parks and forest services will impose visitor limits instead of expanding infrastructure.
Look at the upside though. More visitors means justification for more funding. And more voters who will raise a fuss if that funding isn't provided. You can always train newbs to get better. There's a thousand entertainment choices competing for people's attention today. Most of them are easier than packing a 20lb backpack and tramping off into the woods. On balance I'd say more people venturing outdoors is better than them staying home.
I think "economically significant but existentially loathsome" also describes elitists/materialists who believe that only rich people should get to enjoy beautiful surroundings even part of the time. So it's an apt phrase, but probably not in the way ahelwer meant.
This Wallace guy is certainly proud of his opinions, I'll say that for him. The important thing is that he's found a way to feel superior to pretty much everybody.
I especially like how he can write something as prescriptive as, "To be a mass tourist, for me, is to become a pure late-date American, alien, ignorant, greedy..." while literally admitting that he can speak only for himself ("for me."). The greatest magicians are the ones who come right out and tell you that they're going to try to snow you, and then proceed to do so.
> It's not so much gatekeeping as ensuring people who want to experience that beauty have to put in the work - read terribly-designed websites, meet actual people and gain their trust, or even take a backcountry travel class which hopefully instills a healthy respect for the environment you're enjoying.
Not sure why I got downvoted- why shouldn't these people be denied access to a certain geographical area and all its splendors before undergoing some, say, "naturalization" process?
Your original comment was snarky (with a borderline political bent given current US politics), and your followup doesn't really expand on the conversation any further than your first comment.
If you're trying to say "tourist locations could require more of their visitors," you could elaborate on this point and say why you believe this would solve the problem that the article presents.
"To be a mass tourist, for me, is to become a pure late-date American: alien, ignorant, greedy for something you cannot ever have, disappointed in a way you can never admit. It is to spoil, by way of sheer ontology, the very unspoiledness you are there to experience. It is to impose yourself on places that in all noneconomic ways would be better, realer, without you. It is, in lines and gridlock and transaction after transaction, to confront a dimension of yourself that is as inescapable as it is painful: As a tourist, you become economically significant but existentially loathsome, an insect on a dead thing."
A similar phenomenon is happening in the outdoor industry. Instagram is (depending on your perspective) ruining everything or democratizing access to natural beauty. Most people I know practice some variant of a digital leave-no-trace rule: don't post photos in publicly-trafficked areas of the internet, or if you do then don't say where they were taken. It's not so much gatekeeping as ensuring people who want to experience that beauty have to put in the work - read terribly-designed websites, meet actual people and gain their trust, or even take a backcountry travel class which hopefully instills a healthy respect for the environment you're enjoying.
Another strategy is to delve further into mountaineering, where the obvious danger of the terrain repels everybody with a working survival instinct and ensures some degree of solitude :)