Geotags, Trip Reports, Adventure Apps, and Social Media - The tools of modern conquest and colonization of the American West
The West is now the playground of social media-fueled identity conquest, thanks to tools that open the West to image seekers with no real care or experience for the place they found online.
When most people think about how to find a place to go this weekend or for their vacation, the answer in the 2010’s and beyond appears to be: The internet. And on the internet, it looks like more and more people are flocking to areas previously undiscoverable to the masses thanks to things like:
Geotags, where people tell exactly the location their photo was taken from
Trip Reports where you can sometimes even download a GPS track for your GPS-enabled phone or device
“Adventure” apps that show where all the trails are, and describe and show photos of what you’ll see on each trail
Social Media - where you can see other people’s trips and go where everyone has gone before …
All of these new tools feel good to the users – they can finally find places to go, and know what they’ll see when they get there, rather than having to keep and look at clunky maps, spend hours pouring over them, know how to read them, and so on. They can just look at a photo on the app or social media site and decide, “Yeah, that looks pretty, I can see myself there.” Or, “That looks boring, nah, next…” It’s like landscape Tinder for the masses…
The interesting thing about this technological incursion into open and non-domesticated lands is that it has directly acted to domesticate … almost everything. And, it has almost entirely centered all of these activities on and in the West. No? Find me a hiking trail in Cincinnati, Ohio, or Ridgewood, New Jersey. Didn’t find any, eh?
The proof is clear in places like Moab, Utah, the Alabama Hills of California, Steamboat, Colorado, and the like. These places were off the beaten path so recently, that the infrastructure to support the massive numbers of people hasn’t had the time or money to catch up with the wide array of damages the new travelers have introduced.
Moab, Utah, as recently as 20 years ago was quiet – you could drive through it on a Saturday at noon, and see little to no traffic. Now, the town lines up for miles, just to cut through, and they had to add a half mile double lane waiting line and queue to get into Arches National Park. It’s like a new In-N-Out Burger opening, every day. Of course Arches has been a tourist wasteland since Edward Abbey did his expose of the area in Desert Solitaire, but today, it’s that wasteland on a steroid overdose.
The changes these technologies have brought are substantial, shocking, and have an incredible dark side that few to none likely recognize.
How could these technologies have a dark side, when all they’ve done is to show people what’s there – and open these lands to everyone? It’s the virtuous-right to ensure that everyone sees these places, isn’t it… ?
In all of my observations of the West, and the generational knowledge passed down to me about these places, I can safely say that this change triggered is nothing shy of an abomination – on almost every dimension:
Environmentally, for the unbridled and unwitting damage the social-media travelers do to the places by having no skills and no real or deep appreciation of the places they’re now trammeling.
Socially, for the rapid and incompatible social changes that the newcomers bring – we all know these travelers are more enlightened and well-intended than the dirty locals (tone:deep sarcasm).
And economically, given that the over and misuse is driven by very few who benefit by selling the places out and being part of the tourism industry, meanwhile creating immense and untold externalities* on those outside these industries.
*Externalities are impacts made by actions that are unaccounted for and deferred to another group that do not receive the benefits of the action.
Every campground around Moab, Utah is now chalked full of people every single night of Spring and Fall. Every dispersed campsite now has a party hearth, complete with broken glass, cans, and a variety of burned trash from aluminum foil to tampons. Yep, all of that … really.
In my 40 years of traveling in my home areas, I’ve never seen such widespread and scaled abuses that are clearly driven by the unskilled and careless. Which is even more appalling given that the east and west coasts, and the south once considered all of the interior West to be “flyover country” – and they weren’t quiet about it. So, what, you all go through a pandemic where flying and staying in haughty resorts becomes scary, so you launch into some hiking app and decide to go rough it in flyover country? Ha, go home.
The technologies that have facilitated this huge shift in recreational use and interest aren’t inherently bad – and they aren’t the direct cause of the problem. The people using these technologies are. The users are choosing to go for a hike, then do a complete write-up with photos to show what they saw. And for what; Flair to add to their ego? To help other people know what they’re going to see, before they see it? The deep motive is likely elusive or so screwed up, it isn’t worth exploring.
The act of seeing a place that people are not present in and thinking, “gosh, this place is so great, I should write this up for everyone on the internet to see and find” is not only a decision that one person makes that affects many others, it’s also one of conquest that is deeply rooted in the mindset of a colonist.
Colonists throughout history have built empires out of seeing and claiming spaces that aren’t theirs to share with the masses of people they came from. And, in this case, it appears that the modern colonists want to expose places that are quiet and hard to find to pretty much anyone on the internet. Have you met some of the people on the internet, and would you want to find them in your favorite hiking spot? Doubt it, definitely doubt it.
As I’ve watched the populations of Colorado, Utah, Arizona, and others explode in an exponential growth pattern, a couple trends have developed as a sidecar – the once quiet and untrammeled places have become loud and trammeled, and the amount of infrastructure to support the new colonists has exploded along-side. Does anyone really think you can have millions of people hiking into the tundra on Colorado’s peaks without infrastructure to help keep people on the established paths? What about the delicate and intricate deserts of the American Southwest?
The little geotag here and there on social media for your 627 social media friends may not seem like a big deal. But when you consider that if you inspire 1% of those followers to one day visit that spot, and they make a similar post, and then inspire a couple more, you’ve fully kicked off an exponential use pattern for that place that will continue to grow for years to come. And, you’ve left a post that can now be accessed and viewed by countless others – basically anyone on the internet who might stumble on your post. That’s what the internet is for and what it’s good at.
Trip reports are an even more pernicious form of adventure exposition and exploitation. The entire purpose of a trip report is to share your best photos of a place, and to talk about what someone will encounter when going to that place. It’s a write-up that is entirely intended to show people who couldn’t or wouldn’t find a place themselves how to get there more easily, and to help them select only places that are worthy of their time to see – without any experimentation, risk, skill, or knowledge of their own to get there. It’s an act of capitalism where you create only externalities, and where the stewards of the place are the ones you choose to offload those externalities onto.
The question I have is; What would have to be happening in someone’s mind where they find a place that’s untrammeled by the inherently-careless masses, and their first thought is – “This place should be seen and findable by everyone on the internet!”?
The answer is that that’s not likely what’s going through their head. They’re probably thinking about how they want to write this up so other people can see it, thinking only of their closest family and friends, and not the cascade they would kick off that would lead to the total annihilation of the character of the place. Their thinking is entirely aligned with the virtuous-right.
Some will say that social media and the social nature of humanity makes all of this a natural progression, of which I disagree. All of what I’m talking about is rooted in fads and trend in our current consumer culture, and are driven by very specific kinds of tourists that are really more akin to colonists in their mindsets and actions.
The great irony of traveling to places you’ve already seen on the internet, and of which someone else has outlined for you as a place to go is not only antithetical to “adventure,” it’s also a consumer-capitalist-rooted thought process to only go to places that have five star reviews and the photos to prove it. Amplified by the exponent of discovery that the internet puts on everything, the end equation is total annihilation of places by people who are nothing more than trend followers and image-seekers.
These new internet-based tools for discovery of places likely started with good intent – to help people find places without having to use maps, making it so they can go-do with less preparation, and perhaps to not “waste time” on some places that aren’t worthy of an Albert Bierstadt painting – but it is done in a way that completely misses the cascade it initiates that directly acts to turn all places of beauty into seething masses of people and the infrastructure to support their unskilled trammeling.
In this new era, geotagging places, writing trip reports, and sharing your story on the internet for everyone from strangers to some weirdo you met at the grocery store a couple weeks ago appears to be the new normal. But if you talk to the locals in Moab, Utah, who aren’t part of the tourist industry, or the expat-locals of Boulder, Colorado, you’ll find that the word they’ll use to describe what’s happened as something like, “total annihilation.” Of everything from their community, to their economy, to their environment.
I say “expat-locals of Boulder,” because as we say in the area, “No one in Boulder is from Boulder anymore.”
Of course the new westerners (as they’re being called) will argue that these places are all public, and are as much theirs as ours, but there’s something big missing – acculturation to the place beyond only the aesthetic beauty and what it does for your social media identity. For those who have been here longer than social media and the internet has been around, we appreciated the place for what it was long before it could become a decorative piece of flair for our false social media identities (of which all are). Not to mention the outdoor / adventure “lifestyle” being the nouveau fashion trend, driving all of this interest in what the urbanites of the east called “flyover country” as recently as 10 years ago.
If you want to see an example of how the explosive and harmful this new wave of social media traveling tourism is, take a look at the Goosenecks of Goosenecks State Park. It only took one photographer taking a unique picture and posting it to the internet a few years ago to turn this spot into a destination for … everyone. What started as a place with no parking lot triggered multiple parking lot expansions in the following years, with fencing, signage, bathrooms, and a parking lot that’s now about the size of a football field. Not to mention the masses standing around with cameras and phones, looking to gather the same image they’ve seen hundreds of thousands of times on the internet already – why? Because they need to go see and take the photo of this place for themselves. This place is now a corpse of what it once was, all thanks to the use of these tools without any established ethics around their use.
In the end, this all appears to be the new normal. The new westerner and new adventurer appear to only visit that which has been visited already, written up on the internet, and already seen. The internet and the new tools of adventure help them find even more beautiful places to go with less effort and even less preparation. Think I’m being hyperbolic? Go take a walk up Gray’s Peak in Colorado on a Saturday in September … you’ll see that there’s now only finding of places to go see them and take ones’ own photos, with no skills, preparation, knowledge of the environment, or acculturated practices needed to keep it healthy while exploring it. All in the name of adventure and getting “closer to nature.”
The Fleeting West is written by a westerner watching and listening to change in the West, hoping to inspire a glimmer of ethic in those who visit or choose to move here to domesticate it further.