Local artists respond by making art about it and then leaving for Walthamstow
By Cyndi Himmelstiere | Reporting from the last affordable desk in EC2.
Sources: Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat
The Cycle Continues
The news that OpenAI has arrived in London has prompted, in Shoreditch, the following sequence of events: one local property consultancy issued a press release calling the area “the AI district of Europe”; three letting agents updated their window displays; and my studio lease renewal arrived with a number on it that I initially assumed was a typo.
It was not a typo.
The Artists Respond
The Shoreditch artistic community has responded with characteristic creativity. There is a mural. There is always a mural. This one depicts a robot holding a paintbrush over a city where all the humans are very small and very far away. It is titled “Disruption” and it is sponsored by a fintech startup. The irony is not lost on anyone. The irony is, in fact, load-bearing.
A collective of local photographers, sculptors, and one very committed interpretive dancer has issued a statement. The statement says, and I am paraphrasing only slightly, that they welcome technological progress but would prefer if it did not also welcome itself into their landlord’s Excel spreadsheet. This seems reasonable. Nobody has responded.
Where Does This End?
I asked three people today what Shoreditch will look like in ten years. One said “a server farm with a cocktail menu.” One said “Canary Wharf but with better graffiti.” One said “somewhere else. I’ll be in Walthamstow.” That last one is almost certainly correct. Walthamstow is wonderful. The AI chaos continues and we migrate east, incrementally, pursuing the affordable and the authentic, until one day we reach the sea and there is nowhere left to go except into the water, where at least the rents are controlled by the tides and not by a property management company registered in Luxembourg.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/openai-opens-london-office/
Further displacement at The Daily Mash
