I grew up in Cupertino, California, a place synonymous with Silicon Valley and which most people know as the home of Apple. If you had told teenage Jenny that I would have even half an hour’s worth of stuff to say about Cupertino, I would have been surprised, because my experience of Cupertino was mostly this:
a typical scene. (Courtesy of author)
To me as a bored teenager, the city was merely a sea of interchangeable shopping centers, office parks, and six lane roads with eternal traffic lights. It turns out that in the 1960s they already had a word for this: slurb. Like the technology that comes out of Cupertino, my slurb felt disconnected from place and time, somehow equally a-spatial and ahistorical.