Using technology like Google and Apple Maps, you can now see any place on Earth from the comfort of your…

Using technology like Google and Apple Maps, you can now see any place on Earth from the comfort of your lounge, at any scale from ground level up to the view from orbit. But at the same time, these same sights are collapsing under the weight of tourists going to ‘see’ them. /1 https://t.co/QAeh2UmS46

There’s something important about our culture to be understood here. Want to see Uluṟu? Bang, within seconds, you can see it. And you can see it from angles and heights you can never see, if you go there. You can travel every single route to and from there, in moments. /2 https://t.co/BnPh0uFpm7

You can pick any point in Australia’s vast inland, points that early explorers lost lives trying to reach, and again be there literally in seconds. You can look at every tree, watering hole, track, rock. Anything. It’s something our ancestors would have found astonishing. /3

I do still find it astonishing. I can spend hours zooming around the world seeing things. Here’s me at the top of Mt Everest, moments after being at Uluṟu. Many die seeing that point. I’m on a comfortable couch drinking a cuppa. Of course there’s an obvious response to this. /4 https://t.co/PYOMxrcA16

That ‘it’s not the same as being there’. Of course it isn’t. But what do people do when they go to these places? Today they spend a lot of their time taking photos, of being there. “Here I am, at X”. Being there is different, but how much different? /5 https://t.co/MRrH0P2P7C

People go to ‘see’ these places. But you can see them from your lounge room, and see a lot more of them from there too. You don’t see more, being there. You see less. Much less. Which leads to the next common response, that people go to ‘experience the culture’. /6

But the culture you’re going to experience there is the culture of being a tourist. You don’t live there. You may run into people who do, and talk to them and sit in their restaurants etc. Some even try to ‘go native’, thinking that’s a more authentic tourism. /7

The locals are heartily sick of that too. They can’t even get into their own local haunts, previously free of tourists. The Venetians are so tired of it that some projections say there won’t be a native population there by 2030. Only tourists. /8 https://t.co/aqYM5TvVMf

There’s something really profoundly weird about all of this. You can see anywhere in the world right now, from the comfort of your own home. Even the most remote places, in an instant. There’s no need to go there, to see it, burning tonnes of jet fuel. /9

And this hypertourism is getting worse, not better. There’s something profound about our culture to be understood here. I suspect this is really about our total loss of understanding of what place means. We replaced place with space. With maps. /10

That pathological obsession for the most ‘authentic’ experience of somewhere else is (I think) the mourning of that loss of understanding. We know the places we live don’t have that sense of magic for most that these tourist places have for them. /11

We’re circling the globe every day to try to find that sense of place again. To accumulate places, like quantity will break through that barrier. (It won’t.) Or feeling like if we’re actually there, in Paris, we’re closer to the authentic ‘Paris’. /12

But it’s a hall of mirrors. You can live in Paris, go native. But then you’re not travelling, you’ve moved. The reason the places we go to see seem amazing, is that the people who made them understood place. They knew how to make place a magical, sacred thing. /13

We don’t know how to do that now. Our suburbs are giant car parks for commuting wage slaves. Place has become an address, a point on a map, connected to every other point, so workers can ‘commute’ to anywhere they’re needed. We’re a culture of movement, not place. /14

Of displacement, of people and things. It’s our old Imperial DNA, still expressing itself. We don’t want to be in place, we want to accumulate things in great spirals of travel out and back. Including tourist sights and experiences. We’re even tourists in our own land. /15 https://t.co/BpRPwOELcA

Isn’t it beyond strange that our relationship to our own country is the same as the relationship we have to all the places we travel through overseas? We’re tourists at home, AND abroad. Always just ‘seeing the sights’. Sights we can see from our couch, any time we like. /16 https://t.co/RR7pQBq1Hh

In the meantime Indigenous Australians have been telling us the whole time we’ve been here that place, the land, is the centre of their lives. We’ve never understood that, and we still don’t. To us Uluṟu is like the Eiffel Tower, or Venice - a tourist attraction. /17

Something to see, to have a selfie in front of, to prove that we were ‘there’, to show others. It’s a pissing contest, who can accumulate the most sights, like collecting stamps. Meantime our landscape increasingly lies in ruins, because we have no actual connection to it. /18 https://t.co/9lDVvCdiLb

And it’s not an easy connection to put back. We have no idea how to make place. Both science and New Age mumbo jumbo try, but miss it entirely. How to be grounded, in place. That’s our problem. We could try to learn what it means from Indigenous Australians. /19

The now famous culture stretching back tens of thousands of years, a culture most fundamentally of place. You’d think that would be the most important thing to understand, anywhere on Earth. But we sentimentalise it, mock it, scientise it, camp in it, make it numinous. /20

All of that is just us using our misunderstandings to try to get understanding. To try to recover a void in our cultures, of place. Look at how easily politicians weaponise sovereignty and borders, we know our place is fundamental in some way. We just don’t understand how. /21

It has nothing to do with borders or sovereignty, more rubbish imperial DNA still trying to assert itself. We’re still children of empire, we haven’t figured that out yet. I mostly hate travel, because I feel that acutely, that imperial accumulation of meaningless sights. /22

My most sacred place is my home. My place. It’s not an address, a point on a map. It’s where I experience the universe. It’s not local, or global, all that nonsense is imperial baggage that won’t go away. I’m grounded, at home. That place ‘the economy’ despises. /23

Unless it’s real estate to be sold. You need to stop moving, to just be in a place, to start to feel place. Once you do, the universe comes to you, you don’t need to go to it. /end