on overtourism, the human flow, and checked bags
Every uneasy inkling you’ve had about participating in the modern tourism industrial complex gets boiled down and ruthlessly dissected by Kyle Chayka in his piece for Vox, My Own Private Iceland.
In recounting a recent trip to Iceland, Chayka’s piece wrestles with the concepts of authenticity, overtourism (“there’s prejudice at work when wealthy, white Westerners have been tourists, if not colonizers, for centuries, but now that the rest of the world is joining in, it’s cast as excessive” ← okay THIS though), and how the flattening forces undergirding our digital lives have come to dictate the “experience economy” that was supposed to be such a cool thing our generation was doing:
Geographical places have been reduced to disposable trends … Where we go and how we get there are increasingly influenced by a series of digital platforms — not just big OTAs, but Airbnb, Yelp, and Instagram — that prioritize engagement over originality. Overtourism is a consequence, not a cause.
The more often a particular destination or package proves successful, the more users a site’s algorithm will drive to it, intensifying the problem by pushing travelers to have the same experiences as one another on a single beaten track around the globe, updated and optimized in real time. When one spot gets too crowded and its novelty used up, the next is slotted into its place … Countries and cities must constantly perform their identities in order to maintain the flow of tourists.
Without turning into a rant against those dang tourists or an annoyingly breathless elegy in favor of ~travel~ at all costs, Chayka outlines how the problem of overtourism and our obsession for aesthetically pleasing authenticity is something more existential for a globalized population:
We can’t return to a time when overtourism didn’t exist, and the desire to do so is as problematic as the concept of overtourism itself. Rather, the task left to us is to imagine a post-overtourism world in which we can all participate in and benefit from the human flow.
And while you’re mulling over how to best participate in that flow, you’ll definitely want to read Roxane Gay’s The Case For Checking A Bag, which gravely reminds us of the truth, AKA that Travel is a chaotic, exhausting experience exacerbated by people who forget the social contract the moment they step foot in an airport.