on the topic of things like liminal spaces and the backrooms movie by kane parsons, in terms of a dialectical materialist perspective it almost feels as if liminal spaces were going to be something that would be brought up anyway specifically because of the desire to look back upon nostalgia in the midst of a crumbling empire and the overall architecture of suburban areas literally separating people physically. because of the sense of alienation capitalism creates and the separated nature of suburbs such that you may spend your whole life never knowing your neighbors, we tend to try to spend our time looking inwards (again, something that is also intertwined with the fact that modern capitalism drives the blame of alienation inwards as something to do with laziness or lack of productivity, and so we end up hyperindividualist and lonely, and having lots of time to ourselves, looking back on our memories) and as we try and remember memories over and over again, it changes, which is something the backrooms reflects (copying geometry, creating distorted versions of people known as “still-lives”) and the fact that the liminal nature of things like the backrooms is specifically due to spaces being entirely devoid of people, which also loops back to the idea of loneliness and alienation as well as the idea of nostalgia and introspection simultaneously, it all shows just how connected these modern ideas of liminal spaces and backrooms internet mythology are to the material effects of capitalism especially in the united states
what do y’all think?
Good stuff. In addition to alienation, the liminal space mirrors the functional and synthetic design of our built environment. The purpose of a space, in capitalism, is the product obtaining from it. The subjective side, the experience of interacting with that space, is considered only to the extent that it is compatible with that prior purpose. E.g. you can put a photo of your family in your cubicle, but we’re not entertaining a discussion on whether to have a cubicle. Another example is the US city center or “downtown” which is designed for industry at the expense of livability for the residents.
It all feels very thick heavy and heady, the original copypasta, and I’m not surprised it got quickly interacted with in a way symbolizing our moment. Which is attempting to find the lore, expand the lore, develop the lore. You can look up “why is Gen Z obsessed with lore” for some discount think piece ass articles defining what that means. It’s probably a result of people interacting with media through transcription, where instead of watching the movie, they watch the TikTok (why is it formatting it like that what am I an alien gleep glorp) and watch the video essay twice as long as the pretty short, background-ified Netflix marvel dialogue slop film.
In watching media about media, the interaction forms new dimensions like Discourse and of course lore. Instead of looking at the backrooms and seeing the pretty identifiable relatable themes (like, alienation in Marxist sense within AmeriKKKan SSuburban malaiSSe creates rumination worlds where false memories and nostalgia haunt), content consumers (HELP HELP ME I DO NOT WANT TO CONSUME CONTENT) relate to increasingly watered down media by collecting facts to no end, writing fan fiction about the world of the story if there was one, collating wikis that are never read. It’s the conditions where profits must be maximized to larger structural discomfort (in this case upsetting the KKKonSSumers). Rent seeking by trying to get the insurance money.
My train of thought is kind of lost. I guess I was trying to help connect the ideas you were referencing, about the cultural significance of backrooms and why backrooms 2026 was made and made so. Art if we can use that word is in quite the place. I should like to write and read about our times, without intermediaries.
In watching media about media, the interaction forms new dimensions like Discourse and of course lore. Instead of looking at the backrooms and seeing the pretty identifiable relatable themes (like, alienation in Marxist sense within AmeriKKKan SSuburban malaiSSe creates rumination worlds where false memories and nostalgia haunt), content consumers (HELP HELP ME I DO NOT WANT TO CONSUME CONTENT) relate to increasingly watered down media by collecting facts to no end, writing fan fiction about the world of the story if there was one, collating wikis that are never read.
This happened in a sense with the TADC finale where some fans care way, way more about minute details of the C&A backstory not getting answers instead of the main themes the story was exploring about friendships and gender identity.
And presumably it’s not out of a love of the original story/themes that they interact in this way. For older let’s simplify to pre-web 2.0 fan communities, this sort of investigation or fanfictioning was in service and admiration to the material. But here, the material serves as a sort of asset pack, facilitating creativity without having to do the work of writing from scratch.
I really fear what the necessities of extracting profits via social media have done to a generation’s art. This is the generation that while they may see no future, understand that within the context of promises of treats and false ‘good living’ where there is NOTHING. But of course we can’t isolate variables, pretend political economy can be political science and economics, think rigidly.
Your connecting of background Netflix / “discourse” to liminal spaces, or identifying those as liminal spaces, is quite insightful.
This sounds very similar to the ideas Jean Baudrillard described in Simulacra and Simulation.
It reminds me of that description of vaporwave being “Muzak for abandoned shopping malls.” Liminal spaces tap into that same feeling of a locale you know but in a state of decay. The difference is that they’re more evocative of the strip mall or big box store than the shopping mall; the archetypal liminal space you posted, the backrooms, is a a picture of an emptied furniture store.
The empty, abandoned strip mall carries a different connotation than abandoned shopping malls. The latter represents a promised golden future of consumerism that ended up growing too fast, the opulence of the early vision too costly, the model too vulnerable to changes in consumption. The failure of what we were told would come to pass.
The economics of strip malls and big box stores is different though, in that failure and decay are built into it. The new sprawl always has big upfront revenue and low public spending burdens, but as the years go on the infrastructure lifespans come up and the public spending burdens get bigger. So new sprawl gets built to juice new upfront revenue that can keep the old sprawl in at least usable condition, but never to the state it was in the beginning. Likewise, the big box stores are constantly lobbying for lower property taxes with the argument that because those stores are built so shoddily, there’s zero value in the building once their lease is up. And of course, they have no plans to renovate; just relocate to the new sprawl down the road.
So the strip mall has this association of nostalgia, of economic growth but also of inevitable decay. So I think the backrooms represent an anxiety of meeting the same fate as the old sprawl, being decayed, left behind, stuck in the industry or job or neighborhood that used to be “it” and now is just “was.” You “no clip into the backrooms,” now you’re trapped where consumption and growth used to happen, but now is just the skeleton of it, with the specters that leaves behind.
Who has watched Kane Pixels’ The Oldest View?
