Maybe I came down hard on mall culture when I said, “I don’t need 90s mall 2.0. I don’t want mall-sized anything. I don’t want it because it leads to mall-ethics. You get retail managers and mall cops - and that’s not the covenant I’m after.”

And reading it back - fair. I sound pretty anti-mall.

Which… I am now a grown up, former mall rat, who watched Mall Rats with my friends before going to the mall to hang out there, and I want to clarify a few things.

I am not a fan of mall-for-scale-and-profit which is at odds with any incentive a proper capitalist would have for creating a mall, and, yes that’s what Zuck has always been trying to create with Facebook, but allow me to preserve my teenage sensibilities and ignorance for a second into something more thoughtful.

The mall I love is only a container. A locally placed one, at that. It’s a 3rd space.

The mall I hate is the Hot Topic Misfits on a mannequin shirt thing, where some part of culture I love gets corporatized to profit off of its inherent meaning, which - that’s life, and adult me can accept it as much as teenage me can make fun of it.

But the mall as a space, for friends and people to gather in, I do miss that. The internet has a feeling of that, but not IRL which is probably the whole problem in a nutshell.

You’d go to the local mall on a Friday night to find out what show was happening at which all ages club that Saturday. Somebody would literally walk up to you and hand you a flier and if you’ve never been handed a flier for something you actually want, I understand that feeling entirely, so let me tell you it felt a lot like being invited to somebody’s birthday party that you were really excited to go to.

Sometimes you’d get to the mall and it’d be empty, or at least devoid of your friends, so you’d walk over to the record store to check the board and find out a show was happening that you were now missing, so you and your friends would just leave and head there next.

Other times there was nothing to do but hit the mall, see a movie, get Dippin’ Dots with your friends, bring a sock full of quarters to the arcade to beat Jurassic Park, and do other teenagery things.

To this day, I can’t walk into a mall and not announce (at least to myself, I don’t want to scare the cell phone staring people), “I love the smell of commerce in the morning!”

I love the smell of it AND resist the building exclusively for the purpose of it. I am pro-gathering spaces for people without real agendas. Unfortunately the only way to keep people on social platforms seems to have algorithmic agendas that ruin everything by trying to turn freaks into role models.

In the mall, the freaks were just the freaks. From the spiked-out goth kid to the jean-short’d mall walker who clacked his keys in his hand on every other step. There was no single priority to sort you out when you walked in. Just commerce to walk past, without needing to participate in the commerce all of the time.

I want to believe we can have spaces where we scale certain parts but leave common areas alone for people to be people. My feelings about “the future is for everyone” is that Zuck still wants an algorithm to monetize us. I’ll be there, inevitably, because I’m here - but I’m bringing my little cup with me and saying “waste not, want not” until they ban me, and there’s nothing else you can do about it (I’ll put a clip at the bottom, it will explain everything).

Malls, I love you. Sorry if I didn’t clarify this earlier.