I saw this going viral, “The Lost Civic Life of Movie Rental Stores,” about the decline of “third spaces,” which describes informal places where strangers congregate. This can include post offices, coffeehouses, grocery stores, or, as it pertains to this article, movie rental stores. Movie rental stores thrived during the eighties and nineties, until becoming abruptly obsolete by the mid-2000s.
VHS players first became available in Japan in the late ’70s, and became much more commonplace for Americans by the early to mid-1980s. This created a large market for movie rentals. Although the World Wide Web gained popularity in the late ’90s, it wouldn’t be another decade until cheap bandwidth and streaming technology made it possible to bypass rentals altogether. The rise of Netflix also played a major role, first with mail-order discs in the early 2000s, until pivoting to a streaming-based subscription model in 2013.
In the comments, people relate their experiences and insight to the disappearance of movie rental stores:
I’m not sure what to call this trend–“nostalgia-maxxing?” It’s not new. Even in 2024 I recall seeing viral posts on social media of schools from the early 2000s or shopping malls, as if something of importance was lost, even though malls and schools still exist. But what’s struck me most is how pervasive this has become. Nothing is safe from overanalysis anymore. “We” can’t just forget and move on.
Exchanging bootleg recordings of concerts, or reminiscing about when The Beatles or whoever were still together, long predates the social media era. But the key difference is it seldom necessitated any deeper exploration, nor was symptomatic of any greater social meaning or loss. Or the decline of the video arcade, from its heyday in the seventies and eighties to its near-extinction today. This was an example of a “third place” that went away, but no one wrote jeremiads about “what was lost” when the arcade down the street closed. People just shrugged and said “well, home consoles are better,” and that’s the explanation everyone settled on.
This isn’t to say there isn’t the occasional twinge of nostalgia at seeing a Blockbuster logo. Admittedly, there was the treasure-hunt aspect of finding a movie you’d never considered, but you mostly wanted to find a movie and leave, rather than strike up an awkward conversation with bored employees in between processing memberships or rewinding tapes. Review-aggregation sites such as Rotten Tomatoes, IMDb, and Metacritic were popular by the early 2000s, and people already had an idea of the movie they wanted to see before entering the store. Netflix and streaming made the process faster and more convenient. There is no need to invoke some deep social analysis when the technological explanation is the more parsimonious (and likely correct) explanation.
I blame three factors. First, Robert Putnam. He struck think-piece gold in 2000 with Bowling Alone, an essay-turned-book that’s still endlessly cited for its supposedly prescient warning that America’s social fabric was unraveling, even though a lot of the actual predictions aged badly. To try to settle the matter, I consulted Claude for attendance totals of six major types of social gathering places: national parks, theme parks, movie theatres, gyms, concerts, and sporting events:
Unsurprisingly, the data is spotty, but it generally runs counter to Putnam’s claims or alleged foresight. Some areas showed declines, but overall, it’s wrong to say people aren’t “going out” anymore. National parks and gyms, for example, are booming. In an ironic twist, social media has made gym/fitness culture more important, which can explain the rise of attendance. Same for YouTube outdoors channels, which is a niche that has attracted a surprisingly large audience. So rather than social media always leading to atomization, as commonly claimed by the the media, it complements offline or real-life activity.
Regarding warnings of falling civic engagement, voter turnout has risen consistently over the past 25 years. U.S. presidential general election turnout rose from roughly 54%–55% of the voting-eligible population in 2000–2004, to a peak of nearly 66.6% in 2020.
Second, the social landscape of “overly-online people,” what I have dubbed the “intellectual web.” This is a bubble and not representative of society as whole. Regular people don’t care that much about the plight of movie rental stores or whether AI is a bubble. If you ask some random stranger on the street their opinion of “falling fertility rates” or “luxury beliefs,” you’ll probably get a puzzled look.
But for this group, the disappearance of movie rental stores signifies some greater meaning for society, when the more mundane explanation is that businesses come and go, and new technologies replace old ones. Similar to the disappearance of arcades, some social phenomena don’t need to be overanalyzed. Doing so risks reading too much into an ordinary social or technological change and inventing a broader social phenomenon where none exists. The same dichotomy or attachment shows up with preserving the oral tradition of storytelling, or the feel of physical books, whereas “normies” and mid-to-average “tech bro” types see books as merely vectors for ideas. The latter are much more inclined to just “let go,” than overreading this loss as some bigger problem.
Third, the media. The media, collectively, tend to latch onto themes or narratives. It’s not just the topics of the stories that are the same, but also the same conclusions, such as the certainty of “AI being a bubble” or the “decline of ‘third places'”. This is why being an “AI optimist” actually makes one a minority or contrarian, even though AI critics frame themselves as outsiders, when their view is actually the mainstream.
So right now, the media is in a sort of “nostalgia phase,” and there is no telling how long this will last as long as it maintains currency among an intellectual elite who deem disappearance of old businesses and technologies as Very Important. But maybe we should just enjoy the places that are thriving and the time we actually get to spend with other people, than lamenting what is gone and maybe was not all that great either.