Third places still exist, and if you go find them, you'll notice something: Most of the best ones aren't places of commerce. Not coffee shops, but clubs, church

Third places still exist, and if you go find them, you'll notice something: Most of the best ones aren't places of commerce. Not coffee shops, but clubs, churches, nonprofits, public parks, universities, apartment courtyards, volunteer fire departments, etc. I think that our modern society, based around cutthroat capitalist optimization where any "third space" is a lost opportunity to extract money from "consumers", is so far from the possibility of true "third spaces" that we can't even reason about them properly, no, not even the people who ostensibly study them academically.