Mail-order, Venice
Quote of the Day/>
”A healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people’s patience.”
- John Updike
Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news
Mark Knopfler | Going Home | from the film Local Hero
Long Read of the Day
The AI Bubble and the Extinction of the Mallrat
Following on from Bill Janeway’s essay on what might follow from the puncturing of the AI and crypto investment bubbles, I fell to wondering if among the wreckage might be a lot of empty aluminium sheds that had been intended to be data-centres. And then I came on this perceptive essay by Casey Mock about the cultural significance of shopping malls for teenagers of earlier generations.
In Kevin Smith’s 1995 film Mallrats, the characters spend an entire day wandering the mall, drifting from Spencer’s to the comic book store to the food court with the casual confidence of creatures who are dominating their natural habitat.
Mallrats is not a very good movie and has aged poorly. Yet it did capture that the mall in the ‘90’s wasn’t just where people shopped, but where teens lived their social lives, learned about relationships, and figured out who they are. I was a teenager in the ‘90s, and I didn’t particularly care for the mall on its own terms, but I ended up there frequently anyway because it was one of a handful of places outside of school where you could dependably meet other teenagers. The ‘90’s mall was a genuine community space, a climate-controlled town square where different tribes of teenagers could come together and coexist.
Today’s data center building boom promises even less community benefit than the mall once did. Where malls at least provided social spaces and entry-level employment for teenagers, data centers offer communities almost nothing once construction is complete. These windowless monstrosities often employ fewer than fifty people, the overwhelming majority of whom are likely to be transferred in by a big company rather than hired locally.
And yet, communities across the country are competing to attract these facilities with increasingly generous incentive packages, convinced they’re landing wealth and prosperity for the next generation. Rural counties in particular are offering public subsidies for data centers that work out to hundreds of thousands of dollars per job created, justified by projections of long-term economic development that echo the lofty promises made by mall developers decades before.
And herein lies the relevance of Mallrats: the communities that subsidized shopping malls were left holding the bag when the retail model collapsed, while the developers and anchor tenants extracted their profits and moved on.
When the AI bubble bursts, we can expect the same story to play out on an even larger scale…
Really interesting essay. Worth your time.
So many books, so little time
The current issue of the Economist has a piece about the implications of the decline in reading. It’s behind the paywall, but these two paras were interesting:
Reading is in trouble. Multiple studies in multiple places seem to be showing the same thing. Adults are reading less. Children are reading less. Teenagers are reading a lot less. Very small children are being read to less; many are not being read to at all. Reading rates are lower among poorer children—a phenomenon known as “the reading gap”—but reading is down for everyone, everywhere.
In America, the share of people who read for pleasure has fallen by two-fifths in 20 years, according to a study published in August in iScience, a journal. YouGov, a pollster, found that 40% of Britons had not read or listened to any books in 2024. Reading for displeasure is little better: as Sir Jonathan Bate, an English professor at Oxford University, has said, students “struggle to get through one novel in three weeks”. Even the educated young, another greybeard said, have “no habits of application and concentration”.
The magazine cautions that “such laments should be treated with caution: almost the only thing bookish sorts love more than books is complaining about books and reading”…
Yeah but…. One of the longer term implications of digital technology is that the basic unit of cultural transmission is steadily getting smaller. Memes and soundbites and TikTok (and YouTube ‘shorts’ and so on.
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