The Paris Checklist Industrial Complex
Thoughts on the flattening of Paris
Ten years ago this week, I signed the contract with my publisher to write The New Paris. I worked on that book for nearly two years, never expecting it to resonate as strongly as it did. I still get emails about it to this day, which I love. (Merci!)
It occurred to me, as I was reminiscing on the experience from start to finish (and wondering how on earth I juggled so many freelance gigs while reporting and writing it—financially, I had to. Physically, I don’t know how it didn’t completely crush me), that many of the same frustrations that propelled me to pitch the book are still exasperating me today. In some ways, they’re worse — my gripe about the stereotype-driven standard of storytelling about Paris has been exacerbated by the multitude of social media and travel recommendation platforms that exist but didn’t when I was writing the book. Before, it was glossy magazines, films, some books and blogs parroting the same tired arrondissement itineraries or surface-level toasts to the "Parisian art of living."
Now, there are simply more ways than ever before to flatten this city to caricature or present Parisian idiosyncrasies without context as if they are novel. “So many shops closed during lunch, it’s super inconvenient!” Groundbreaking. When the Instagram algorithm decided to torture me this week by pushing a slew of “here’s everything I bought in my French pharmacy haul!” videos into my feed, I cracked.
After building a career online and using social media to connect with people interested in France, politics, life, or my work, I’ve come to accept that it is rarely originality or an impenetrable point of view that earns attention but instead, gaming a trend and repeating it ad nauseam. A 30-second video set unironically to Edith Piaf with romantic imagery meant to capture Paris, the film set not the city, gets hundreds of thousands of views. The clickbait machine has gotten faster, prettier, and more formulaic. Creators work from a script: a croissant, striped shirt and a Polène bag, a no-name bistro for steak-frites, and a pharmacy run like it’s a pilgrimage, and voilà: they’ve “done” Paris.
Every generation finds its own way to flatten Paris into a digestible fantasy, but this era’s version is particularly grating for the same reasons content around fitness or alpha male ideology are—they all play on an inescapable loop. It’s hard to escape them once you’ve seen them. God forbid you hate-share a piece of content with someone, the stuff appears even more.
So this cottage industry of TikTokers and grammers' breathlessly declaring, “I did Café de Flore,” as if it’s an escape room challenge they conquered by ordering an €8 espresso, hits differently.
What’s missing in all this isn’t just nuance, it’s soul. These overly curated feeds don’t capture the sounds, the mess, or the contradictions of Paris. There’s no room for detours or discomfort. It’s all croissant, no crumbs.
This contentification of experience isn’t limited to Paris, mind you. Rome and Venice are battling the same, and given that I’m currently planning my first trip to Japan for later this year, the content machine for Tokyo and Kyoto is equally as saturated. Last week, a New York Times piece asked, “Is the restaurant good—or does it just look good?” It’s a question worth asking about travel, too: is it meaningful, or does it perform well? (For more on the broader theme of better tourism, listen to my podcast episode with The New Tourist author Paige Mclanahan.)
Given that I’ve written my books, in part, as a rebuttal to lazy or downright problematic storytelling, I have to wonder: have we lost our capacity for curiosity in favor of control? There’s nothing inherently wrong with wanting to document your travels—give me an interesting anecdote from your meal at Bistrot Paul Bert or something that moved you while speaking with a local. But when the performance becomes the point, we risk missing the story that’s right in front of us.
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Bravo, so well said. The “influencers” who are only there for the photo ops are so icky. And yes, I am sick to death of the cliche posts and surface-level takes.
Thanks for this piece, and for your honesty as someone whose work of course also influences the influencers, so to speak. It’s a challenge for an industry that makes its money by telling people which restaurants and cafes everyone MUST see, because as soon as the address is uttered, there’s only one thing that can happen to these places if the book, Tik Tok, viral Insta video is successful. L’institut Suédois, Paul Bert, Chez Janou … just a few casualties of an era in which it became cool to tell people where to be cool, which thus destroyed their essence. I suspect fewer guide books and more uncanny dérives through Paris is what continues to resist the flattening of the city, whose secrets and joys can never really be written about anyway, only lived in and treasured and kept a secret for those who know.