that malls, which were in their day such abhorrent monuments to the naked capitalist enclosure of even the idea of communal physical spaces, have now forced me to become nostalgic for them by virtue of how much worse their replacement is
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in reply to @nex3's post:
of course you could also read the absorption of public space into capital as a mere step on the interview road to destroying that space
I think nostalgia is less about the thing itself and much more about longing for the person I was at that point in time. I definitely feel mall nostalgia, but it's not because I even liked malls then. I didn't. But being 16 and having tons of free time and my entire life ahead of me was pretty rad.
at this point I think I might just miss being in a place without health anxiety
i mean it's kind of the latest in a long line of Things that were "replaced", but they weren't really replacements, just different things that were more convenient in some ways but ended up way worse. like video rental stores being replaced by streaming or magazines being replaced by hell rectangle (aka smartphone). malls were replaced with online shopping, but that's just not the same thing at all. there's no social aspect, the choices are overwhelming, and there's no filter, so everything's just scam products with really long names made to game search engines.
obviously, what we actually need to replace malls is things like community centers and well-funded libraries; but we didn't. we didn't replace them with anything, so we lost the closest thing capitalism was able to create to a Third Place. the tech industry has really just taken capitalism and made it even worse and worse and someday i hope we'll burn silicon valley to the ground
they don't really feel "replaced" to me?? (not USian) I meaaan I've been mostly using them to eat rather than shop tho. Also to fondle new gadgets (like flip phones wheee)
Pretty much all malls in the US are completely gutted wastelands, either closed entirely or shambling corpses with one or two stores and hall after hall of empty storefronts
That sounds literally much worse than what's left in Russia after the exodus of western brands wtf that's bleak
it's awful isn't it? I remember learning from experience, growing up in the 1970s through the 1990s, just how disappointing the shopping mall was as a public space. I've never thought of shopping as fun. but at least there were some fun distractions sometimes. ~Chara