Catherynne M. Valente
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Move Fast and Break People Part 2: Everyone's Third Place
🕑 Added 2025-03-19 15:31:24 +0000 UTCCross-posted from the Uncozy Substack. As the Laboratory is always my priority, anything paywalled there will be cross-posted here if a patron directly requests. I prefer to keep this place cozy, but don't want anyone to not get their money's worth.
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Good afternoon, this is your very stressed-out captain speaking. Welcome back to the most depressing shit imaginable! We are flying at dangerously breakneck speeds above what appears to be a couple of hundred million Artaxes stuck teeth-deep in a nationwide Swamp of Mudsucking Sadness on our long-haul flight from Normal Fucking Life to the Inevitable Burning Wreckage of Ostensibly-Civilized Society. We hope you’re enjoying our in-flight Long Form Socio-Philosophical Essay service. Out the left windows, you can see just exactly where it all went wrong, but don’t worry, this is a non-stop flight, and we’re not going to do one even half-assed thing about it. We are expecting an absolute rustic pigfuck of a journey through the end of liberal democracy and anticipate noisily facedrilling into medieval fucking feudalism within the year.
Brb, just gonna check my feed…
Last time on I’m From the Government and I’m Here to Tell You to Get Fucked, Die Broke, and Worship Dear Leader, we talked about how, over the course of thirty or so years, we replaced every part of regular, everyday human life with the internet, and when we couldn’t quite totally replace something with various iterations of a live feed of people screaming at each other about politics, we just went ahead and stapled the internet onto the side of it, whether anyone wanted or needed that or not, we were not fucking fussed.
But we might have sort of kind of basically held together, with wishes, imagination, a lot of caulk and emojis, and people’s annoying habit of actually wanting some kind of social interaction aside from blood relations and toner relations work colleagues. After all, we’ve had malevolent dickvoids moaning over their weird ergot-dreams of total domination running things for pretty much always, in all places and times, forever.
They just couldn’t get us all in one place before. I’m not even specifically talking about the walled gardens of Facebook or X or TikTok, I mean the internet itself. A place whose points of ingress and egress they already controlled, and whose activity they could manipulate for, quite literally, less money and effort than it takes an average consumer to buy a new car.
And now it will become clear how a little musing about hey maybe we shouldn’t have relied on that whole “caring about other people” thing to get us through an election against Goblin Fascism, seeing as how we just got done rearranging all of society to discourage interaction with other people as much as possible and then just let that bin-bag full of trauma-diapers marinate in its own fetid juices for four years turned into a four-part series: it’s all just so much. Once you start pulling at the threads, it’s everything.
(And I swear by the ghost of Usenet I’m not just shuffling around the house being 45 and complaining about how much better everything was back in the time known colloquially as “my day.” A lot of this was not better. That’s why we replaced it with the internet. It was slow and clunky and annoying and unexciting. It sucked up all the extra hours of your day, and then a few more, like a gluttonous anaconda of time and energy. There were definitely nefarious schemes afoot from the earliest of digital days, but the most nefarious of all turned out to be that almost everybody is just a comfort-seeking human animal who would like things to just be a little easier and less scary than they were yesterday, to have just a few more minutes between work and sleep to exist, to be just a little more comfortable, have less on their mind, experience a little more of life. What a bunch of assholes, right?)
So how did we get here? Well, to put it plainly, without jokey profanity?
We tried to use technology to fix our very human loneliness and increasing alienation from the modern world and accidentally got close enough to making progress that way too many of us were all gathered in one place for way too many hours in the day, until it became so easy and convenient for the people in charge of that place to control public opinion that not doing it, to these edgelord minds, was not only lame and cringe, but approached fiduciary negligence.
Plus, being able to control how and what people think and not doing it really annoyed them. Some humans find pleasure in nothing so much as controlling other humans, and if you were that kind of person in the 90s tech boom, you probably gravitated toward the big shiny new thing with no rules that could reach right into the brain of those oh-so-controllable human toys and let you play.
We let ourselves get corralled. Brought in from the prairies and fenced off in one place, where it was trivially easy to get to all of us at once. And it’s just so unbelievably fucking sad that we did it, not entirely, but largely, because we were lonely.
Because, as the digital age ascended and the structures of the analogue world decayed, we went looking for a new third place.
I remember the first time I heard the phrase “third place,” meaning a place humans go to be human at each other which is neither home nor work. The loss of such places has been a subject of great distress, handwringing, and much scapegoating for most of my adult life, even before such places were really lost at all.
I heard the phrase first in 2001, but it was only coined in 1989, by a sociologist named Ray Oldenburg. Before that, such a phrase would’ve been mostly non-sensical, even apart from the fact that, for most of history, it would’ve had to be a fourth place, neither home nor work nor church. But we very intelligent, enlightened lefties only saw the (admittedly terrible) religious part so we already went ahead and ditched that useless thing where you had to go somewhere every week, dress vaguely well, look your neighbors in the eye, talk to them in a manner that wouldn’t get you ostracized from the entire town, hear about their problems, meet their children, let them witness how you treat your family, and be forced to at least pretend to consider stupid shit like hey maybe be nice to each other you leaky fucking bin bags, if you don’t someone’s gonna set you on fire forever, just saying.
The weird thing is, even in 2001, the context in which I heard “third place” was…a bunch of young people bemoaning that they were extinct, and that extinction was dooming humanity forever. The internet was the only third place left; it would be the lone hope of our generation. In the future, they said, the internet would be everyone’s third place.
ruh roh shaggy
The irony of this sentiment being uttered by a bunch of young people hanging out in an internet cafe, itself very obviously a third goddamned place, was completely lost on me at the time because I was a dork-ass child. But, in my defense, it was lost on everyone else, too. In comparison to 2024, in 2001, third places were absolutely bloody everywhere. Pubs, clubs, rec centers, cafes, bowling alleys, hell, even Grange Halls were still kind of a thing, if only for the olds. There was literally no shortage at all of places to go or things to do. And those places were packed and they were cheap, even for the young.
So what were we bitching about in our cozy, cheap, easily accessible by bicycle, third place?
Well, none of the third places available except internet cafes, and the internet itself, were meant for, or appealing to, people like us. People who were young or at least not 100% sold on adult conformity, weird, disinclined to participate in things “everyone” liked, maybe not the best at raw-dog socialization, interested in niche culture, not mainstream, possibly overly arrogant in our assessment of our own intellect, often traumatized and bullied or just ignored in real life, depressed or angry or shy or otherwise unable or unwilling to fit in, go along to get along, blend in with the other good workers with good futures, but rarely pretty or charismatic enough to make that an intriguing movie-script-ready personality trait.
You know, geeks. Only geeks weren’t cool yet. Geeks weren’t profitable yet. Geeks weren’t even a demographical term anyone with influence was talking about without a curled lip of disgust. And we found each other online, developed our own in-group lingo, rules for behavior, trends, fashions, ways to spot one another in the real world.
Unfortunately, so did a lot of other folks who weren’t very good at fitting into society before society learned to function without direct human interaction. I’m not talking about your average neurodivergent introvert. Your average neurodivergent introvert is lovely, and made pretty art online, or argued about Kirk and Picard, or got weirdly into reading long recaps of television shows they’d already seen. I am talking about people like Peter Thiel and Mark Zuckerberg, Curtis Yarvin, Steve Bannon, Elon Musk, and all the C-Suite Children of Gmork whose names you don’t even recognize because they’re just sociopaths, not narcissists, and they don’t need constant adulation to serve the Nothing.
You should hear this guy’s TED Talk, what an icon. I heard Trump’s nominated him for Labor Secretary
And those are the people, good and bad, optimistic and opportunistic, who set up the scaffolding for the way online life was going to work before the people who were pretty okay at offline life even knew what was up. They are also the people who have been able to live longest in the antiseptic world of not actually needing to wrangle with the radical concept of “other people” at all unless they want to. (VCs do not count as other people, obviously, the whole ecosystem is literally just a weaponized frat) Every app that kicked another societal pylon down in slow motion piloted in Palo Alto or Cupertino first, or somewhere very nearby.
Not for nothing, but that conversation about third places back in 2001 took place maybe thirty miles away from Palo Alto.
But back then, my age cohort was just a bit too young to have made fortunes in the 90s tech boom, and were, instead, rushing to a terminal in our spare time to take apart this new thing and see how it worked, or could work. We, and everyone else, still had to talk to another human being, in a minimally socially acceptable manner, to accomplish a majority of life’s necessities—and even when you didn’t, a lot of people still preferred to, and could, run their shit that way. Face to face or over the phone, with paper and pen or printed from a computer onto paper and notated with pen, slow as Heinz, exhausting, and yet a lot of people still pretty consistently chose it over the new digital world.
2001 was a seriously transitional time, even apart from 9/11. Conventional wisdom holds that the internet went mainstream in 1997, but the vast majority of people were still not very online at all four years later, and certainly not for daily logistical activities. Not just because the tech wasn’t there yet, but because “normies” vaguely, yet holistically, disliked and distrusted the internet on principle, if they took it seriously at all.
Most regular people were not very active online yet. Vanishingly few celebrities were. No one’s grandparents were—they were too busy having to sit the fuck down in an office with another human person whose demeanor, apparel, personal scent, and manner of speaking determined how much car insurance said gramps was going to buy that day. It was like San Diego ComicCon before it was OMG COMICCON. And that was why we all felt so comfortable being as raw and open and actually bonkers inappropriately personal on Livejournal or Diaryland or our own scattered and be-webringed blogs—none of which we called social media, because we did not yet consider it to be media. Because our parents weren’t looking. Our bosses definitely weren’t. Even most of our IRL friends weren’t. We were still writing emails with full and correct grammar, openings and closings, like 19th century letters, and Google wasn’t a verb yet.
Going online felt like a fucking miracle back then. And the real heartbreak is that most of the moving parts of that miracle were the exact things that, over the years, curdled into the poison we won’t stop chugging straight out of the bottle now, even though we know we could.
We young pioneers had to interface with the meatspace, all the time, in all its difficulty and pressure and how little it seemed to enjoy us, so we valued real life just about as much as famed documentaries The Matrix and Fight Club would lead you to believe. You didn’t even have to use your real name. No one ever had to know what you looked like. You could be whoever you wanted on the internet, which was both an almost knee-buckling blessing and a monstrous curse. It was both those things, but it still is, too.
And one of the biggest draws to that digital world was how obnoxious and separated the real world so often was. Maybe you find the one other kid at your school who has every line of Monty Python and Hitchhiker’s Guide memorized and maybe you don’t, but when you log on to your forum of choice everyone there knew the parrot sketch and where their towel was and someone was working on a full babel fish cosplay and someone else re-wrote the Galaxy Song with more accurate numbers and it felt like coming home.
So that’s where we went. To discuss our interests and relax after work and trade stupid jokes and gossip and learn cool facts and meet new people. A third place. Not work, not family. A new home.
And you trust your home, don’t you? You know it so well. It knows you. It belongs to you. It wouldn’t hurt you. It wouldn’t trick you. Not like the outside world.
Where everyone knows your username…
The problem is, third places had always been the one realm where the Man, however you should like to define said Man in this, the Year of Depends Adult Undergarment, couldn’t quite get to you. At work, you were subject to management, the business day, pressures to conform and perform, the tension at whatever points in which government entities interacted with your industry. You had to look, act, speak, and deliver in certain stratified and expected ways order to not get fired. At home, you were subject to your spouse, children, extended relations, neighbors, the needs of the home, the need to model your values for the next generation, whatever they were, and television was super excited at all times, eager to sell you acres of useless plastic, convince you you were ugly, encourage you to imitate fake people in fake places doing fake things, and coax you into really committing to getting your whites their whitest. And church-as-third-place never helped at all with this one, because God could get straight at you there.
But at the pub, or the arcade, or the VFW, or the Rotary, or bridge club, or indeed, the internet cafe, you could simply exist, subject to yourself alone and the barest minimum of please do not piss directly on the ceiling, actively rob the place, scream uncontrollably into the face of strangers, or rip the larynx out of any of the other patrons in order to express dominance standards of behavior, for the price of a shitty beer, if that.
We didn’t think about that stuff then, at least not much. We were just happy to find somewhere we could build into a place to fit in. We couldn’t see that, if the internet actually became everyone’s third place, then the eternal abusive spouses that are the 1% would have the societal Triforce fully assembled in their pockets.
Anywhere you can be your own self alone without being constantly fucked with is going to feel precious, more than precious, authentic. You’re going to believe the things you hear there a little more, because they didn’t come from a random media figure, they came from Bob from the grocery store or Sarah who has a kid in your kid’s class. Value the thoughts of the other humans you meet there just a little more deeply, because they’re just people talking, and you trust that Regular Dude doesn’t have the kinds of ulterior motives Work Dude and In-Law Dude might. Get a little more personally attached to the way things work in that place, because it matters so very much to you to have a place like it. React a little more strongly to any perceived change, any possible whisper of a threat. Defend the owners who provide it to you just a little more strongly.
It certainly wouldn’t occur to you that Regular Dude chit-chatting about Star Wars at the pub is a fucking agent of a foreign government or an actual robot. That is nightmare fuel, when you imagine it happening in the meatspace. But online, we just accept that every time we talk to someone we don’t personally know, there’s a solid chance one of those is what’s up. And somehow we go about our day.
It was never possible to manage public opinion the way it is now because after Work and Home, there was a wide, varied field of wildly different places where people existed and formed their identities and found meaning and authenticity.
Slowly, over the course of this century, because everything got scary and expensive and weird and it was just so easy and cheap to log on instead of go out, because the new third place had dopamine on tap and seratonin shots on the bar, we moved toward one place. One place that could be owned. That could be shaped. That could be, at trivial expense and with trivial effort, made to serve.
Almost as soon as anyone whose job it was to notice such things noticed the premium desirable consumer demographics were beginning to put on a kind of DIY authenticity that rose from internet culture specifically because it was separate from, less gatekept, rougher and less stage-managed than mainstream culture, an arms race began among marketers, politicians, and all sort of media entities to repackage all their old shit into something that appeared as authentic as possible, appeared to be coming up from the masses rather than down from above. To very consciously trick a massive audience into believing anything, so long as it looked a little off and unprofessional.
Can you think of anything else that’s gotten real fucky because people thought the thing that looked super off and unprofessional was authentic? I mean, I can’t think of anything. But maybe you can.
Because the internet itself looked a little off and unprofessional back then, and that was where the people who understand money knew the future was hiding. It was a goddamned hamster-dancing mess of technicolor vomit. A million different fonts and colors and obnoxious braying auto-play songs and animated wallpapers and wonky homespun photoshop images. Which slowly, over time, became two or three fonts, standardized (and muted) colors, profile pics so small it’s difficult to tell who’s talking, and a handful of websites whose graphical layouts became the almost-unseen window through which we experience the world outside our neighborhoods, commutes, offices, and families.
I remember the first time I saw a commercial that put the standard ecstatic housewife belting out a Euripidean paean to laundry detergent inside a jank-ass old school YouTube frame. Other than that, it was a normal commercial. But it all took place inside the insnantly-recognizable grey toolbar and icons of YouTube. The young had already started valuing YouTube over other sources of information—and that simple frame was meant to trick our brains into receiving Big Soap’s buy-begging along the same neuro-pathways that it received the Vlog Brothers and Lonelygirl15 and fucking Dramatic Squirrel.
And it worked.
Poor buddy. He didn’t ask for this.
Thus began the Authenticity Wars of the early 00s. An arms race to be the most trusted bullshit-slinger, to reinvent the vibe of the internet into all other marketing and culture, until the hero’s journey in mainstream films, up to and including animated Disney features—looking at you Wreck-It-Ralph 2—involves having something go miraculously viral to solve all the protagonist’s problems.
Here in these godforsaken 2020s, God appears in the form of the view counter at the bottom of a viral video.
The problem is, when everything gets carefully re-skinned with the New Authenticity, it’s impossible to tell what’s real. When you scroll through a feed, there is no visual differentiation between an actual elected representative notifying their constituency of a legitimate emergency and eaglebazooka1488 notifying their followers that Ozempic is made from the tears of pure Aryan conservative children collected after they saw a trans exist, and no matter how evolved we might like to think we are, our brains receive those two pieces of information the exact same way, and lend it the exact same legitimacy, because they look identical, and both came at us out of the corners of our very precious, authentic, third place megapub where Bob and Sarah tell us the truth.
Ask yourself why the most unhinged accounts have anime profile pictures. IS it because that obscures identity and it’s easier for bots to be mistaken for people that way? Sure. It’s also because geeky shit became synonymous with authenticity, intelligence, and in-group coolness for about ten years and our skulls are filled with electrocuted meat that’s SUPER slow on the uptake. Why, the pink galactic fox with stars in her tail couldn’t possibly be trying to socially engineer liberal democracy into the fucking Sarlacc pit! That’s just so silly!
I love long walks on the beach, picnics, and enslaving the masses to serve a cancerous supremacist ideology that gamefies human happiness to the point that they voluntarily sell their brain chemistry to dark lords for less than a cent, turn on their own families, and reboot feudalism tee hee!
When the internet is everyone’s third place, that is a very, very big target. Once such a huge swatch of humanity, across country and demographic lines, is in one place, not only does it become trivially easy and trivially cheap to reach them all at once. For quite a long time, the buy-in to become Sarah down at the pub Who Knows What’s Up was fairly high: you had to be able to write interesting long-form blog posts, even if they were just about Julia Child or cats, or you had to be able to produce unique videos quickly, you had to be knowledgable enough to build an audience, to cultivate comment sections. And the second it’s possible to automate that hero’s journey—via AI or bots or fake followers or the utter pure unalloyed evil that is the engagement algorithms—it’s simply to easy to change what people think for the kind of people who like to control what people think to not do it all day every day.
Neuralink is so unnecessary. We’re already there. The neo-oligarchy that grew out of the tech boom got access to the one thing only religion had even managed to sip at before: the little voice in the back of our heads that we trust more than anything because it’s our own voice. The voice of our conscience. Of our most intimate selves.
And then COVID happened, and the last of us who weren’t Doing This Shit had the world reduced to a small glowing screen in their homes for a year. Everyone who’d held out got sucked in.
That’s why it’s working. And that’s why it’ll be almost impossible to put any of the china cups back on the shelves when and if this particular meth-addled fuckbull ever leaves the shop. Fiscal and governmental entities have rarely been able to access the most intimate backwaters of the human mind, much as they’ve tried. And once we all had to stay inside for a real expanse of time…we all logged on.
And they got to replace that little still voice of our genuine selves with an infinite feed of what sure the fuck seems like human beings, but only sometimes are, screaming and selling and fighting and monetizing and attacking and defending and going at each other as though there’s only one pint of dopamine left in the universe and it’s on fucking Twitter. It just hadn’t been possible to access the little voice in our own heads as a megaphone before. Not at scale. You’d have to go on one crazy road trip to seed even a simple idea in every pub, church, rotary, grange hall, barcade, sports stadium, book club, craft night, bowling league—anywhere people could be themselves apart from work and family.
That still little voice got replaced with Gmork. With The Nothing.
The internet will be everyone’s third place in the future! Oh, how optimistic we were, never once considering that “everyone” included Elon Musk, Donald Trump, and Vladimir Putin, all of whom used the adolescent internet to convince people who would never worship a craptastic programmer, a game show host, and a dictator as the risen gods of their world, that they were cool and authentic in a way they never EVER could in face-to-face real life.
You can be anyone on the internet. You’re not chained down by the old ways. But so could they. And neither are they.
Back in 1938, a large part of the nation tuned into the radio and heard a broadcast concerning an alien invasion. It was just Orson Welles reading The War of the Worlds, but people believed it. Because it came through the radio, whence all the other True Things came. Some people—many weren’t fooled. But many were. It took a a bit of effort to convince the fooled to join the unfooled, but it didn’t become a crisis. You could still look out your window and see a startling lack of aliens.
But in this un-brave new world, we live in 1938 all the time. In many more ways than this one. And when we look through the window of a social media site’s algorithmic authenticity-generating machine, we might see a startling lack of aliens…and we might see an AI-generated video of aliens landing. Or the President talking about how serious the alien problem is. Or the richest man in the world blaming the invasion on trans athletes. Or a famous man telling you to vote his way if you don’t want to get eaten by Martians.
And all of them sound as convincing as the voice in your head reading this sentence out loud right now.
Comments
M Anderson
I really appreciate you sharing these here. Your perspective is valuable and your analysis is spectacular. (And I know I'm coming at this more than a month down the line but ... Things matter for longer than the first day or two they're available.)
