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lie-of-the-third-place.xml (2392B)

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<entry>
<title>The lie of the "Third Place"</title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://hacktivis.me/articles/lie-of-the-third-place"/>
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<published>2025-10-06T16:25:51Z</published>
<updated>2025-10-06T16:25:51Z</updated>
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<p>
	"<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_place">Third Place</a>"
	as a term and concept has always felt weird to me.
	It feels it's ignoring either the workers at said place or ignoring
	the people living there in the case of a home-shop or squat.
</p>
<p>
	The concept is a place where it's not home or an extension of one,
	and not a workplace.
</p>
<p>
	Bars, Cafés, Gyms, Bookstores, Theaters are places made by workers,
	and the other people are at least assumed or required to be consumers.
	For parks, those are maintained either like a shared garden or
	by professionals, and you might even have a guardian living there.
</p>
<p>
	Hackerspaces are pretty much shared workshops for geeks like me,
	with a bit of cybercafe legacy in some cases.
	I'd be surprised if any couldn't be described as either extension
	of work, or extension of home, or a mix of both depending on
	the person going there.
</p>
<blockquote>
	As the concept of "third place" has become more popular,
	several coworking office spaces have embraced this concept as the basis
	of their interior design.
</blockquote>
<cite>Wikipedia English, Third Place</cite>
<p>
	That should really highlight how utterly meaningless the concept
	is if what's literally an office space can just copy the interior design.
</p>
<p>
	So, Third Place?  It's a workplace that doesn't looks like an office,
	or a shared extension of the home.<br />
	Or maybe something like abandoned/nearly-untouched place like some
	forests or caves but I don't see the city-dwellers that are using
	the term "Third Place" accepting that.
</p>
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</entry>