The club  is dead because kids are afraid of being filmed while dancing or making out. Instagram Stories (including mine) are filled with beautifully curated dinners and food displays. But hardly any of it gets eaten and certainly not drunk. Because in addition to the fear of showing up drunk in some Instagram Story, living a healthy lifestyle is now all the rage. Instead of having fun with your friends in the evening, you’d rather go home early so you’ll be fit for the gym or the running club tomorrow.

What seems harmless, even positive, at first glance is actually the emergence of problematic structures. The very last thing we have left, our shared moments and our bodies, are also being co-opted by capitalism: brightly lit and beautifully staged.

Also the places that were initially for sharing and exchanging, so called third spaces, places like coffee shops or bars all start to look the same.The term “placelessness” describes this loss of place-specific identity: places are becoming increasingly interchangeable because they’re understood less as established social and cultural structures and more as malleable spaces that are adapted to the interests of large corporations, mass media, and an efficiency-driven economic system.
In addition to completely homogenizing and negating culture, these developments also serve to enforce social control: it is perfectly clear who frequents such places and who does not belong there. As Alexis Shotwell argues in Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times, Purity - something these kind of spcaes aim to radiate - is an illusion, historically connected to religion, colonialism and racism.

When I think of empty, soulless spaces, the “backrooms” that have been lurking all over social media over the past few years, come to mind. These endless, deserted, and faceless spaces, where one only arrives after slipping throught a lack in reality, only to end up in yet another, equally interchangeable environment. What began as a seemingly harmless byproduct of doomscrolling (spending hours lingering in the endless, absurd realms of the internet) seems to be increasingly spilling over into our built environment as well.

Are we, too, being pulled out of reality and thrown into endless, uniform spaces? Spaces that, while seemingly perfectly designed and tailored to our needs, offer fewer and fewer opportunities for genuine encounters, the unexpected, and collective experiences?

All I know is, that when I look into one of these White Cube Coffee Shops, I get the same eerie feeling as by looking at backroom pictures.

So here’s my plea: We need to get back to the pubs. Where the lights are dimmed so much that cameras can’t capture anything anyway, where the tables are so close together that we can make out and talk in peace. Where the food might not be Instagram-worthy, but is made with love.

There is something fundamentally generous about a space that allows people to linger without generating value. Where time is not treated as a resource to be optimised, bodies are not treated as images to be consumed, and relationships do not have to produce anything to justify their existence. A space that resists the logic of constant visibility, self-branding and productivity. Where you can occupy space without having to perform, document or monetise your presence. Where encounters are allowed to remain fleeting, awkward, intimate, unproductive or entirely inconsequential. In a culture that increasingly turns social life into content and every experience into an opportunity for self-presentation, perhaps simply being together, without making anything of it, is already a form of refusal.