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Comment by Bucephalus355 | Hacker News Reader

I really appreciate you using the term “classist”. I think that term, and not “racist”, needs to be much more widely applied these days.

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.

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I get it.

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 ...

The ugly tourist the piece refers to is all tourists being somewhere the wouldn’t otherwise have been except for relative affluence and the opportunity. Lots of people who just go places, which by definition become tourist destinations.

I can actually see suburb tourism become a thing. At least they're pre-prepared for consumption and foot traffic.

> determined to burnish their brand on Instagram

Stop projecting, 99% of people do not give a shit about this

Instagram has 700MM daily actives. The world doesn't have fifty billion people. Who's projecting exactly?

And is your claim that the vast majority of these users are curating a personal brand, as opposed to simply sharing with friends and family, actual corporate brands maintaining an online presence, or any other use case besides?

Actually, I read literally in the last few days that a survey indicated 'Instagramability' was the #1 issues for Millenials in their choice of destinations. I think it was the Globe and Mail, sorry I don't have the link. That kind of threw me a little, but I think 'it's a thing'.

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 ...

My parents did not even bring a camera on vacation; they considered it an annoying habit of tourists and that is 30+ years ago. It had the sideeffect that we did not get flagged as tourists but as locals/expaths which is better usually. With smartphones all of that changed ofcourse.

I don't believe your parents were the norm, and taking pictures is generally not considered rude in any culture, really.

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.

I did not mean to say it was considered rude; when people got robbed/pickpocketed it was not us as we didn't look like clueless tourists with huge cameras around our necks.

While your point about racism is kind of tautologically true from a purely semantic standpoint (in the same way that "primate" is a more widely applicable term than "human"), race and class are inextricably linked in the US, and the problems caused by it deserve focus on their racial context.

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.

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