Comment on The Billionaires have spent a fortune making sure you hate Socialism.
Snapz@lemmy.world 5 hours ago
And remember that they got rid of your third spaces so you couldn’t discuss any of it (and made common affordable gathering options like concerts and sporting events out of reach for the same reason). Threw you into algorithms so you felt like you were only preaching to the choir or conversely that nobody held your same opinions/aspirations for something more - either way a formula for you to get exhausted and give up.
And you do feel exhausted.
5wim@infosec.pub 4 hours ago
Absolutely. But also remember that the concept of Third Places coined by Oldenburg focused on the wrong thing. A lot of the examples of “welcoming and leveling” places were actually pretty deeply exlusionary, which makes a lot of the Third Place rhetoric a white, male, heteronormative fantasy.
And importantly, it’s starting from a contradictory place to build a theory of pure civic community around spaces that rely on capital. A business’s primary goal is profit. The moment a patron stops spending money or takes up a table for too long, the illusion of “neutral civic ground” dissolves. By focusing on establishments (where the primary activity is conversation and consumer lingering), his theory ignores the Commons, the true public infrastructure like plazas, parks, and sidewalks. The argument can be made that instead of trying to revive Oldenburg’s nostalgic storefronts, society should focus on the “right to the city” in the shared public ownership of physical space where citizens don’t need a consumer identity to exist.