I needed, this weekend, to make a last-minute purchase at a big-box retailer. I won’t name names, because this isn’t about particular chains. However, after biking to the store, winded and tired, I stumbled into a sort of no-space. The air was climate-controlled, the aisles spacious and well-stocked. The floor was without feature, while the ceiling was so high that, like clouds, I couldn’t distinguish specific details; I could’ve been literally anywhere on the planet.
In the epilogue to Greg Grandin’s book The End of the Myth, Grandin mentions America’s collective outrage to discover, at the height of the Trump Administration’s “family separation” policy along the border, that many children, isolated in a nation where they don’t speak the language, got warehoused in a prison that used to be a WalMart. Officials didn’t even need to change the building much; they applied their brand, and voilà, it was a prison.
Like many Americans, I initially felt the intuitive gut-clench of fury upon learning children, children, were treated in this way. But, stepping into such an arcology of modern commerce this weekend, I realized: that’s who we are now as Americans. We live in a world of modularity and bigness, a culture that celebrates the vast and complete interchangeability of life’s corners. The total correspondence between WalMart and a prison isn’t a bug, it’s the system.
Visit any randomly selected big box retailer or enclosed shopping mall on Saturday afternoon. Notice how different age brackets respond. We adults often accept the necessity of these basilicas of commerce, and circulate constantly, eyes down and feet constantly in motion, interacting only with our designated in-group, not unlike prisoners in The Yard. However, children, not yet socialized to these environments, absolutely hate them, and often scream bloody murder, until they learn to accept fate.
Think about that difference. Children, still beholden to the first-order impulses that reflect human evolution, God’s creation, or whatever, want to run, play, meet new people, and build communities, as children do. Adults resign themselves to the environment, and go along to get along. Do stores and malls socialize adults into complicity with a system totally counter to evolutionary drives? Not by themselves, certainly, but they’re part of an elaborate system to accomplish this goal.
Shopping for hardware this weekend, I realized, the owners had successfully isolated me from the outside world. Was it sunny or gloomy out? If I hadn’t just been outside five minutes earlier, I couldn’t have told you. What about social conditions outside: rich or poor? Peaceful or violent? Who knows? I’ve visited big-box retailers from the West Coast to Kansas City, and once you’re inside, you could be on the moon for all you know.
Converting one store into a prison, thus, isn’t any big stretch. Industrious entrepreneurs have converted abandoned big box retailers into schools, public libraries, and suburban megachurches. Because ultimately, they all feed the same base impulse. Complete isolation made me believe I could assuage the emptiness inside by purchasing batteries, bananas, or tube socks. Change the interior layout of the building, and you can fill that emptiness with wisdom, salvation, or penance. It’s all modular anyway.
Because fundamentally, as humans, we know we’re missing something. Christians once tried to plug that absence with God’s love, while Buddhists encouraged us to disconnect from the material world and become pure spirit. Religion has retreated from the greater discussion of human experience, at least in our time, leaving a vacancy without any ready-made solution. Big box architecture accentuates this absence, then encourages us to assuage it with… well, with whatever they’re selling this week.
In one of philosophy’s most misused orphan quotes, Michel Foucault famously wrote: “Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?” The interchangeability of these buildings emphasizes, to Foucault, their identical purposes in social formation. They isolate individuals from their core evolutionary drives, and redirect them to whatever authorities consider admirable. One wonders why, writing as late as 1977, Foucault’s famous list didn’t include the already ubiquitous malls and K-Marts.
No wonder Siddhartha or Saint Anthony didn’t just abandon their lives while seeking transcendance, they abandoned built environment altogether. Because this isn’t an individual function. The entire social arcology serves to redirect humans to accept a power hierarchy that, if we could run and climb trees, we’d immediately realize is artificial. For all their faults, churches and temples encourage us to look up and aspire. Big box architecture forces us to look down, and comply.
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