HotelChatter

Hotel Heaven / → All Tags

Tim Bray sees the future, and it looks like a hotel lobby

Where: 8200 Gateway Boulevard [map], Newark, CA, United States, 94560

The prolific blogger Tim Bray recently glimpsed the future in Newark. Ok, stop laughing, he was in Newark California, not that other Newark.

Tim Bray was staying at the W Silicon Valley this week, which he "unhesitatingly recommends".  He doesn't mention the rooms, but he sets the scene in the lobby nicely:

There's WiFi in the bar, so I was online, and the only people there were me at a neatly-sidelit marble table, a geek on one of the big weird sofas also with laptop, and a couple sitting chatting softly to the bartender. There was some soft techno music pulse, just audible. If you'd put this on a movie screen in the 1950s it would have been a totally plausible Sci-Fi future. In late 2004, it's just a glimpse of what more and more transient spaces are coming to look like.

"Give me a Leonard Cohen afterworld, So I can sigh eternally"...Looks like that "afterworld" has arrived Kurt, smack dab in the middle of Silicon Valley, just as we suspected.