Addressing the specificities of post-internet urbanity often leads to sweeping statements leaving a bitter feeling of irresolution. There is a sense that all is being transformed, absorbed and mined, that something profoundly novel is taking form, but it all still looks and feels deceptively the same. Changes haven’t yet sedimented into architecture.
Looking for a paradigm in this age feels desperate and passé. The nature of the time is to hide everything as a déja vu. So many familiarities – the new media extends the speculation, the spectacle, the displacement and the inequality that also defined the pre-internet city. But perhaps this is why we settled on the case of Calabasas, California.
Calabasas, 91302
Calabasas is the world capital of social media inasmuch one would easily say that Hollywood is the world capital of cinema. There is a disproportionate number of the most followed accounts on Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat and Vevo that are run by people living in Calabasas. The reasons behind the attractivity of this suburban neighborhood of Los Angeles is largely unclear if not mysterious. There has been countless more or less interesting articles and stories devoted to the life in this suburban city of Los Angeles but even the most skanky local tabloids have failed to impose an unified narrative on Calabasas celebrity success.
Rather than the social media’s world capital, Calabasas should actually be called Instagram’s world capital. Since the app’s launch in 2010, there has always been at least 40% of the ten most followed Instagram accounts who had lived in Calabasas. It peaked in 2015 with 70% of the top-ten being Calabasians, a ratio which is now at 50%. Even if the rest of Los Angeles is counted as one single city, it would be less consistently represented than Calabasas. This city-neighborhood of Los Angeles is just 30 minutes drive from the heart of Hollywood and 45 minutes drive from Downtown – which is inside Los Angeles in Angeleno standards. Located in the Southwestern corner of the San Fernando Valley, the city of Calabasas is an enclave confined in a hilly recess of the Santa Monica Mountains, the range that made Hollywood famous for its cinematic views over the metropolis. Calabasas is also located at the other end of Mulholland drive. The notorious road that sinuously crosses East- West through the mountains above Los Angeles from the bottom of the Hollywood Sign to the entrance of Calabasas, by its shopping mall. “You feel the history of Hollywood in that road” states David Lynch on the occasion of the release of his film Mulholland Drive, also certainly referring to the notorious foundational story for the City of Angels of the water engineer William Mulholland who made the California life possible by bringing it sufficient water supply, that was retold in Polanski’s Chinatown. Could David Lynch be right? Could Mulholland Drive tell the story of Los Angeles from Hollywood to Calabasas? The story would then assume that Calabasas is the post internet Hollywood, the heart of the cinema 2.0, the studio for the new spectacle facilitated by social media.
