Redefining Third Spaces
The church, the grocery store, the coffeehouse, third spaces have been crucial for community engagement, empathy-development, and collective coordination — for society to function despite difference, to strength pack-bonds across a group. But these spaces have changed over the past decade as brands have become more personified, the abundance of choice, and proliferation of content creation.
The first era of third spaces feel centered around Maslow’s Hierarchy, addressing those base level needs, a culture that is pre-self-actualization through identity creation. Rooted in addressing common needs. But base level needs have not only been just satisfied, but a leisurely pursuit in themselves: it’s not about being able to buy groceries, but where one buys them. Whole Foods as liberal and Walmart as conservative. From buying oil, to buying not just oil but EVOO, to buying Psyche versus Zoe.
Tech, both hard and soft, has further complicated the idea of “third spaces.” We now have digital personas and create avatars of ourselves that are iterations, extensions, or total departures of our physically-bound self; have more access to new innovations which allow for the increase of choice, whether that be more brands to select from due to the democraticization of manufacturing; and can exit physical reality and enter a digital world. In a prior era, the subway could be a solid third space, but now we ride airpods-in and the population who took the subway could be lesser now that Citi or Lime bikes are available in most cities.
It’s not longer about just getting by, but a proliferation of identity-driven choice. “Third spaces” becomes the umbrella for three subgenres: “homes,” “stages,” and “places.”
The first, “homes,” are places we frequent, like a Whole Foods, that are dominantly functional, i.e. the grocery store or coffee shop. Proximity, price, ease, all are factors in this selection; pragmatism forcing one’s hand. Given baseline needs are dominantly alleviated, one can select based on politics or preference, but there’s always a sense of capitulation involved. A reluctant sigh when admitting it’s a frequent establishment or service, followed by a bit of justification to one’s peers when it doesn’t perfectly align with aspiration values. I.e. Amazon. Liking the art and not the artist.
The second are “stages,” places to where one can further explore their self-developed character and self-actualize. Locations driven by aspiration: longing to be a part of Community Goods’ community; friends with the crew who started Sam’s Place in LA; to be fashion-adjacent Oiji in Paris; Bridges versus Zimmi’s in NYC; each place represents an aspirational lifestyle one can slip into. These places are not common. They are not a crossroads where cultural cross-pollination occurs. Their communities come together because of shared value aspirations and idealisms. Overlaps in their most perfect lives. They are nexuses of reinforcement: the same content, same image, people of similar lifestyle aspiration go to, like pilgrimages to self-actualization, whether that be to consume the chef’s ethos and principles on a plate or visually consume and create content to reinforce one’s persona-aspirations. Unlike the church, where those who gathered believed in an entity beyond themselves — spiritual community — these places are distinctively not about spirit, rather they emphasize self, locations one travels to to realize their aspiriante, the self they aspire to, in its full.
The third, “places,” are those where we are inevitably forced to be together. The places of yesteryear’s limited options: the grocery store, the subway, jury duty, PTA events, and the YMCA. Only possible when choice is limited rather than our world of choice proliferation (an resulting paralysis). They’re often places that have a bit of friction: we have to contend with them with little wiggle room for choice and opting out. For the most part, they’ve become increasingly difficult to find we live in Seamless culture (everything immediately available with little friction or hurdles; designed to be mindless and disengaged for more frequent engagement, addiction. Literally the app Seamless or any decision driven for convenience, often influenced by UX-thinking), an optimization of the world that tries to comb through these knots in our daily lives. This is especially acute in the US because our culture is predicated on the idea of new-ness and reinvention. We love trend and zeitgeist, demonstrating our place in social hierarchy via consumption. In places like France or Japan, with a longer cultural histories, third places, like the café or onsen, have maintained their role in daily life, more or less available for all to visit, to take a café or bathe.
Given the speed of cultural change and ability to craft our own network of disparate, individual worlds — a proliferation of “stages” where our aspiration can be actualized — the idea of the “third space” need reevaluation in order to best fill the void of “places” in our society. The Apple Store? The airpot Starbucks? Quora or Reddit threads? A modern look at where collision is inevitable, where we are forced to intersect.
Main Character Energy and Mythmaking; Purpose through Self-Promotion (2023)
In a time of institutional collapse and loss of religion, collective values, and reality, left to fend for oneself and find purpose, are we all deliriously, overindexing on the idea of narrative and self-creation to make up new myths that serve as guiding north-stars and parables to teach and learn lessons? Our self-created replacement of Aesop and Greek myth? Do we create personas as means of having aspirational characters to guide us forward, to empower us to push on?
Parasitic Patronage (2022)
Brands are stepping into their roles as the leaders of society, a baton passed from spiritual, economic, cultural, and governmental institutions, into the future. Our personification of them — expecting that they maintain an ethic and value system; their connection with “community” and funding of culture; pulling at emotional heartstrings to differentiate themselves; the narratives they tell and create; how they effect the infrastructure of our daily lives. Our Medici’s or Carnegie’s, the patrons and sponsors funding cultural production around the world.
Given our ethical and emotional relationship to them, it’s crucial to not only remember that their goal is growth and capital, but understand that brands, like Loewe or Apple, are media companies more than product companies.
Rather than pursuing the goal of perfecting craftsmanship, their efforts go the design the sets of the stage upon which they espouse the histories of the brand, their traditions and heritage. As their stories explode, finding new stages to set-design to a tee, their original thesis (the ethic and savoir faire that’s so foundational to their “heritage”) lost under the bright lights they themselves are staging. So much focus goes to these elements that their products, the supposed raison d’être — craft — become secondary. The lighting, set, sound, special effects, and choreography are so grand and intricate, their plots so nuanced, that the main character’s — the product — complexities, their motives and intent, become lost in the spectacle’s blur. Product becomes a prop, an excuse to continue the story. Another fantastical element to further inflate their brand’s world.
The purpose of their content and engagements with “creatives” are to extend their brand world, a means of adding to their sprawl and omnipresence. Exiting the confines of the stage, they’re extending their role beyond the list of benefactors on a museum gala’s pamphlet and into every nook and cranny of our worlds. Their diverse content and access points designed to make a full, immersive, unignorable. The game of gaining power through cultural currency for themselves. Their goal is eyes, attention, clout. To tie themselves to every corner of culture to prove they’re relevant, lust-worthy, and themselves “cool” and connected.
Now, rather than investing in perfect product, gaining respect through integrity, they amass clout through with both subtle and more oblique sponsorship and patronage. They engage with “artisans” and “creatives” not out of reverence for expert craft, build, or make, rather they scrape the surface, copy- and logo-deep relationship. From funding entire issues of magazines; the quid-pro-quo of products sent to influencers, a subtle push to promote their product; or working with artisans in countries like Taiwan or Japan, crafting beautiful content around their craft while paying them very little and often abandoning them after the campaign drops; their efforts are self-serving, asking others to partake in the labor of their own growth, rather than the cultural entity or individual at-hand.
Of course the Medici’s or Vanderbilt’s had their own desire for power and good PR, but there was also a sense of duty. Patron saints of the arts, if you will. That by commissioning or buying a work for themselves those artists could continue with their own practices, on their own terms. Botero might’ve done portraits of the elite he so despised, but the sitter didn’t stop him from his own practice, didn’t dictate nor control the rest of his work. Force guardrails upon his self-expression. There was a respect for their vision of the world, their interpretation, rather than the handcuffs forced upon editors and stylists to follow the full-look directives made by “patron-ing” brands.
Unlike the prior craft, driven by creating the most beautiful version of a functional object, whether that be a sweater, home to stay, or trunk, there’s no need for what’s coming out now. No actual urgency besides the anxiety of not producing product: There’s no visceral need to make anything except for the sake of these brands maintaining and gaining our attention. Their funding of the arts is only to continue give themselves relevance — a means to give themselves an excuse to produce — rather than to further culture at-large. Buying clout as self-affirmation these brands need to exist in the first place. Forcing their voice into the space rather than listening to what culture is asking for, what support it needs beyond money.
And it’s our hopeful expectations — that brands that are best friends or espouse tales of craft —that are repeatedly let down — only to fall apart seconds after unboxing — in reality that’s forced reluctant, semi-masochistic consumerism and and further nihilism about institutions. Trained to consume and, with the privatization of many societal institutions (i.e. Oscar or Parsley for healthcare) our forced reliance on these brands, we buy out of boredom — the main activity in capitalism and means of “self-discovery” — with no expectations that what we buy will fulfill any real emotional need. A quick fix that results in let-down. Buying with the bleak awareness of a brand’s selfish intentions, not to last nor be of value but to create opportunities for consumption. Spending money, adding more product to a world that does not need it. With few realistic options of consuming, we actively and reluctantly become a part of the consumption cycle that feeds our own destruction. Knowing there its inevitable. The sad acceptance that their prerogative isn’t to nourish — not thinking about you nor culture, even when saying they’re designed with you in mind, champion “creating community,” or speak of their past expertise — but to consume culture to further fuel their own enrichment — vampiric rather than symbiotic. Parasitic rather than patronage.