Cities Shouldn't Buy Blue Check Marks

This article was originally published on Strong Towns member Michael Natelli’s Substack, Hope in Cities. It is shared here with permission.

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(Source: Unsplash/ilgmyzin.)

When he recently proposed charging for blue check marks on Twitter, Elon Musk posed an interesting question:

Is verification worth it? And if so, when?

The original intent of check marks was to help identify authentic public persons and major organizations and distinguish them from fakes. But while that intent is still true, Twitter’s measure for a “public person” has broadened immensely in recent years, with criteria somewhat subjective, leaving the chance to receive verified status available to just about anyone that can produce the perception of even mild niche fame.

With verification status feeling in reach to the masses, so is the accompanying feeling: being noteworthy enough that other people want to pretend they’re you.

This trend goes far beyond Twitter. It plays out in real life. And it plays out in cities, too.

Look no further than my own backyard, where Nashville is prepared to drop over $1 billion for a new Tennessee Titans football stadium. The reason? Verification.

“We’ll get to host a Super Bowl.”

“The College Football National Championship could come to Nashville.”

And the flip side, of course, is that had the city balked at supporting a stadium, the Titans—who helped Nashville gain national notoriety as “an NFL city” back in 1999—could threaten to relocate elsewhere. But should that matter?

We don’t look at marriages that negotiate through the threat of divorce as models for healthy relationships. And we shouldn’t see business that threaten divorce as healthy economic partners, either.

This isn’t just true of sports stadiums. In recent months and years, we’ve seen cities across the country outright beg to enter these same kinds of abusive and unstable relationships with Amazon, Ford, and perhaps most frequently, Walmart.

Subsidizing our way into fiscal poverty can only be explained by one thing: getting verified.

Except we pay far more than eight bucks a month. And like with Twitter checkmarks, we do so primarily to impress people that we don’t even know.

Urbanists love to say "cities are for people, not cars” but I’ve said before that it’s important to double-click on the first half of that phrase and define who we mean when we say “people.” Are we trying to build for a city’s present and future residents? Or for visitors and media types that will put us in Top 10 lists?

Economic development models that primarily serve tourists turn cities into places to be consumed first and foremost rather than engines of human flourishing. Consumer cities are economically unstable, fiscally unproductive, and ultimately soulless.

So long as it is purely a vanity plate, I don’t plan to spend $8 per month or any other amount on getting a blue check mark. Would it generate more followers and even subscribers to my newsletter? Perhaps superficially. But the members of these fledgling “communities” on both platforms have chosen to “live here” not because of my status (which is virtually non-existent), but because each of you has decided there’s something of value here. And I hope to continue to make that true every week.

Digital communities and analog cities alike are at their strongest when those who live in and economically engage with them do so because of value, not perceived status. When we do the latter, the only thing verified is how costly it is.

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