journal features

so this is Detroit!

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-eight years and a million words

Detroit, 2015.10.09

I'm in Detroit for a conference, and had the opportunity of taking a tour around the city center. Naturally, I took it and I'm glad I did. It was free of charge, but included access to a number of the fine old steel-frame buildings around the city that have been restored (and in some cases from the edge of demolition). We saw funky basement offices done up like a speakeasy, we saw the extensive graffiti art that's been included in the design of the "new Detroit", and to be honest we had the best coffee I can remember (at a shop whose name I cannot remember).

Aside from the tour, we'd been enjoying the restaurants and bars that are part of the city's turnaround. I even found a place across the street from my hotel that makes its own bourbon (in Kentucky). What can I say!

Then tonight the Red Wings won their opening game, and the place went nuts. Never seen such a celebration over a hockey game.

In short; way to go, Detroit.

The conference is put on by the Society of Information Risk Analysts (SIRA) annually, and is called "SIRAcon". I sit on the board of SIRA, and naturally felt it necessary to take the tour as a) who wouldn't want to get in on the ground floor of the renaissance of a North American city famed until recently only for the collapse of the city center and b) I felt that I should attend, as I'd voted for Detroit as the venue this year and wanted to ensure that the board was represented on the trip. A bit like being a politician, really.

rand()m quote

I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness... The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.

—Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World (1995)