Dead Malls

Hello lainons, Not sure if this belongs here, but I wanted to gain a better understanding on the fascination surrounding dead malls. I first stumbled upon them by watching Dan Bell's video series but after that I became very interested in the phenomenon of people doing video tours of dead/dying shopping malls. I feel there's a lot to be explored here. I'm just looking for some more insight into why it became associated with the vaporwave/pseudo-cyberpunk aesthetic. Is it the sense of nostalgia that is evoked by watching those videos coupled with the late-80s, early-90s visuals that attract some people to them? I can only guess as to why, but my theory is that people are chasing a certain sense of nostalgia brought on by seeing places like those. Given the state of American capitalism, so many people's formative years were spent hanging out in shopping malls, because they were the place to be in some parts of the country. And now that the retail landscape is changing, and abandoned retail spaces are becoming very common, there is a longing for a more prosperous time. Perhaps retail is a barometer for the economy for some? I would like to hear what others have to think about this phenomenon. Maybe there's also some psychogeography involved? Anemoia? But I can't help but feel there's an underlying /cyb/ through-line here.

urbex meets some weird liminal spaced out nostalgia farm. Union of opposites: The husk of a mall juxtaposed with the mental background of copious commercial programming involving imagery of thriving sales floors. Hundreds of lemmings can't be wrong, join the herd. Once I was part of an arcade cult. We would meet up to play Virtual-On (twin stick robot arena fighting game) at wherever the game could be found. We saw many malls (and their arcades) die slowly. It was kind of weird hearing the echo of a few footsteps in the nearly dead places, then there came the familiar inevitable "Damned" moment, showing up to see others idling by the forever locked doors of the closed mall or arcade. Part of Virtual-On's in-game text mentions that it is not really a game, it's actually a training simulator that is used to select humans to fight aliens. When [not if] someone stopped showing up for our weekend tournaments, We would instead say, "Susan got selected." Recruitment for such a group is hard, there's the difficulty curve and competitive element, and online options exist now... But online play doesn't replicate the fellowship of making the effort to drag yourself to a physical location, sit next to your enemy IRL, and eat junk food together afterwards. I think religion's primary drug must be the fellowship. When it was just down to two of us, we both decided that day would be our last "tournament". Cringe as it was, I couldn't stop myself from saluting the only other guy back when he said goodbye. Weirdly enough, basically nobody in the group stayed in touch. Was it the draw of more attention draining social-media, or just the strangeness (shame?) of explaining to normal people your adult life involved a connection to a dying community devoted to an old arcade game? Perhaps the ghost of the dying mall left a hollow feeling in the "selected", leading to them ghosting? Perhaps it was to maintain the illusion of the game's promise about players fighting aliens. Part of me believes the missing crew really got recruited off world and is still kicking alien butt even now. Fight on, soldiers. There's a weird forbidden fruit element to dead malls. There are places to get into you're never allowed to normally, and perhaps things you're not going to do in a crowded mall. Suddenly those things are possible, those places are no longer off-limits.

>>60036 I have a strange relationship with malls/ When I was growing up, malls seemed like a drag, like there was no real reason to go. I was never into consumerist shopping, and inevitably I would go into the slower hobby stores and just talk to people working there for hours when there were no customers. Made a few friends that way, but otherwise malls were this sort of commercial behemoth that always felt unnerving (liminal space would be a better term now). I go to the mall and browse frequently for inspiration or because I am bored, also because the advertising is not as bad IRL as it is in the wired. But I think there is a more cyberpunk aspect now, where there is a whole wired mesh that exists in the physical. Digital beacons and cameras now track every person gathering data to shape how the stores look and what they sell. Once or twice I accidentally wandered through an unlocked door looking for a restroom, and wound up in the back end of this system. It was a strangely familiar feeling wandering around cramped hallways lit by dim fluorescent lights listening to your lonely echoing steps, only to go through a door and be back surrounded by people.

>>60034 I relate to this. There is definitely a /cyb/ undercurrent to this aesthetic and the fascination that it implies. There is naive, optimistic feel about big malls that waste tremendous amounts of power just so that you can spend all your money buying not-so-useful soykaf, coming from your car that you parked in the enormous parking lot outside that takes up 10x more space than the actual mall, and you do that without entertaining the idea that there is no way that this is sustainable. People that built these malls did not worry about the coming ecological collapse, they did not think that you cannot build air-conditioned steel boxes in the desert and getting away with it without even thinking about it. We see these dead malls and see a future that never came, a future that was promised to us by endless consumerist advertising, that technology will just keep on giving us better and better things. Of course that is a lie, it's hauntology, you see this and wish you could live in that moment, but the moment is gone, it passed us because we did not want to see where it would inevitably end. I actually think that hauntology is the main idea underpinning vaporwave, where old music and eerie 70's/80's corporate imagery get remixed into new music, like we can't actually produce something new, because we're trapped with this idea of a carefree past that actually never existed. Anyway thank you for posting this, this is why I keep coming here.

>>60034 I'd love to use a dead mall as a hideout or as a hunting ground if it becomes covered with vegetation. Also, I'd love to have at those games and prizes in that mall.