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.
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.
It could be...during this entire election soul-draining period for all angles I became fed up, again, with the whole social media scene. Sitting directly on the Baby Boomer/Gen X cusp line I saw the mall destroy my hometown which used to have some true panache. Known by several names, River City, Home of the Music Man, Mason Shitty, or just "MC", as in Mini Chicago it was kicked squarely in the groin in the 80's when they dumped a mall of all malls squarely in the middle of town disrupting a fluid downtown area, and oddly enough people carried a sense of pride. https://time.com/archive/6847740/behavior-mason-city-a-porn-fed-town/. Whether it was a futile attempt at reimaging or just short sighted the place has been on a decline ever since, albeit a couple restorations were a success (the Old Nat'l City Bank/Frank Lloyd Wright hotel) that was restored very elegantly that Dillinger may have considered staying there vs. just robbing a bank a bolting out of town. You're 100% correct on the saturation of social media platforms, and Substack, IMO, I truly hope survives. Kudos to not selling out. It's pretty obvious that these platforms become whores to the highest bidder controlling who gets banned, or what is considered playing nice. Deep fakes, and the like I hold a Harry S. mentality of "show me". Thank you once again for a very good read, and I pray Substack stays the course. It wouldn't be prudent if it wavered. It could be the final frontier of unbiased sharing of knowledge.
Substack is already terrible. If you have a problem, good luck getting a human to help fix it. I needed help getting a refund to a subscriber, because the normal methods weren't working. I spend 3 months trying to get SS to answer, and they never did. So I don't blog here anymore.
SS has abysmal ratings on Trustpilot. And it has 8 unanswered complaints at the Better Business Bureau, earning it a grade of F.
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.
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.
It could be...during this entire election soul-draining period for all angles I became fed up, again, with the whole social media scene. Sitting directly on the Baby Boomer/Gen X cusp line I saw the mall destroy my hometown which used to have some true panache. Known by several names, River City, Home of the Music Man, Mason Shitty, or just "MC", as in Mini Chicago it was kicked squarely in the groin in the 80's when they dumped a mall of all malls squarely in the middle of town disrupting a fluid downtown area, and oddly enough people carried a sense of pride. https://time.com/archive/6847740/behavior-mason-city-a-porn-fed-town/. Whether it was a futile attempt at reimaging or just short sighted the place has been on a decline ever since, albeit a couple restorations were a success (the Old Nat'l City Bank/Frank Lloyd Wright hotel) that was restored very elegantly that Dillinger may have considered staying there vs. just robbing a bank a bolting out of town. You're 100% correct on the saturation of social media platforms, and Substack, IMO, I truly hope survives. Kudos to not selling out. It's pretty obvious that these platforms become whores to the highest bidder controlling who gets banned, or what is considered playing nice. Deep fakes, and the like I hold a Harry S. mentality of "show me". Thank you once again for a very good read, and I pray Substack stays the course. It wouldn't be prudent if it wavered. It could be the final frontier of unbiased sharing of knowledge.
Substack is already terrible. If you have a problem, good luck getting a human to help fix it. I needed help getting a refund to a subscriber, because the normal methods weren't working. I spend 3 months trying to get SS to answer, and they never did. So I don't blog here anymore.
SS has abysmal ratings on Trustpilot. And it has 8 unanswered complaints at the Better Business Bureau, earning it a grade of F.