Earlier this week, we were strong-armed into watching Brokelandia—but not everyone was impressed with the Brooklyn-based response to Portlandia, the love letter to artisanal knit cap-wearing locavore hipsters. The Frisky was particularly riled up by it, and came up with the above Venn diagram to demonstrate just how dumb and surface-level the comparisons have gotten at this point. Either that, or they're making an even deeper point about the space-time continuum.
For you see, (Western) Brooklyn and Portland are an example of the relativity of the space-time continuum, where the same place can exist at two separate geographical points. As Wikipedia so helpfully explains:
When a space-like interval separates two events, not enough time passes between their occurrences for there to exist a causal relationship crossing the spatial distance between the two events at the speed of light or slower. Generally, the events are considered not to occur in each other's future or past. There exists a reference frame such that the two events are observed to occur at the same time, but there is no reference frame in which the two events can occur in the same spatial location.
Instead of rejecting that space-time break, we should embrace the fact that thriving indigenous Etsy-based cultures can exist at multiple places at once! This idea is one of the major pillars of globalization—who needs to go to Disney Land when they have Times Square? And we can't let a few Maggie Gyllenhaal's get in the way of that progress.
Of course, this is just our interpretation of the Brooklyn/Portland paradigm presented above. Maybe what we really need is a new TV show called "TVlandia" where hip 20-somethings discuss things they saw on TV programs and use TV as a jumping off point to discuss the world around them and extrapolate the relative merits of culture between things that are basically the same.
