My hometown Basel (Switzerland) does not have a mall, instead the center of town is a car-free pedestrian zone, and people shop in markets and local stores all year round. This not only enlivens the town, but creates a strong social fabric among the residents. No wonder malls and social media platforms are facing a demise; people long for the Real, not for the vapid and fake.
After da hype it 's assimilated & now recalibrated on funktionality as part of way broader skills & levels of communication, while the spontaneous live connectivity & openness amongst this fresh generation is high, colourfull & indeed refreshing to see ...
I really like what you have written here. It’s insightful and thoughtful and hopeful. I am finding the scrolling to begin to feel as if it is stealing real life from me. They only thing that keeps me in some semblance of balance, is traveling to other countries and staying in Airbnb’s, with friends, or in hostels so that I am forced into face-to-face interaction with other humans. That is so much more satisfying.
It's sooooo important to note that apart of the reasoning for malls dying is Americas hatred of teenagers. The mall near me banned anyone 18 and under from going to the mall after 5 without a parent or guardian, and they're actually very strict about it. My friends and I were escorted out when I was 16 while searching for homecoming dresses because it was 6 o'clock. Ever since that rule has gone into effect, at least one store within the mall has closed every year.
I think it also had something to do with Mayfair group (which owns Macys) buying up its competitors. Where I grew up it was Filenes. When they bought Filenes they just shuttered that end of the mall because a mall can’t have 2 Macys in it. It was terrible. Where I live now it was a department store called Mervin’s. Every community has this same sad story.
I grew up in the town (San Lorenzo, CA) that was home to the first Mervin's department store. It was popular for a while, but the site where it once stood is now an abandoned area bereft of any business. I'm reminded of the poem "Ozymandias".
My point #2 - this is all of great interest to me as someone on the autistic spectrum
I never been particularly great at interacting with masses and social media is the closest I came to fixing this. Yet I also realize its rife with all sorts of issues - enshittification, groupthink, racism/bigotry (cough cough - Twitter) etc etc etc
In theory it would've been nice if billionaires started investing in offline communities. I just know its never going to happen.
Fellow autistic here. I've never felt as seen and accepted as ME as I have on the comment section of some videos for autism online. :-) No one reading "other meanings" into what I say, no eye contact required... it definitely has it's place.
I've just watched a CNBC report claiming that Gen Z is now shopping at brick-and-mortar stores at the same rate as their grandparents, and a lot of them are going to malls. It seems they're doing it for the same reason a lot of them are starting to go to church, which is that they want to get their faces out of the screen and start living a real life.
Fascinating observation. I too agree that social media is the new mall. And I hope that their popularity wanes. It seems that the mall attempted to replace the town gazebo as a natural gathering place. Maybe we ought to bring that back along with some natural beauty. Community sponsored live music or markets will make people come together. I’m tired of everyone zoning out to their phones. It’s boring! When will everyone realize how boring it all is!?
As someone who has a decent Instagram following and a hybrid influencer role for my job (as well as 100k subs on YT), I can tell you this is all true. There has been a definite vibe shift both with over-saturation of influencers (ie a second layer of the mall/platform saturation parallel) and the doom spiral of imitation. Even if you hit a viral reel, it doesn’t result in followers. It’s all click-through, ephemeral bullshit. People are starting to hate influencers hawking their niche and phones at every concert and sitting at a dinner table where nobody is talking. It’s death can’t come fast enough.
I am still (don't know why) just floored at how pervasive the influencer culture is. It's all just swipes and links to products they're hawking. I watch with interest - I feel like we're reaching peak consumerism (though every time I say that something else appears to shuffle that end line along a little longer) and that their model of business (if you can all it that?) is heading for a financial meltdown. I cannot understand how someone can spend all day constantly filming and curating their lives like that.
Growing up in the western suburbs of Denver in the mid to late 1970s, there was no “main street” for us. So the malls were the places we had. They were all generic except for one oddity in Englewood, Cinderella City. Ask any long-time resident of Denver who lived here in the 60s, 70s, or 80s, and mention “Cinder Alley,” the basement part of Cinderella City. Their eyes will roll back in their heads and a wistful expression will emerge and they’ll tell you stories. That oddball basement with its headshops, comic book shops, toy shops, and a really fun little pizza parlor was a quirky place. I remember it fondly as I bought my first Rolling Stones on vinyl there in the summer of 1980, Satanic Majesties. Years later I bought H. R. Giger’s Necronomicon from a crazy shop that had art books, old issues of Warren magazines, psychadelic posters, and lots of art books from the British publisher Paper Tiger. Had it not been for that store, I wouldn’t have been exposed to a lot of great graphic artists and poster artists. By the late 80s, it was just a shadow of what it used to be, but, man, in the late 70s and early 80s, what a place it was.
That sounds like something out of a fantasy, an unknown level in an ordinary shopping mall full of peculiar little shops, non-chain restaurants and so on. There used to be stories about an unknown level of Grand Central Station in NYC, but this sounds even better.
Ted, do you listen to the Mallsoft genre? Kind of a hauntology of our broken consumer dreams. Ersatz muzak for people huffing the vaporwaves of the past, trying to get whatever dopamine thrills they can from shopping nostalgia. And/or critique of the same.
Haha I love everything about this!! Made me laugh in the good way. Nice throwback photo of Ted—you’re a cool dude!
I went through a phase circa 2019 where I’d walk in the silver sneaker club in dead malls near Cincinnati. I made applicable playlists (was into Aphex Twin, Air, and Disasterpeace at the time). It set up a unique atmosphere! There is a super sad story about a dead mall near me in Cincinnati. Another story of greed that will disturb you. Check out the Cincinnati Mills/Forest Fair mall of my childhood. It was once the third largest mall in the country. My sister has done a few wonderful paintings depicting the dead American dream inside those walls…
The liminal space of social media. Good riddance, I say!
Downtowns and city centers have predictable cycles in property valuations. Rent whether residential or commercial gets too high for market to bear, prohibitively high that they'd become "ghost malls" before malls even ghosted. I wouldn't value the 'distribution' v. 'consolidation' of goods model any more than our anti-social\anti-trust acceptance of Market Rules substituting for Rules to Live By in the American anti-social fabric of late 20th C. and early 21st C. anti-trust and non-competitive zeitgeist.
Perhaps when US Broadcast access isn't also controlled by Market Values and the allocation of "Living Rooms" once again is more plentiful than our decades-long "NORMALIZATION OF HOMELESSNESS" evident as we pole vault over the DEPRESSION Era tents or humans reclining on our sidewalks and thoroughfares that are now having to be municipally legislated out-of-view we may be able to sit back and truly view with room for reflection in a living room of our temporary availability or once ubiquitous now repurposed for soaring speculative Market Value Best Price\Purpose Community Center (rather than spiffy if vacant newly constructed for global asset purchase by absentee landlords and Equity Fund managers) and even host discussions and group study on these and other anti-social phenomenon. Invite the targeted NEXT GENERATION OF CONSUMERS our mall-bedazzled yoot into a conversation where their ideas are actually listened to and reflected upon.
A la PUSH the documentary here that has yet to be aired on corporate-underwritten Public Interest Broadcasting in our corporate-captured nation. Here are about half an hour of free taste excerpts:
"Some excerpts from the documentary "PUSH" (2019) (full doc @ "Push | TVO Docs" on YouTube)"
"Exploring why people cannot be allowed to live in cities... The high cost of housing and global investment funds that push people to poverty and strip them of a fundamental human right."
Plainspoken folk from our knowledge industries are the guides. Saskia Sassen happened to have been my city college Adjunct Instructor in a peasant skirt circa late 1970's and her Euro accent via Argentina was thicker before her current incarnation as an Ivy League Columbia U. Professor-in-global-demand and she still focuses her area of expertise on Migrant Labor and Housing patterns. There's clearly an autobiographical driver there and not just for today's Golden Rolodex Expert Asset of choice...........
Malls are turning into old folks homes with attached food courts. Costco has a project with old folks housing attached to a warehouse.
I think there’s a lesson in there somewhere about the future of social media, I just haven’t grasped what it is yet.
I’ll tell you this, malls were inferior to neighborhoods because the neighborhood has the ability to distribute goods and services instead of consolidating them. It’s the same logic I use when saying that Washington, DC should be busted up, distribute the goods and services around the country. It’s better.
So, is social media consolidating or distributing? That’s how we figure out its future…
This post made me so happy I finally converted to a paid subscription to support your excellent work! I have been waiting for the Law of Reflexivity to kick in for the social platforms -- I didn't know it had a name - looking forward to researching it - and cannot wait for the cycles to kick in and turn these "gathering places" into ghost towns. You make so many excellent, interesting connections in this essay. Hooray for long-form content and the community in the comments!
An encouraging read. I wish substack had a feature on it's infinite scroll page to stop after x notes, so i could set x to say 25, and have a bit of delimited dopamine fun. Like ice cream, nothing wrong with a bit of indulgence, but an infinite ice cream that's quite yummy is clearly creating an inertia issue.
Great idea, but those who own the apps would never introduce such helpful measures. Sometimes I turn a timer on, say 15 mins, for social media time. When the bell rings, it's time to log off! Self management is something we can all choose to do 😉
A feature which keeps the fun, but works to avoid the mental draining / decentering effects would be a boon to us paying subscribers. Give it free to everyone anyway.
It's a sad calculation to not risk some revenue loss, to try a feature, which could help the health of your customers.
It sounds quite marketable as a feature in itself.
My hometown Basel (Switzerland) does not have a mall, instead the center of town is a car-free pedestrian zone, and people shop in markets and local stores all year round. This not only enlivens the town, but creates a strong social fabric among the residents. No wonder malls and social media platforms are facing a demise; people long for the Real, not for the vapid and fake.
Yes, it's a lovely city isn't it.
Teenagers are the proprietors of whats cool. And I've seen a lot of teenagers in this last year begin to reject social media.
After da hype it 's assimilated & now recalibrated on funktionality as part of way broader skills & levels of communication, while the spontaneous live connectivity & openness amongst this fresh generation is high, colourfull & indeed refreshing to see ...
I really like what you have written here. It’s insightful and thoughtful and hopeful. I am finding the scrolling to begin to feel as if it is stealing real life from me. They only thing that keeps me in some semblance of balance, is traveling to other countries and staying in Airbnb’s, with friends, or in hostels so that I am forced into face-to-face interaction with other humans. That is so much more satisfying.
This seems very plausible to me. All I can really add is that comparing social media to malls seems deeply unfair to the malls! ; )
Good one, lol
It's sooooo important to note that apart of the reasoning for malls dying is Americas hatred of teenagers. The mall near me banned anyone 18 and under from going to the mall after 5 without a parent or guardian, and they're actually very strict about it. My friends and I were escorted out when I was 16 while searching for homecoming dresses because it was 6 o'clock. Ever since that rule has gone into effect, at least one store within the mall has closed every year.
I think it also had something to do with Mayfair group (which owns Macys) buying up its competitors. Where I grew up it was Filenes. When they bought Filenes they just shuttered that end of the mall because a mall can’t have 2 Macys in it. It was terrible. Where I live now it was a department store called Mervin’s. Every community has this same sad story.
I grew up in the town (San Lorenzo, CA) that was home to the first Mervin's department store. It was popular for a while, but the site where it once stood is now an abandoned area bereft of any business. I'm reminded of the poem "Ozymandias".
Our Mervin’s is still a Macys.
My point #2 - this is all of great interest to me as someone on the autistic spectrum
I never been particularly great at interacting with masses and social media is the closest I came to fixing this. Yet I also realize its rife with all sorts of issues - enshittification, groupthink, racism/bigotry (cough cough - Twitter) etc etc etc
In theory it would've been nice if billionaires started investing in offline communities. I just know its never going to happen.
Fellow autistic here. I've never felt as seen and accepted as ME as I have on the comment section of some videos for autism online. :-) No one reading "other meanings" into what I say, no eye contact required... it definitely has it's place.
Sister autie here. This is the way it serves me too. My FB group is fairly restricted so I have made long-term friends there. Plus Substack.
Thank you for your POV, as I can see a great use for the platforms for reasons that your using them. I guess there is a positive to be found.
I've just watched a CNBC report claiming that Gen Z is now shopping at brick-and-mortar stores at the same rate as their grandparents, and a lot of them are going to malls. It seems they're doing it for the same reason a lot of them are starting to go to church, which is that they want to get their faces out of the screen and start living a real life.
Fascinating observation. I too agree that social media is the new mall. And I hope that their popularity wanes. It seems that the mall attempted to replace the town gazebo as a natural gathering place. Maybe we ought to bring that back along with some natural beauty. Community sponsored live music or markets will make people come together. I’m tired of everyone zoning out to their phones. It’s boring! When will everyone realize how boring it all is!?
As someone who has a decent Instagram following and a hybrid influencer role for my job (as well as 100k subs on YT), I can tell you this is all true. There has been a definite vibe shift both with over-saturation of influencers (ie a second layer of the mall/platform saturation parallel) and the doom spiral of imitation. Even if you hit a viral reel, it doesn’t result in followers. It’s all click-through, ephemeral bullshit. People are starting to hate influencers hawking their niche and phones at every concert and sitting at a dinner table where nobody is talking. It’s death can’t come fast enough.
I am still (don't know why) just floored at how pervasive the influencer culture is. It's all just swipes and links to products they're hawking. I watch with interest - I feel like we're reaching peak consumerism (though every time I say that something else appears to shuffle that end line along a little longer) and that their model of business (if you can all it that?) is heading for a financial meltdown. I cannot understand how someone can spend all day constantly filming and curating their lives like that.
Growing up in the western suburbs of Denver in the mid to late 1970s, there was no “main street” for us. So the malls were the places we had. They were all generic except for one oddity in Englewood, Cinderella City. Ask any long-time resident of Denver who lived here in the 60s, 70s, or 80s, and mention “Cinder Alley,” the basement part of Cinderella City. Their eyes will roll back in their heads and a wistful expression will emerge and they’ll tell you stories. That oddball basement with its headshops, comic book shops, toy shops, and a really fun little pizza parlor was a quirky place. I remember it fondly as I bought my first Rolling Stones on vinyl there in the summer of 1980, Satanic Majesties. Years later I bought H. R. Giger’s Necronomicon from a crazy shop that had art books, old issues of Warren magazines, psychadelic posters, and lots of art books from the British publisher Paper Tiger. Had it not been for that store, I wouldn’t have been exposed to a lot of great graphic artists and poster artists. By the late 80s, it was just a shadow of what it used to be, but, man, in the late 70s and early 80s, what a place it was.
That sounds like something out of a fantasy, an unknown level in an ordinary shopping mall full of peculiar little shops, non-chain restaurants and so on. There used to be stories about an unknown level of Grand Central Station in NYC, but this sounds even better.
Ted, do you listen to the Mallsoft genre? Kind of a hauntology of our broken consumer dreams. Ersatz muzak for people huffing the vaporwaves of the past, trying to get whatever dopamine thrills they can from shopping nostalgia. And/or critique of the same.
For some, reason this track is probably my all-time favourite:)
https://macintoshpluss.bandcamp.com/track/--6
Reminds me of when Nordstrom used to have pianists playing on the ground floor. It might not be glamorous, but their checks cleared.
Definitely worth revisiting!
Yes! Love me some Mallsoft:)!
What if they are? Everything gets replaced and fast these days. My motto is: Hone your craft. Create, create, create. Don't let them find you.
Haha I love everything about this!! Made me laugh in the good way. Nice throwback photo of Ted—you’re a cool dude!
I went through a phase circa 2019 where I’d walk in the silver sneaker club in dead malls near Cincinnati. I made applicable playlists (was into Aphex Twin, Air, and Disasterpeace at the time). It set up a unique atmosphere! There is a super sad story about a dead mall near me in Cincinnati. Another story of greed that will disturb you. Check out the Cincinnati Mills/Forest Fair mall of my childhood. It was once the third largest mall in the country. My sister has done a few wonderful paintings depicting the dead American dream inside those walls…
The liminal space of social media. Good riddance, I say!
Downtowns and city centers have predictable cycles in property valuations. Rent whether residential or commercial gets too high for market to bear, prohibitively high that they'd become "ghost malls" before malls even ghosted. I wouldn't value the 'distribution' v. 'consolidation' of goods model any more than our anti-social\anti-trust acceptance of Market Rules substituting for Rules to Live By in the American anti-social fabric of late 20th C. and early 21st C. anti-trust and non-competitive zeitgeist.
Perhaps when US Broadcast access isn't also controlled by Market Values and the allocation of "Living Rooms" once again is more plentiful than our decades-long "NORMALIZATION OF HOMELESSNESS" evident as we pole vault over the DEPRESSION Era tents or humans reclining on our sidewalks and thoroughfares that are now having to be municipally legislated out-of-view we may be able to sit back and truly view with room for reflection in a living room of our temporary availability or once ubiquitous now repurposed for soaring speculative Market Value Best Price\Purpose Community Center (rather than spiffy if vacant newly constructed for global asset purchase by absentee landlords and Equity Fund managers) and even host discussions and group study on these and other anti-social phenomenon. Invite the targeted NEXT GENERATION OF CONSUMERS our mall-bedazzled yoot into a conversation where their ideas are actually listened to and reflected upon.
A la PUSH the documentary here that has yet to be aired on corporate-underwritten Public Interest Broadcasting in our corporate-captured nation. Here are about half an hour of free taste excerpts:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6juSABUfnUg&t=380s
PUSH - ( some excerpts from the documentary )
Tiktaks Point of View
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Share
2,657 views Sep 1, 2021
"Some excerpts from the documentary "PUSH" (2019) (full doc @ "Push | TVO Docs" on YouTube)"
"Exploring why people cannot be allowed to live in cities... The high cost of housing and global investment funds that push people to poverty and strip them of a fundamental human right."
Plainspoken folk from our knowledge industries are the guides. Saskia Sassen happened to have been my city college Adjunct Instructor in a peasant skirt circa late 1970's and her Euro accent via Argentina was thicker before her current incarnation as an Ivy League Columbia U. Professor-in-global-demand and she still focuses her area of expertise on Migrant Labor and Housing patterns. There's clearly an autobiographical driver there and not just for today's Golden Rolodex Expert Asset of choice...........
https://www.chronicle.com/article/saskia-sassens-missing-chapter/
Producers: Fredrik Gertten, Margarete Jangard
Director: Fredrik Gertten
From Knowledge Network Aired Feb. 2, 2021
Mitch Ritter\Paradigm Sifters, Code Shifters, PsalmSong Chasers
Lay-Low Studios, Ore-Wa (Refuge of Atonement Seekers)
Media Discussion List\Looksee
Malls are turning into old folks homes with attached food courts. Costco has a project with old folks housing attached to a warehouse.
I think there’s a lesson in there somewhere about the future of social media, I just haven’t grasped what it is yet.
I’ll tell you this, malls were inferior to neighborhoods because the neighborhood has the ability to distribute goods and services instead of consolidating them. It’s the same logic I use when saying that Washington, DC should be busted up, distribute the goods and services around the country. It’s better.
So, is social media consolidating or distributing? That’s how we figure out its future…
This post made me so happy I finally converted to a paid subscription to support your excellent work! I have been waiting for the Law of Reflexivity to kick in for the social platforms -- I didn't know it had a name - looking forward to researching it - and cannot wait for the cycles to kick in and turn these "gathering places" into ghost towns. You make so many excellent, interesting connections in this essay. Hooray for long-form content and the community in the comments!
An encouraging read. I wish substack had a feature on it's infinite scroll page to stop after x notes, so i could set x to say 25, and have a bit of delimited dopamine fun. Like ice cream, nothing wrong with a bit of indulgence, but an infinite ice cream that's quite yummy is clearly creating an inertia issue.
Great idea, but those who own the apps would never introduce such helpful measures. Sometimes I turn a timer on, say 15 mins, for social media time. When the bell rings, it's time to log off! Self management is something we can all choose to do 😉
A feature which keeps the fun, but works to avoid the mental draining / decentering effects would be a boon to us paying subscribers. Give it free to everyone anyway.
It's a sad calculation to not risk some revenue loss, to try a feature, which could help the health of your customers.
It sounds quite marketable as a feature in itself.