A Maze of Twisty Strip Malls, All Alike

[forsyth]

Tonight, I drove out past Dulles airport, because we had some time to kill before meeting my girlfriend's friend who was flying in.

Something about the whole area out there didn't feel right. Strip malls and developments abounded, of course. Just plopped down randomly in places just because. Giant overpasses and confusing messes of roads. And Dulles Town Center, this giant fancy mall, was the same.

Part of it might have been the hour. It was late, and not very many people were around. But part of it was design. The mall was designed not for people, but for crowds. So without the crowds, it felt empty. Pieces of it were designed to remind you of things like old train stations, or temples, or something I guess, but none of it was designed to live in. It was just built as a temple to consumerism, or a castle, surrounded by a moat of steaming asphalt.

It, like the rest of everything else out there, wasn't designed for people. It was designed for cars. Everything is scaled to cars, not humans. I think that's part of it.

And part of it might be it all feels like a rotting mask, because it's not sustainable. I don't mean it in some kind of new-agey sense, I mean it in the literal sense of this can't go on. And what can't go on, won't. But it'll hang on a lot longer than you think it will.

Maybe the desperation was what I felt. THe retail stores, desperately waving their hole card of Christmas, trying to spur people into spending still more money they don't have. All the overpriced stuff we don't need, that marketers spend their days trying to convince us we can't do without. The baby trees and the old fashioned wooden benches scattered amidst parking lots, desperately trying to pretend to be a park...

Or maybe it's none of those. Maybe it's just me being tired, and being elitist or something. Or maybe the overwhelming attempts to make things seem fancy kicked in my latent anarchist feelings.

I don't know. This is why I probably shouldn't blog at 2 in the morning.

Comments

[leticia.livejournal.com]

Anarchist? No, that's anarchy in action.

When the government doesn't regulate urban growth in a logical and healthy manner, what you get is the shit that the developers want to develop.

The libertarians bitch and moan and whine about any restrictions on what they can do with their land, as if freedom from permits and zoning laws were inalienable rights and when they get their way, they ruin communities; they impoverish entire towns by a surge and crash. They take the money and leave.

Don't call it anarchy to want to see growth done in a sustainable manner. Because it won't happen without laws and government to protect it.

[forsythferret.livejournal.com]

True, true. The anarchist part of me was more the part that kept being tempted to smash the glittering temples of consumerism. Or would that be more a commie attitude? I was rambling at 2 AM. Class envy or somesuch. Or just that it was all so fake.

[leticia.livejournal.com]

Commie, perhaps, or realist. :p

[leticia.livejournal.com]

Or anti-authoritarian. Corporations are, of course, authoritarian. More so than a properly democratic government with guaranteed rights.

[forsythferret.livejournal.com]

This is true. Nearly all corporations are authoritarian hierarchies. Which is one of the reasons they get so dysfunctional, because one of the first rules of hierarchies is that nobody tells the guy above them anything other than what they think their boss wants to hear. Multiply that by six or seven or more layers of bosses, and the people at the top end up both completely isolated from reality and completely separated from the actual affects of the decisions they make on this faulty information.

This is why hierarchies should be as flat as possible. And because then the people at each layer actually know the people around them. Plus, in this day and age, a corporation is legally required to only care about the profits for the stockholders, not the customers or workers or communities or anything else, except insofar as they affect the profits for the stockholders.

So in short, eat the rich.

[leticia.livejournal.com]

Costco continues to get asked 'don't they realize that they get hit on wall street because they pay their workers too much?' and Costco continues to thumb their nose at wall street, rake in tasty tasty profits, oh, and have competent and content employees; they compete with walmart on their own turf and hold their own. No one else has managed that playing by Walmart's rules.

Why so many companies haven't yet realized you can't play by walmart's rules, I don't know