I’ve had two pieces that came across my radar via Kottke saved in my to-read pile for a while now, and getting to them at the lake this week unlocked something in my brain.

The first is this nostalgic look at the video rental store. I think about video stores as being places I would go to get an armful of stupid action movies to watch when I was sick, or to wander the aisles with friends arguing over who’d seen what to try an agree on a movie night watch.

But this piece positions them as a kind of “third place”, a concept first articulated by Oldenberg and Christensen in 1989. Third places are the spaces we hang out in that aren’t work or home. A local bar, or a European piazza, or dog park. Places where there are regulars, and where you chat. There’s been tons written about the gradual erosion of third places (particularly for teens, who don’t have the malls, roller rinks or arcades or previous generations to hang out in) and the impact that has on our health, sense of self, loneliness etc etc. We’ve talked about this before here, when we discussed the six things people are looking for when they gather, and what an online neighbourhood would actually need to function like a physical one.

Third place thinking is everywhere in marketing. Starbucks as a company built its entire brand mythology on being a kind of "third place", where there were comfy armchairs and wifi that worked. But then it became more and more transactional, pivoting to mobile-order pickup counters, and optimising every store into a beverage dispensary with a queue. Now, it’s spending a billion dollars to buy the vibe back with ceramic mugs and softer seating and layouts designed to slow customers down rather than move them through.

The union representing its baristas has pointed out the obvious irony: you cannot simultaneously close stores, cut staff, and restore "community vibe," because the community vibe was the staff. (Also, in 2022 Starbucks announced it was building a "digital third place" complete with NFTs, so, idk that they’re the best at this)

And now we’re getting trend pieces celebrating Gen Z's third-place revival — setting up run clubs and craft parties and frequenting dive bars. And look, the run clubs are real, and people are genuinely finding each other at them, and I refuse to be cynical about anyone lacing up shoes to make friends. Except maybe when they pound past my apartment on a Sunday morning and make me feel guilty about still being in bed.

ANYWAY, I digress. The reason that I was thinking about all of this was the second piece I read this week. Philosopher Agnes Callard has a theory she calls "the uni-context," laid out here in a genuinely brain-rearranging conversation with Derek Thompson. Her starting point: a context is a set of circumstances that tells you how to act. For most of human history, contexts were local and multiple. Am I in a field? A church? A bar? You looked around, and the context told you who to be or how to behave. Callard builds on the idea of context collapse — which we've talked about before, in fandom terms — but takes it much further. Her claim is that we now increasingly live in a uni-context: one universal room, with one set of norms, that we carry with us everywhere, and that dissolves all the local rooms.

This feels initially like something I reference a lot — the death of a monoculture. Or that fact that our online spaces feel like loud noisy overcrowded cities. But there’s some new stuff in here for me to chew on.

Read alongside the video store article, I started to realise that third places were also context machines. Each one was a small world with its own norms, its own authorities, its own version of you. The video store had the clerk, Oldenburg's bartender figure, who knew what you'd already seen and what you liked. We've talked before about what happens when human curators get replaced by recommendation engines. More than that though, third places, where you’re a regular, are exactly what I love about the spaces on the early internet that I’m always writing about. They have their own injokes and ways of operating and you feel like a local.

But in a uni-context, we’re all in one universal room. Callard articulates several things that flow from that. The first is our focus on negativity. There's nothing that's good all the time for everyone — happiness depends on who you are and where you are and is hard to make legible to a large, mixed audience. But there's a set of near-universal evils — death, pain, illness, violence — that anyone can recognise as suffering regardless of their circumstances. So when you're broadcasting to the universal room, negativity is simply the thing more people can agree on. Which is why we’re always talking about the things that suck.

The second thing she talks about is character (how you navigate life through different circumstances) The key thing is that character shows up differently in different contexts, and sometimes doesn't show up at all. Grasping character requires knowing someone well, across many contexts, over time, before you can generalise. Identity is the opposite. Categories like woman, disabled, gay, Australian attach to you in every circumstance — "identity is a hat you never take off." Because it's constant and context-independent, identity is suited to the uni-context, and character isn't, which is why (she and Thompson argue) public discourse now runs on identity and doesn’t talk about character.

For most of human history, people judged norms based on local context. A home had its own rules, a cathedral its own rules, and a classroom or bar or funeral parlor had its own rules. But now it is almost like we are constantly living in universal rooms, and the universal room we occupy is assumed to have universal values and universal norms. That has specific implications. First, rather than talk about what is good, which is context-dependent, we tend to focus about universal truths, and it’s easier to talk about universal bads than goods, so people focus on negativity. Two, character is context-dependent, so we talk less about character and more about its universalist equivalent, which is identity.

This is really just a new way of thinking about something we’ve already talked about alot. The easy conclusion — phones bad, touch grass — is one I've already argued against as an aesthetic rather than a plan. And Callard herself refuses to condemn the uni-context, for the reason that we keep choosing it. The universal room exists because humans have always been hungry to escape the small closed worlds we were born into. The teenager in the suburban video store, let's be honest, would have killed for the universal room. Some nights she was only there because it was the biggest world available to her.

But I still believe in making deliberate spaces, on and off-line, that have context. Where we can be regulars. The central library in Pōneke reopened after seven years (closed for seismic strengthening) and it’s such a delight to walk into. There’s comfy seating and children’s play spaces and sewing machines and 3D printers and it feels really good.

The library’s name — Te Matapihi ki te Ao Nui — means "the window to the wider world." Which is the uni-context's whole pitch, escape your small room and see everything. But the library is also wildly local. It has toddlers and a café and no one counting how long you stay. You can sit there all afternoon and buy nothing. I think we still hunger for those spaces — in the run clubs, and the dive bars and the listening parties. The whole world at once isn’t everything.

more good stuff

• as someone who barely managed not to be violently ill on the Harry Potter ride at Universal Studios, I appreciated this longread on amusement park rides and motion sickness! Design a ride for me, someone please.

• yes, I bought the X-Files lego. No, I don’t know where I’m going to put it. I was interested to read this interview with Chris Carter about the directors cut of I Want to Believe that he’s dropped on Hulu.

• sad but fascinating read about faux-cancer-detectives online getting it very wrong: Sydney Towle, the Fake Cancer Lie, and the Internet Snark Rabbit Hole. So many parallels to other messed-up investigators.

• one last tiny Lume thing — yesterday we launched the Lume Sampler. If you download the app, you’ll now find a free compilation to get you started, so you can try out the experience before you buy.

finally, in my lego city

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