the last metrocard

earlier this month, the MTA announced its last branded MetroCard before they complete the transition to contactless OMNY. the physical cards will linger — there was a decade of overlap between subway tokens and MetroCards, too — but they’re on their way out.

like everything i write, this should all be taken with an asterisk of hypocrisy: i haven’t swiped onto the subway regularly in a few years, but usually keep a spare MetroCard in my wallet. there’s an erotic satisfaction in the tactility of swiping, something sexy about the dexterity, like riding a citibike directly into the dock. it conveys a cosmopolitan competence. fucking up a swipe is akin to mispronouncing a word in a language you can never really be fluent. remember when it took Hillary Clinton five tries to swipe?

was this why she lost the election? no. but it wasn’t not why.

there are some upsides to OMNY that i’m not going to get into, because i’m not the news and have no obligation to parrot city-approved talking points. so here’s my take: i find it alarming that it’ll soon be impossible to take an untraceable subway ride (unless you jump the turnstile…while you still can). OMNY is yet another barrier to anyone without a smartphone, presents new privacy concerns, and accelerates gentrification. so what better stake in the heart of its predecessor than a partnership with Instagram?

the branded MetroCards also feature local c*ntent cre*tors @subwaytakes and @NewYorkNico, both of whom i follow and enjoy. they’ve done genuinely great work to preserve the best parts of this city. Nico, along with his 1.5 million followers, singlehandedly saved multiple New York institutions during covid. Kareem’s series @keepthemeterrunning interviews cab drivers at their favorite restaurants, spotlighting a vital group of workers that have essentially been abandoned by the city.

@overheardnewyork is another crowd favorite. it’s worth it to move here for the eavesdropping alone. last week I heard a guy in a diner ask the waiter "so, the Shroud of Turin — what do you think? gotta be fake, right?" immediately, the waiter responded "well, society is controlled by elites who communicate through symbols and imagery, so." what a gift it is to call this place home. nothing can pry me out of this city except death or rent.

but it's not any of these people featured on the front of the card. it’s Instagram, the Zuckerberg-owned shrine to consumption that, among other things, promotes eating disorders and illegally monitors children, entrapping them in an algorithm to harvest lifetimes of data. it’s contributed to the perpetual sense of un-belonging that haunts contemporary life: am i pressed up against the glass of other people’s worlds, or have i unwittingly built my own enclosure?

individualized algorithms are, i’m beginning to suspect, fundamentally incompatible with communal existence. in spite of Robert Moses, New York was not built by or for one single person. but the New York Instagram sells you is another story: a hyper-curated, exquisitely tailored capsule wardrobe you can try on for a few throwaway years before your parents stop paying your rent and instead gift you a down payment on a 4 bed 3 bath in your hometown for your 30th birthday.

i say that with zero malice (okay, maybe one malice. New York is not a honeymoon destination for spoiled twentysomethings — that’s what Jackson Hole is for!!!). i’d honestly rather you flee than become the kind of person infiltrating my neighborhood: leash of an untrained dog draped lazily over the wrist, gobbling up the entire sidewalk pushing a double-wide stroller one-handed, Airpods Max sealed over the ears to prevent any accidental interaction with a neighbor, eyes shielded by thick sunglasses but clearly glued to a phone — scrolling, naturally, through Instagram.

there is, of course, another Instagram version of New York, documented by accounts like @subwaycreatures and @whatisnewyork. the undercurrent here is less celebratory, more unkind. here, the “realer” parts of New York — poverty, mental illness, even art or food or music that isn’t explicitly catered to wealthy white American tastes — are posted as punchlines to gawk at, a stubborn grit that has yet to be sandpapered out of the city. i don’t think it’s a leap to say treating the subway like a zoo, and its working class riders like “creatures”, contributes to the structurally violent reality where cops arrest women selling churros, shoot turnstile jumpers and each other, while volunteer white cops murder poor Black riders with impunity.

voluntarily capitulation to the surveillance state aside, filming strangers for clout is fucking lame. this is a city with 8 million people — sometimes weird shit happens on the subway! sometimes it’s even scary! i’m so sorry you experienced life! god forbid any of the slings and arrows of existence brush your FaceTuned skin! for many, New York is not something intended to actually be experienced. it’s just another meal to post and never eat.

is falling in love with New York via Instagram or TikTok any different than reading about it in books or seeing it on film? i’d argue yes. on an app, you can give feedback, tell it to “Show me less of this”. you can steer your algorithm until it aligns with the perception of a place you already had. it eliminates all spontaneity, curiosity, and discomfort. why live in a city without these things? why live at all?

maybe i’m wrong. maybe this is just the beginning of the Fran Lebowitzification that happens to anyone who lives here long enough. (“i’m a Leftover,” my older Greenpoint neighbors lament, a title people my age may never live anywhere long enough to earn.)

i’ll never know the very specific pain of being from here and watching your home morph into something unrecognizable. i chose to make this home; i signed up for the pain. i grew up in jersey, but came into the city at least once a week — my parents both worked in Manhattan and grew up in Queens; my grandma still lives there. moving here was never a dream, but an inevitability, an arranged marriage. it began as a matter of strategic convenience, and was later forged in a fire of loyalty and duty: during covid, i felt religiously compelled to stay, as if i had made some sacred vow to never abandon the city, in sickness or health. then one day i woke up, noticed the new lines that had formed on my city’s face, and felt nothing but an overwhelming surge of desire, protectiveness, and gratitude to have witnessed the change. i had fallen in love.

how do you explain this devotion to someone whose desire to move here came from a Goldman Sachs intern’s Get Ready With Me? who Ubers everywhere because they’re scared of the subway and real taxis? who’s never wandered into a restaurant without first consulting the Yelp reviews? who doesn’t pay their own rent, high up in a hastily constructed skyscraper, its great glass teeth sinking into what’s left of this city’s heart? we have such different ideas about what life in a city ought to be, and since they have all the money, they get to decide. a rich “new yorker” can live in their pied-à-terre for only two months a year, and everything in the neighborhood will still be catered to them. how many units in “luxury” buildings sit empty? (a lot!) there’s an entirely new, hyper-corporate, uncannily-sanitized city being built for people who aren’t even here. how do we get them to care about this place? they’ll never unplug long enough to have a conversation with a stranger. maybe i can AirDrop them some literature.

the same week they debuted the Instagram partnership, the MTA announced their oldest train cars — the ones with the orange seats — were being discontinued. strangely, i’ve been encountering them more than ever, or maybe i’m just appreciating them more. one pulled into my station the other day. couldn’t begin to tell you how it got there — i was waiting for the G and up pulled a D, a line with which the G does not intersect. but it instantly felt like home. a coveted perpendicular seat was open, and i slid into it, pressing my head against the windowpane. a guy with a boombox boards. this is infinitely less offensive to me than blasting a video on your phone without headphones: the boombox, at least, was never designed to be an individual experience. have the courage to audio-assault the entire community, or use your fucking headphones.

the conductor garbles an announcement over the loudspeaker. we wouldn’t have been able to understand without the boombox anyway. if our route’s been changed, we don’t know about it. on this loud, outdated, mislabelled train, rumbling underground towards a mystery destination, i am in the depths of many people’s idea of hell, and i’ve never felt more held. in the belly of the beast, i let myself be devoured.