Mark Fisher was right: The desire for Starbucks really is the thwarted desire for communism
Let's talk about my two cents on the loneliness problem - it's related to the decline of third places, which capitalism is largely responsible for.
“Starbucks is generic, homogeneous, it crushes individuality and enterprise. At the same time, however, this kind of generic space—and evidently not the mediocre and overpriced coffee—is quite clearly at the root of Starbucks’ success. (…) What if, in short, the desire for Starbucks is the thwarted desire for communism? For what is the ‘third place’ that Starbucks offers—this place that is neither home nor work—if not a degraded prefiguration of communism itself?” – Mark Fisher, Post-Capitalist Desire
The third place. A place for unexpected encounters, for meeting people who are unlike yourself, a place for leisure in a casual and inexpensive environment, surrounded by other human beings touching grass or sharing bowls of potato chips. You can go there anytime, with friends or alone, enjoying community or solitude – unlike work or school or even your household, there are no pressures or expectations of you other than to simply be there, and by regularly being there, you start to feel like you belong, because you do.
How many of us can honestly say that we have a third place that we regularly visit? A public space that isn’t work, or our home, or a functional facility, or something that centers around productivity in one way or another? When was the last time you’ve had a conversation with a total stranger? One that wasn't a shallow drunk exchange of silly words at a noisy party that disappeared into your blacked-out memory loss by morning?
The topic of declining social connections at this bleak period in time is by no means an unaddressed one in the blogosphere, it is in fact so trendy that I was unsure if the world needed yet another take on it, but one thing I do not see mentioned enough is the effect of disappearing third places on our collective depressive-hedonistic loneliness.
A third place is a term coined by a sociologist named Ray Oldenberg. His idea was that home is the first place, work is the second, and any place where you can build community counts as a third. Think the Agora in ancient Athens, coffee houses in pre-Revolutionary Paris, and whatever parking lot goth teens congregate in after school. They're hubs where people from different backgrounds can freely exchange ideas, a fact that perhaps explains why many of the people accused of witchcraft in Salem were either tavern owners or related to them, according to Giuffre. (x)
Even back into the 18th century (and before), communities gathered in coffeehouses to exchange information and news. Cafes were dubbed “penny universities” for how they allowed experts and novices alike to share ideas and learn from one another for the price of a cup of coffee. Your rank, status, or literacy level did not matter in these spaces—third places can be a level playing field for all who enter. (x)
Third places are important not only as a means of meeting people and experiencing ourselves as part of a Society™, but also as a way of developing ideas and growing our political consciousness as agents of change. Even just having our face recognised by someone in a public spot can make us feel more connected with the world around us, and in consequence, more powerful.
Without third places, there is no community, without community, there are no politics, and without politics, there is nothing much we can do except to lay down and take whatever the ruling classes have in store for us. All while feeling very lonely.
The state of the economy has made real-life social engagement increasingly unattainable, with some places acting on absolute hingelessness by penalising "loitering", discouraging casual gatherings in public, clearing the aforementioned parking lots of cool goths. Places that would qualify as thirds – by being economically accessible, open to anyone, and not centered around products or expensive activities – are struggling to stay open as “hanging out” isn’t a financially promising value proposition for a business, and the people who would like to be frequenting them are workers who not only make little disposable income that continues to decrease with inflation, they also tend to come home late and knackered and with no energy left to use in their social batteries.
Traditionally, the church used to serve as a crucial community hub, free from profit-driven motives, funded by donations and taxes and whatever Vatican financial corruption might be taking place that I am not qualified enough to elaborate on. Independent from economic incentives, it was able to foster a variety of social activities and groups that people regularly attended and found their social circles in. Hiking groups, knitting clubs, cheap cafes, any other event one might think of that brings people together, they probably had it, as long as it fit into their value system. However, as the influence of religion in our society slowly disappears, viable alternatives are failing to take its place when it comes to accessible hangout spaces. People's need for guidance from a greater power is no longer met through any semblance of social participation, but through hyper-individual, neoliberal trends along the lines of Goop.
Instead of moving forward and evolving as an enlightened collective, our new pseudo-religious beliefs both emerge from and reify the social isolation we are already experiencing. New-age spirituality is great at getting me to buy useless products like Yoni eggs and overpriced motivational seminars about how best to connect to the universe and my inner power, it may help me understand how to say uplifting things to myself or believe that everything I want is inevitably going to happen, doing manifestation rituals in my room may feel nice, but it will never require of me to be in real contact with another human being at any point. It only gets me to focus so deeply on myself and my own potential inner construction sites that not only do I no longer feel a need to make it a priority to go outside and connect with the world around me, I also might forget that I, and anything it is that adds up to "me", is part of a running system that can only meaningfully change through collective action.
From Meatspace to Cyberspace
Financial barriers of entry as well as our growing habit of spending our incredibly limited free time at home, glued to “the good screen” after closing “the bad screen”, as the meme we’ve all seen before states, has shifted third places from real-life environments to internet bubbles for the majority of people. From movie theaters, which could still qualify as a social gathering place, to private family TVs to one TV in each room to personal computer streaming to mobile phones to hyper-individualised VR bubbles: each step in technological development concerning entertainment has pulled us further apart, right into algorithmically-generated information microspaces that are so specialised and targeted to our specific needs and interests that one might argue we are all each living in our own world, unable to fully relate to one another.
Social media was supposed to bring people together like nothing else before. How could anyone be lonely with friends and family at our fingertips, as well as constant interaction with a variety of strangers whenever we want it, and even when we don’t? An eternal and infinite third place, a digital town square, open 25/8. No need to call your friends to see how they’re doing - they’re already posting about it. No more sitting by the phone waiting for your date to call when you can look at the latest meme they’ve posted and over-analyse whether or not it suggests they’re going to ghost you, which they probably are. Which, in turn, means less actual talking, communication, and real-life hangs. That’s how we can be lonely, possibly more than ever.
We are no longer in parasocial relationships with only celebrities and fictional characters, as used to be the case. We are in parasocial relationships with most people we would consider part of our circle. We consume one another as content instead of connecting on a personal level. However, with rising living expenses leaving lower budgets for leisure, less time to be spent outside of work, and the isolation resulting from people moving away from friends (to where the jobs are) and struggling to find new ones precisely due to the decline of real-life third places, online spaces become a sad substitute to avoid the alternative that for many could only affordably be “laying down and rotting”, as the incels call it. There simply is no accessible alternative to being terminally online for many people. If it isn't money that's missing to cover transport, entry fees or overpriced drinks, it is most often time that isn't there to be spent on casual activities. It is an unfortunate cycle in which the lack of accessible community makes us retreat from seeking out community, and the largest "community" imaginable turns out not to be much of a community at all.
Instead of being a 24-hour third place, internet spaces and the behaviours they foster are incompatible with the concept of a third place entirely. The point of a third place is to encounter a variety of different people on neutral ground, people you otherwise would have never met or interacted with, with the ability to engage with them personally at any time.
Thanks to digital platforms, people have become accustomed to comfortable “safe spaces” in which everybody is just like them, which is ensured by punishing and potentially shunning those within the bubble who dare to say things that make others feel mildly uneasy. Just as Tyler the Creator said when he tweeted about cyber-bullying not being a real thing because one can “close their eyes” and get away from the screen, comment sections full of strangers that one might have otherwise run into in real-life spaces and be forced to confront head on can be closed by the click of a button. Online interactions are not nearly as real as those in meatspace, which makes them infinitely less threatening, less challenging, but also less fulfilling and less qualified to deal with the problem of each of us feeling entirely alone in the world.
Compared to the psychological safety of social media, the physical world looks like a minefield of danger and hurt. Gracefully navigating social rejection and general dissent seems to be quickly unlearned by stewing in an artificial bubble of agreement and in-group inclusivity for extended periods of time. It damages our ability to tolerate and rationally argue against different viewpoints and maybe even learn something in the process. Quite a few events that do take place in real life are influenced by how we interact online – they can no longer exist without guidelines on who can and cannot be there and how they should behave, which turns something that could have been a facilitator of chance encounters into yet another filter bubble that impedes political debate and agency while connecting us to more of the ever same. It is the exact opposite of the Agora. Knowing that our belonging is dependent on following tight constraints and conditions keeps us on guard, while a true third place is meant to put us at ease.
This is not me boomering on about the wokes again. People across the political spectrum are attached to their echo chambers. It is too easy, and for many of us, these bubbles are the only form of discourse we engage with, if not the only social interaction entirely.
We consume content from people instead of talking to them, because disagreement is pain. We collect matches with people online and never meet, because rejection is pain. And instead of being something necessary and essential to the experience of being alive, pain is bad, will cause irreversible Trauma™ and must be avoided at all costs. We have unlearned to tolerate the opposition that is another. The interaction between human beings, along with all the good it may bring, necessitates a clash of difference that becomes harder to deal with the longer we spend time in the endless algorithmic positivity of the Internet showering us in only things we want to see and hear, and big titty chatbots who will give us all the validation we need on demand.
“We want coffee without caffeine, beer without alcohol and love without its dangerous moment” – Slavoj Zizek, Heaven in Disorder
There’s been a lot of talk these days about the “male loneliness crisis”, men having trouble finding friends or romantic partners, as if women are not also lonely, as if everyone isn’t suffering from the death of real-life community. In a sense, it is disabling how people seem to have unlearned how to view issues through any lens of analysis other than identity categories, in this case, men vs women. It is disabling because we could be taking the issue on practically, instead we are running circles in discussions of who’s lonelier, who’s having a harder time and whose fault it is. And it is never the people in actual power who are blamed. It’s never about the systems necessitating and encouraging the social problems we have, and the depressive hedonia that results from them.
The Bourgeoisie Isn’t Terminally Online
In reality, this is all more of a class-based issue than an identity-based one: think about what the incredibly rich do all day. They work much, much less than the plebs, if they actually work at all instead of sitting on comfortable decades of generational wealth. Being an 80-hour burnout-lord as a CEO type often is either a transient period on the journey to nouveau-richeness or a bold-faced lie to save face and propagate the myth of meritocracy to keep us all hoping and grinding.
We should all at least have some familiarity with how not being concerned about money for even a second of one’s existence tends to play out in people’s daily lives: they gather and discuss business trends, politics and the latest goss in the golf club, they are active in a variety of social groups and get to feel like a relevant member of their community and society at large through engaging in charity activities. They have horses and hobbies and gardens and much fewer reasons to feel isolated or socially anxious or otherwise incentivised to spend endless time in online bubbles that discuss the latest cancellable offense or assert their superiority (or rather, overcompensate for their perceived own inferiority) through new-age amateur phrenology (I’m sure the Zucc does not care about the angle of his eyelids). They exercise their intellectual interest by reading, discussing, and writing books and articles that are sometimes smart, sometimes incredibly out of touch, but always not located in the comment section of a meme page. They spend tons of time in spaces that serve as their bourgeois-exclusive, financially extremely gatekept versions of third places.
To wrap all of this up: in my humble opinion, one of the biggest issues responsible for our decline in social connection is that we do not get to all live the financially secure lifestyle that would enable us to be more social, and the objective has to be to make sure we get as close as possible to enabling something similar for everyone. Leisure for everyone, not just the rich!
I’m not advocating for people returning to their small communities and engaging in village gossip and bonking the neighbour because there is literally nothing else to do around. I do not want everyone to join the beet-measuring competition at the local spring market because that’s all that is available to do in a day. This is not a plea to return to tradition, to embrace Jesus and go back to church.
I want cities to be cool. I want city planning that can seriously prioritise people over products - while I recognise that small projects are popping up here and there to make inner cities a little less depressing, they are ultimately limited and crushed by their lack of profitability – but imagine if the city actually belonged to the people? I want affordable hangout spaces and enough free time and energy for people to gather in them. I want fewer working hours and higher salaries. We need to discuss and read and enjoy and expose ourselves to people who are unlike ourselves. Those who advocate for the grill pill may have largely given up on politics, but I would argue that more grill in our lives is exactly what we need to realize our potential as interconnected, responsible, and political beings.
In order to be fully autonomous, overall less miserable humans, we need to do away with the profit motive. Capitalism is proving to be fundamentally incompatible with humanity, with people as true and fully realised subjects. It does not need our personhood to function, in fact, it presents an obstacle – free people left to their own devices surrounded by communities of people who are not suffering from burnout and crippling depression might get ideas that will distract them from the grind and threaten the existing order. And of course, we can’t have that. Grind or die.
People who feel dead inside, with no social circles or skills, and no priorities outside of work, are the perfect capitalist object. They will not ask to leave early to take care of their child, or to go to the golf course, or to crack open a cold one with the boys (and get a chit chat going with a bunch of other boys). They will not have important conversations about exploitation at work that can only really be had outside the workplace itself. They are unlikely to develop time-consuming hobbies like a silly Substack blog that may incentivise them to decrease their working hours, or an interest in surfing that will motivate them to ask for a raise so that they can afford a surf club membership. In an ideal capitalist scenario, all people need to be able to afford beyond basic survival is a Netflix subscription to binge-dull the pain after an overtime shift. Social atomisation makes us not only easier to sell to, as our shrinking income is spent on cheap consumer products that will satisfy our depressive hedonia for a few hours without the time investment needed to have meaningful experiences, it also makes us forget how to get together and get things done with other people, which is bad for revolution-coin and at the same time great for the coin in our employers’ checkbooks.
We cannot have the world be left to those who want to turn it all into, in the words of Terence McKenna, an airport terminal - a long, winding tunnel in which your only choices are what to buy as you're rushed to the next thing you need to buy, all for the profit of a handful of people.
With the current state of politics today, and me being in my personal doom phase concerning the Left itself, I'm not sure I can give meaningful recommendations that will make real change, but touching some unironic grass once in a while and making an effort to hang out with friends instead of liking their memes might be a good first step.
Socialism is when people can simply hang out and connect as social and political subjects.