How Platforms and Cities Unmade a Way of Thinking
Ever since I left humanities academia years ago, I’ve struggled to find spaces where certain kinds of intellectual conversations can happen, and I miss them deeply. Being around Library Science students, people in tech, or artists and musicians isn’t a substitute – it’s adjacent, but not the same. This isn’t meant to sound snooty or dismissive of the communities I’ve been part of for years, but there’s a specific kind of discourse I feel increasingly estranged from. Book clubs come close, yet they rarely replicate it: everyone arrives with different academic trajectories, different reading histories, different inherited canons. The shared scaffolding that once made certain conversations possible just isn’t there.
What I miss isn’t simply “smart talk,” but continuity: long arcs of thought that assume depth, context, and a willingness to sit with complexity. When I follow academic blogs or accounts on Bluesky, I sometimes catch glimpses of those lost worlds. But they arrive as fragments: compressed, pithy, and often submerged beneath the urgency of current politics—which, while crucial, also exhaustively flattens everything else.
While going through old files in preparation for our move, I’ve been finding printed correspondences with professors, colleagues, and others in my field from years ago. Reading them now, I’m struck by how many of those relationships were never continued. I pivoted from Japanese studies into Information Science, and then into tech, and my local circles became even further removed from that earlier intellectual life. I boxed that part of myself up, almost without noticing. Revisiting it now feels bittersweet – not because the work was unfinished (I completed my degree, published in journals, published my thesis), but because the conversations were. When I left that domain, I fell out of the loop. I still received emails from our niche listserv, but I was no longer actively participating.
Substack promises a return to slower, more sustained thinking, but its design quietly undermines that possibility. Without robust ways to organize, label, or browse subscriptions by theme, the experience collapses into noise. Attention that wants to settle into deep focus is constantly disrupted by unrelated content. I used to rely on Feedly for precisely this reason: Asian Studies in one place, Digital Humanities in another, Information Architecture in another. Those separations weren’t arbitrary—they were cognitive. They allowed immersion. On Substack, dozens of updates arrive daily in a single undifferentiated stream, making it impossible to read with care. The result isn’t abundance; it’s overwhelm.
Algorithmic platforms like YouTube or Instagram at least acknowledge how attention works, even if they exploit it. They detect patterns and narrow the field. Substack offers neither meaningful curation nor intelligent filtering – only a flattened feed that treats all content as equally urgent. Faced with that, I find myself reading less, not more.
What this mirrors, uncomfortably, is the disappearance of the physical and social conditions that once made intellectual wandering possible at all. Walter Benjamin’s flâneur – the figure who roams city streets absorbing culture, ideas, and chance encounters – depended on an urban fabric that allowed for slowness, permeability, and unscripted exchange. Cafés near UC Berkeley once functioned this way: you overheard conversations about theory, politics, or art; sometimes you joined in; sometimes a single remark sent you down rabbit holes. A conversation about quantum mechanics might lead to a comic touching on chaos theory and mythology, then to a used book on Jungian psychology at Moe’s Books, then to a European New Wave film at the U.C. Theatre. These experiences formed a chain – thinking unfolded across bodies, books, streets, and time.
That chain has been broken. Cafés became laptop farms, bookstores vanished, movie theaters became unaffordable or inaccessible. Online spaces, meanwhile, atomize experience into monetized fragments, interrupted by ads, paywalls, and notifications. Add the inflated cost of American cafés – spaces where lingering without purchase is discouraged and conversation with strangers feels socially and economically improbable – and the flâneur doesn’t merely feel anachronistic, they’ve been rendered structurally impossible.
What I’m grieving, ultimately, isn’t nostalgia or youth. It’s the loss of the environments – both digital and physical – that once made deep, meandering, non-instrumental thinking possible, and with them the quiet disappearance of the flâneur as a way of being in the world.
Notes:
If this piece resonated with you and you’d like to explore related work, here are a few places where I’m continuing these conversations:
- 💡 On Patreon, I share additional writing, behind-the-scenes notes, and works-in-progress that don’t always fit here. You can find it here.
- 📖 I also self-published my MA thesis on Butoh, which looks at performance, embodiment, and cultural history. If those threads interest you, it’s available here.
- 💸 And if a smaller, one-time gesture feels more your speed, you can leave a $3 tip via Ko-fi here. It’s always appreciated.