added by alexi gunner · updated 3mo ago
Something Is Rotten on the Street of Denmark
It’s true that walking through central London in 2024 can feel like navigating a bleak, postmodern satire of the thrills of urban spontaneity: ballpit bars and escape rooms for contrived office socials; expensive, ticketed mega-events; and security guards cosplaying as cops, moving civilians on from heavily surveilled POPS, or privately-owned publi
... See morefrom Don’t Sit at Home Mourning the Loss of Britain’s Nightclubs – Go Out and Rave by Dan Hancox
alexi gunner added
- Stark reminder of the parlous state of afterdark subculture in so many cities around the world. In the UK, for instance, 75% of nightclubs have shut since 2005 (75%!) - and, truth be told, so much of what survives is very corporate and highly contrived.
They say nothing good happens after 2am (or is it midnight?), but in the case of creativity, that... See morefrom Atualizações do feed
alexi gunner added
- However, by forcing patrons to stop capturing content, and attempting to generate an artificial sense of mystique, it all feels a little contrived. As Emily over at Feed Me wrote in her review of Frog Club : “don’t treat me like a child and put a sticker on my phone, give me free bread, allow walk-ins, and stop trying so hard” .
from idle gaze 065: in search of ungrammable spaces
Alex Dobrenko added
- As Mireille Silcoff noted in a piece exploring how real life subcultures have been reduced to online aesthetic trends: ‘youth culture’ comes alive when the sun goes down, and by stopping young people from hanging out in cities at night, they’re ultimately cutting off the lifeblood of these scenes: “ the youth belong at the rave, at the block party,... See more
from Idle Gaze 062: Dawn Chorus / Dusk Chorus by Alexi Gunner
Brian Wiesner added
- The modern utopian dream of the model city wants to stay open, totally. In this place there are no curfews; transport runs all night; bankers working foreign stock exchanges go to dinner after trading; comedy writers drink litres of coffee and order takeout; and live music plays through the evening.
In 2001, Tony Blair ran for PM on a platform of ke... See morefrom Matter
alexi gunner added
- We’ve lost gradients of intimacy, a concept from architecture, the ability to loiter and meander through a space, engaging when we want in varying levels of expression. We don’t have any peripheral vision on the internet. We have to be in one place or the other. Simultaneously, we’re never really in any place—we can always blame connection issues a... See more
from tiny internets: sidewalks, geocaching, and more · tiny internets by Spencer Chang
Tanuj and added
- the real world is one place, and the online world many, but what I didn’t appreciate even as recently as two years ago was that the online world as I knew it then was subject to more constraints than I realized; it is only as those constraints disappear that the idea of the Internet as a place of refuge seems ever more dubious
from Regretful Accelerationism by Stratechery by Ben Thompson