I find this hugely classist. (Edit: and I'm generally not someone to use that terminology)
Most (even American) travellers are just trying to see some sights, have a normal and are not particularly rude or problematic.
The issue is now that 'everyone' can afford to travel ... it's causing problems.
This is a problem of prosperity.
Animal-rights advocates frequently argue, not without some justification, that it's unethical and exploitative to capture wild animals and lock them up in cages so that we can gawk at them. So let's follow their advice in a hypothetical sense and get rid of zoos, circuses, even pet stores. Fast-forward a generation or two and let's imagine how that might turn out. The people from which those very organizations draw their membership will have never seen an elephant or a tiger -- or, for the city-dwellers among them, even a deer or a rabbit -- in real life. These are also the same people who vote for Congressional representatives to pass or repeal conservation laws.
In this hypothetical future, volunteers from the animal-rights organization will go door-to-door canvassing for votes or petition signatures, just as they do today... except no one will have the faintest idea what they're talking about. The activists will find that they might as well be asking their contributors to save the T-Rexes in Jurassic Park. What's the difference? They're all just pixels on a screen.
Tourism works the same way, IMO. It may have harmful aspects, but the effects of completely eliminating it will be worse.
And decrying "mass tourism," as Wallace puts it, is nothing but code for "Only a few wealthy people should get to experience this."
"Nothing but" is an incorrect over-reduction. Like any high-volume human activity, mass tourism can have real impacts. Concern over those impacts is likely to exist entirely independently of wealth-favoring classism.
And whether the experience is limited only to the wealthy depends what mechanism is chosen to limit access. If it's determined by pricing mechanisms responding to demand, then, yep, you're going to largely skew access to the wealthy. If it's determined by assessing the number of visitors that won't destroy the experience, and then handing out access via lottery then the criticism loses some of its power.
That being said, I really enjoyed the author’s post. If anything, the people who are going to these places are the social climbing, upwardly mobile middle class, determined to burnish their brand on Instagram.
Also the free flow of tourists is a problem that parallels a lot of other things in the world currently. Information, capital, trade, all these things have moved so much and so fast they have loosed control from national government sovereignty that used to regulate them. As the anti-globalization train begins picking up speed, all these will be severely restricted, for better or worse.
Stop projecting, 99% of people do not give a shit about this
There are many little tourist spots where 'selfies' are indeed a problem.
That said, we've always been taking photos on vacay. So maybe it's just that we can easily click-and-share ...
Stepping into the fountain, doing something stupid, mobbing people, stepping 'over the rope', crowding a public space to get a picture - this is 'rude'.
Taking a photo of the Eiffel tower from the sidewalk is normal.
If you're using "class" as a synonym for "concerned specifically with the divide between poverty and not-poverty", then this is especially relevant. Colorblindness in anti-poverty solutions has been historically a way to aggravate problems problems caused by systemic racism that is not addressed (like Federal housing loan guarantees to jump-start an American Middle Class that "just happen" to only be available to people who meet a particular set of characteristics that "just happen" to correlate strongly with whiteness).
If you're speaking specifically about objections to how loaded the term "racism" is when speaking to people, thanks to an inability of our broader society to produce a distinction between individually non-complicit, systemically racist outcomes and individually complicit, "racist intent", then I would suggest moving the burden of the term to "classist" is a form of euphemism, and will generally only serve to make the word "classist" take the same emotional connotations in the future rather than solve the terminology problem it is presented to solve. We are probably better just trying to find a way to grapple with why the term "racist" makes us so emotionally charged than avoiding the subject.
I love travelling and I'm soured at how overrun places are.
But it's not a problem of the 'ugly tourist' it's a problem of just 'too many people'.
I don't go to tourist destinations, I just go to places.
Every French or German village is 'interesting' to those who don't know them. They are all full of history.
Same for so many other places.
The only 'non destinations' on planet earth are the suburbs, and places where there are a lot of Starbuckses, unfortunately, that seems to be what we are building everywhere. And I do mean everywhere. The suburbs of Toronto, Singapore and Istanbul are oddly similar in too many ways ...
"alien, ignorant, greedy for something you cannot ever have"
I find this hugely classist.