Dreams of Dead Malls

Dead Mall in Thailand. Photo Credit: 2026, Naruto Memer.
(Note: Full color photos have been modified for this post.)
My apologies to the individual photographers.)

Saturday, May 06, 2006

"I had one of my Giant Shopping Mall of the Future dreams last night. "Blade Runner" meets "Mad Max" as directed by Romero, with me as the unwitting star. (I was searching for my cats.)

Epic mounds of detritus, cannibalized machinery, meandering hordes of suburban nomads in search of an obscure fix. As always, a feeling of detachment and loss; a whole millennium dashed upon unfriendly concrete shores as the population cowers from a sky it's never seen, oddly content among the crowded memories of a derelict century.

I'm watching from the meticulously stripped-down carriage of an elevator, camera in hand, filming the spectacle floor by floor. Strangers pass like silhouettes consigned to Celluloid purgatory, just out of reach. And I descend into the hive's very guts, enamored of the darkness."

- Mac Tonnies via this Posthuman Blues post.

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The deceased Randall Park Mall (and a dangling conversation). Photo credit: Seph Lawless.

Friday, November 05, 2004

This reinvented world is hushed, stagnant; the excesses of today's fast-forward commercial ecology keep the population in virtual submission. It's not necessarily that there are fewer people; it's simply that humans will find themselves dwarfed by structures whose function seems to balance on the razor's edge of obsolescence. Ever seen a deserted shopping mall slated for demolition? Imagine a whole country with that same sad, desiccated atmosphere; a world thrown rudely upon the concrete shores of its own past.

A man sits on the jetee, bracketed by clammy concrete walls, and sips rice tea. He watches the tide -- warm and strangely odorless -- rush in, crashing against the fortified seawall with a peculiarly electric sound. Lukewarm spray beads the asphalt between his feet.

I am watching.

- Mac Tonnies via this Posthuman Blues post.

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May 21, 2008

"But the locations in my dreams are far from what I’d expect of wish-fulfillment fantasies. As familiar as they’ve become, there’s nothing overtly pleasant about them. Rather, they seem more than slightly ominous: jaundiced psychic postcards from the near-future landscapes of Philip K. Dick and J.G. Ballard. My very identity is relegated to that of a confused tourist; my itinerary, if there is one, seems limited to so much queasy sight-seeing. I can’t plot a meaningful course of action, so I merely watch — and awake with my mind’s eye awash in fragments."

- Mac Tonnies via his Futuristic article: 

Dreams of the Future. Inset right is a photo Mac would love: a scene from a mannequin slaughter at Macy's (found here) by Alaina.

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(Continued below the break...)

 Rolling Acres Mall in Akron, Ohio. Photo credit: Johnny Joo.

I think, more than anyone else I've ever known, Mac Tonnies was haunted far more by his visions of the future than he was by his memories of the past. But, as time went by his futurescapes became the increasingly bleak, dystopian ones refected in his dreams.

Maybe this was due to a particular time frame... when a burgeoning Technological Age was about to collide with the turning-of-the century: a paradigm zeitgeist squared by the turning of the millennium. Everything seemed so fertile initially... almost golden... but how swiftly the dire musings of the Cyberpunks would come to pass.

...and all it would take was one global pandemic, when we were forced to slide too deeply into our virtual worlds. Nobody shopped unless it was absolutely necessary. After all, operating in the real world required masks, vaccines, marking a "safe distance." That is, unless you were very wealthy. In which case, you sipped cocktails at your favorite resort, invested in Bitcoin and bought real estate. Capitalism, in the hands of the new technocrats ran amuck while the masked masses slept fitfully. Tyranny, elitism, terrorism... all of it waiting to spring from behind our drawn curtains like bats out of hell. Ultimately, we never knew what hit us.

By then, Mac had already passed, but even as early as 2009 - the year of his passing - his earlier dreams of dead malls were becoming a reality. By 2014 the BBC was reporting The death of the US shopping mall.

Abandoned shopping malls or dead malls, are now so numerous they've become the phenomenon of the 21st century. There are official dead mall enthusiasts, "– an intimate public that s

hares and expresses worldviews, memories, and affects centered around the figure of the dead mall. Enthusiasts sense the affective intensities of decaying 20th century consumer-capitalist futures that haunt these ruins – they sense 'hauntological affects'."

There is even a .com and an occasional exposé or news story, like this one: Amazon is buying up dead malls–adaptive reuse, or just eating its prey?

 

(Gotta love that one!)

Meanwhile, in keeping with the summer season, it's generally over 100° every day here in New Mexico. But, then, Albuquerque is surrounded by a desert. Not so Europe, where heat waves begin to take human casualties. Now, Mac had plenty to say about that topic, too, but why more doom and gloom when so many more intriguing things are within our grasp? I'm speaking, of course, about those wiley little trendsetters of 2026: CATS!

Stay tuned for Our Feline Overlords!