City, Interrupted

How the presence of technology powerhouses is fast converting the once sleepy Seattle into a sleepless future metropolis

Traveling is about transformation. We travellers pursue varied landscapes, food, and cultures, for every such bit experienced adds a little something, however faint, but still a new perspective. We evolve through these little add-ons. But what happens when a city – by definition, a static, immovable territory – assimilates several different cultures and allows itself to be germinated from these influences? And how does technology fit into this evolution equation? These were some of the questions I carried with me when I travelled to Seattle. I had a singular purpose in this week-long visit: ignore the beauty that Seattle’s outskirts are known for, forget the hikes, but focus on understanding the city itself. Seattle is being remade, and I wanted to study its transmutation.

Seattle, once a sleepy town, is now a technology dynamo.Its flywheel given momentum by the likes of Amazon and Microsoft, and several thousand start-ups that have borne from the presence of these tech heavyweights. March to the centre of the city and what you first find is a beautiful city wretched by all the construction going on in its heart. The high-paying tech jobs have led to a soaring demand for housing and resulted in a construction frenzy, blocked lanes and closed sideways. Cranes stand perched at almost every corner, and the innards of nearly every second lane in downtown Seattle lie dug up in the open. Okay, I exaggerate. But you get the idea. 

“All companies are expanding, Amazon leading the pack. Finding space in downtown to accommodate this workforce means new construction,” explained Mridu, my host, when I asked about the feverish construction. Amazon alone has close to 50 buildings and expanding. “South Lake Union is the epicentre of this construction boom, and it will not end anytime soon,” said Mridu.“Parking lots are disappearing, and low-slung buildings are demolished to make space for skyscrapers”. As a traveller, that simply meant that I walk around instead of driving or waiting for my Uber to show up. And that’s what I did: walked miles across grid lanes, from mornings through till midnight, pouring-in and out of cafes and shops, educating myself. In the process, I got a glimpse into all that seems to be shaping Seattle into a new city. 

Hacker’s mindset is a mantra well-respected on the West Coast. A few start-ups have mushroomed in Seattle that bring this radical thinking onto health as well. ‘Body hacking’ as it is usually called in these parts. One such body hack concept I discovered is Bulletproof Coffee, which became a regular morning fixture for me during my week there. The brain behind the concept is Dave Asprey, who has written several books promoting the bulletproof lifestyle. The centrepiece of this concept if bulletproof coffee, which when broken down into its simplest elements is black coffee, blended with ghee (clarified butter) and coconut oil (or its derivative, MCT oil). It’s touted to speed up ketosis and hence weight loss. Asprey derived this idea from yak butter tea, commonly consumed in the Ladakh region. 

Every morning, at six, I would walk to this minimalist café, order a large bulletproof coffee, sit by the window and watch the momentum pick up on the streets outside. The café is next door to several Amazon buildings, and I would see the early morning crowd of officegoers walk past its ceiling high glass windows, their ears wrapped into wireless speakers and hands cupped around Starbucks lattes. At this hour in Sweden, where I live, I would have done the same. But now, on vacation, I marvelled at the mechanistic march of drones of tech workers heading to their open layout offices to create yet another feature or app that would make our lives a tad simpler and nudge us to a shop a little bit more. 

After finishing my coffee, I would walk to Whole Foods to shop for breakfast, or to simply check out its aisles, which are invariably stocked with organic food with several vegetarian options. During every visit to the US, I make it a point to visit this favourite retail chain of mine, known for its organic and urban health root. Amazon had acquired Whole Foods for 13.5 billion dollars in 2017, and I searched for signs on how that move may have changed this brilliant retail chain. I found no visible Amazon presence in the stores itself, except for the checkout lines dedicated for Amazon Prime customers. What I found however was an aisle dedicated only to sleep supplements, such as melatonin. It came in various forms – drinkable sachets to tablets – and it shared the shelf space with chamomile tea, lavender smells, and other sleep aid supplements. To me, this well-stocked shelf seemed a symptom of sleep deprivation that may be affecting the citizenry of Seattle. Long work hours are not uncommon in Seattle, I later learned, and the inability to sleep is fast becoming an epidemic in Seattle. ‘Sleepless in Seattle’ just acquired a new grimmer dimension.

While Whole Foods may not have yet wholly changed under Amazon’s leadership, a perfect illustration of the future of retail was on display just a few blocks away from Whole Foods in South Lake Union district. This was the futuristic Amazon Go store. These stores are only present in three cities in the US, and Seattle is home to four such stores. The concept store uses computer vision, deep learning algorithms, and sensors to automate the purchase and checkout. What that means is that while entering, you scan your Amazon Go QR code from the App on the reader at the store’s entrance. Thereafter the process is seamless, which means you can pick up any item on display – currently it’s a limited assortment of juices, coffee, fruits and prepared meals – and just walk out of the store. No waiting in queues at the cashier. I was simply blown away by this vision of the future, and so was the group of Chinese tourists who were in the store at the same time as me, taking selfies. 

Still dazed by the ‘Go’ stores and in awe of Amazon, I caught up with Nishant late one evening. He works at Amazon and promised to walk me through the new headquarters of Amazon, a new addition to the downtown since my last visit two years back. The focal point of the visit was ‘The Spheres’ – giant domes of glass, housing tropical plants in an artificially created surrounding. Though the Spheres are supposed to be a lounge for Amazon employees, but when I visited it, these domes were primarily filled with tourists. “It’s a gift from Amazon to the city,” Nishant explained, “There was lately a lot of criticism that Amazon was taking a lot but not giving back enough to the city”. That rang true, for South Lake Union's transformation is easy to see. While buildings have gotten higher and open parking lots are being reclaimed into shiny new office space, the housing prices have surged, the centre has become overcrowded and traffic unrelenting. Cynics even have a name to this phenomenon, "Amageddon".

The Spheres are anyhow a welcome addition, green lungs to a concrete jungle. Nishant managed to get me a visitor’s pass for the Spheres. Once inside, we took a tour of the lounge that housed plants from more than 30 countries, including some insect eating carnivorous species as well. The plants are kept at roughly 22 degrees centigrade and more than 60% humidity, the latter via automated sprinklers that shoots up a fine mist periodically. The star of the show is a huge bulb like plant, nicknamed the ‘corpse flower’ (scientific name ‘Amorphophallus titanum’). A native to Sumatra, this plant lets off a rotten flesh like smell to attract pollinators. Well, I couldn’t smell a thing but was awed by the sheer size of the flower – the largest I had ever seen. 

The downtown – with its congested streets and skyline speckled with neon yellow cranes – seemed to me very much Amazon’s territory. I wanted to contrast the experience. So, I decided to head to Redmond, a 30 minutes bus ride from Seattle, to visit the Microsoft campus. “Redmond is Microsoft’s home” explained Linishya, who was showing me around, “and it’s not any one central building that you’d call Microsoft’s head office. Rather Microsoft has several buildings sprawled over the entire campus.” We drove around the campus, from one building to another, each nestled deeply in a cover of trees, and letting off a feeling of exclusivity. Redmond, though only 30 minutes away from Seattle, came across as a complete antithesis of Seattle’s downtown. Its greenery, wide uninterrupted streets, and diffused landscape counterpoint the hustle of Seattle with assured collectedness. At one such office building, we parked the car and walked around. It was a weekend, and silence reigned, the kind that lets you hear the birds chirp and the stream gurgle. And there were plenty of both in the campus. A narrow stream curved right across, its rhythm adding to the prevailing calmness. On both its sides lay chairs for employees to sit and eat lunch, or even take meetings. I wondered how much thought had gone into designing this campus, and how gently it has merged itself with the surroundings. Microsoft’s was a different jungle than Amazon’s concrete one – this one aimed to harmonise and not violently disrupt its environs. 

A while later, Linishya took me on a tour of the Bellevue neighbourhood. Perched on small hills, this neighbourhood is dotted with multi-million-dollar homes – ones of Satya Nadella and Bill Gates also lay hidden somewhere, I am sure – with their private roads and overseeing the Olympic range of mountains. This was an exclusive corner, and perhaps one of the richest parts of the US, I was told. Lots of these homes are perhaps owned by early shareholders of Microsoft. As we drove around, I wondered: If given an opportunity, where would I end up working. Would the hustle of Seattle and its mantra of move fast and break things appeal to me, or the poise of Microsoft, one so deeply soaked in its campus also? 

How different was this experience for me, I considered – an education into how the world moves, crashes and disrupts. Soon, I would fly back to Sweden and resume the life I had disassociated from for a week, one in a society that’s almost anti-capitalist, where the wealth can be made but is redistributed actively and consciously, where the development happens but not at a breakneck speed, and especially not disrupting the environment or causing major inconveniences.

On the bus ride back to Seattle’s downtown, I realised that I had collected more questions than I had brought with me in this trip. I wasn’t sure if Seattle was in control, which company did greater good to Seattle, would I ever consider living here, would I even survive? But that’s the point of travel, isn’t it? Unanswered questions expand one’s thinking, makes you question the status-quo, wonder if things could change for better. I left Seattle inspired, and I left it with a promise that I will come back to study its mutation again, and yet again. The story of a city undergoing transformation is a story not different from us humans. A city, like an adolescent, grows, sometimes awkwardly, before settling down into a rhythm. Seattle is yet to find a rhythm, and I’m left curious if it’ll ever - in my lifetime. 

A version of this story appeared in the National Geographic Traveller