Shopping Mall Syndrome

I grew up without knowing my neighbors. I may as well have not had any. Even though we existed together in close proximity in time and space, our actual lives were worlds apart. My friends from school, though, were an entirely different story. Our experiences of life were approximately similar because the same things were important and valuable to us. In middle school, I bartered with one of them for my first ever music compact disc, the Chili Peppers’ album, Blood Sugar Sex Magick (in exchange for my second issue of Wolverine). Every album I got for years after that came from the mall (until I stopped buying CD’s altogether).

I am a child of the suburbs. I spent afternoons and weekends at a shopping mall named after a poet who couldn’t have had less to do with an inarticulate gray mass of chain stores: Walt Whitman. His birthplace stood nearby, in my typical Long Island town. As restless teens, we’d spend countless hours pacing the mall from end to end - one of the few public spaces we were allowed to congregate aside from schools and parks. We would peruse endlessly, purchase rarely, and never quite find what we were looking for.

It has only been years later that I have come to understand the importance of relating to people who are different from you (ie, who like different media and products) and the difficulty we have - thanks to things like malls - with forming healthy functioning communities.

Small Town Living Gone Sour

Once upon a time, not too long ago, people didn’t live like this. People could actually go outside and say hello to each other and look one another in the eye, and ask - by name - how family members were doing. These are skills I have seen vanishing in my travels around the United States, and I suspect I’m not alone in noticing them. Some small towns retain these simple values of human communities, but too many people grow up in anonymous suburbs now, spending their formative years interacting with peers through the socio-economic lens of the local shopping mall.

So what’s wrong with shopping malls? Nothing! They’re a great place to buy stuff. But they tell stories culturally which are rarely articulated. Literally every town I have lived in - and I have talked to friends from other places like this - has a similar myth about how they were the first town in America to have such-and-such type of shopping mall. From the ubiquity of this phenomenon, I would wager that this tactic was frequently used as a cultural-historic selling point to convince local shopkeepers to give up shops all over town (on land owned by the family), and centralize into one super-shopping location to grease the wheels of mass consumerism. Over time, most of these shopping malls - that I have seen - have gone over to national or international brands, edging out mom and pop operations who can’t compete with massive advertising budgets and branded media recognition.

This doesn’t just happen with shopping malls either. It happens everywhere around small towns: big businesses come in and dry up business for everybody else by selling at lower costs, because they can buy in such enormous bulk. How many of you still have a neighborhood hardware store which isn’t co-branded with either Ace or with True-Value? How many of you still even have a local neighborhood hardware store? Home Depot & Lowe’s shut down most of them. The same thing happens routinely with banks - the bastions of local value and hubs of community exchange: they are taken over by huge corporations who aren’t from there, and who take the money from local communities and does God-only-knows what with it.

Mutual Support Systems

Back when people lived off the land - hunting game and growing crops or gardening - communities were better defined as people who helped one another survive. Consider the historical myth/story of the Pilgrims and their first Thanksgiving with the Native American peoples who they lived in close proximity with. Each community shared knowledge and traded skills, food and goods with the other. And as a result, both communities survived. Other colonies, like Roanoke, integrated with their neighbors less successfully, and simply vanished as a result.

Speaking of Thanksgiving, I was just in Massachusetts for this last one, and spent some time with a friend’s family. His father told me about a trip he’d taken recently to Nova Scotia to price land there (very cheap!) and all the activities in which they took part. He used the phrase “mutual support” to describe life up there in the bitter cold of winter, and said something like, “You can’t survive up there unless you help each other out.”

Which is true, anywhere, of course. But it’s easier to forget about when surrounded by shopping malls, Best Buys, Targets, and grocery stores to take care of our needs. Because - for many of us - our basic survival needs are taken care of. We have jobs where we do work for other people to pay for rent on a house or apartment someone else owns. We drive cars financed (ie, owned) by international banks so we can get to work and to shopping malls to buy products from halfway around the world from people we’ve never met. It’s a bit more convoluted than the simple survival requirements of getting through the winter without freezing to death.

Terrorists, Perverts & Serial Killers

Let’s say, hypothetically, you did have to suddenly figure out how to survive a winter with no heat in your comfortable boring suburban lifestyle. What would you do? Who would you turn to for help? Let’s say there was a black-out in the dead of winter in your neighborhood with several feet of snow on the ground, and supplies at local shops were beginning to run thin. Not knowing your neighbors suddenly seems kind of idiotic, right? Especially since your neighbor has a huge supply of cut wood, and you have several bottles of the kind of whiskey he likes to keep him warm on long winter nights.

Sadly, the mediate seems to portray images which help to keep people who should naturally be forming healthy communities staunchly isolated from another. Sit down and look at a week’s worth of television programming, or even just a single night’s worth. Make a chart of how many television shows there are which depict real or fictional crimes. The criminals are often shown as “quiet, ordinary people” who are or were harboring some kind of dark secret: that they are a serial killer, or a child molester or some kind of kooky terrorist. The results of this type of objective media study, taken all together, conjure staggeringly dark visions of human behavior and consequently do much to tarnish subconscious emotional images most people hold unwittingly about the “dangers” of community, and - more directly - the dangers of other people who are different than us.

Say Hi To Your Neighbors And To People You See

Do we then, need to abolish television crime dramas & shopping malls, and all move back to small towns? While that may be a great idea if it suits you, that’s not the sort of extremist solution I’m searching for. What I’m searching for is much more simple: to get to know the people around me. But we don’t have to start with such a scary goal in mind though, because I know how many terrorists, perverts and awful awful people are probably living next door to me and you. We can start with something much easier, simpler and more direct: just saying hello and looking people in the eye. Acknowledging that other people exist is the first step to undoing limiting assumptions and non-useful habits when it comes to community.

If All Else Fails, Try Craigslist

The next step, for those brave souls who want to get to know people in their area is a little thing I like to call Craigslist. Instead of buying something you need at a nearby shopping mall, try posting a want ad for whatever it is on Craigslist. You can also scan through other listings of people like yourself who are selling things. I know it’s a hassle sometimes, compared to just jetting off to Target or Ikea. But hassle can be another word for adventure if you’re approaching life with the right attitude.

Benefits derived from purchasing something on Craigslist include:

- Interacting with real live human beings
- Learning to negotiate and communicate clearly and effectively
- Finding people who are interested in the same types of things as you
- Getting a good deal on a product
- Gaining expertise in tracking things down that people want or need
- Keeping money circulating within your community makes everyone more wealthy

Days Of Future Past

I know Craigslist is super-futuristic-seeming, because it is all on the internet and stuff, but I like it because it is a technological extension of a very ordinary and classic way people have always operated: as a community. One person needs x and somebody else has it, so they find a way to trade value with one another where both derive some benefit. It is a win-win situation.

In classic American small towns, and other exotic locales in times and spaces distant from us today, trade amongst the community was first and foremost conducted amongst people who were mutually supporting each other to survive and to thrive. If your friend needed help patching a roof, you’d do it because he was your friend, but also because you knew this meant he would help you mend a fence the next season. Amish and other groups who come together for things like community barn-buildings carry on these sorts of traditions.

Additionally, at Harvest Time, you would invariably have extra crops which would go bad if not sold or otherwise used. So you would give your extras to your friends and neighbors, and they would do the same. People would also use things like eggs as units of currency in many places (a practice which continues - but just barely - in the tradition of borrowing a cup of flour or sugar from an apartment neighbor). Livestock were commonly brought to market for trade (State Fairs, anybody?), along with crops, plants (farmer’s markets) and handicrafts (raw materials to which value has been added by man-power). And when people needed things immediate neighbors couldn’t provide, they would trade with shopkeepers for credit at general stores. During the Great Depression, it’s said that store credit became more valuable as a unit of currency in some places than actual paper dollars, even.

How It’s Always Been

This method of “community money” or of actively trading value amongst members of your immediate community stretches back into the distant past. It’s not some new-fangled internet fad. Typically, people reserved use of commodities like gold or silver (or coinage and certificates backed by the same) for the few instances where they would engage in long-distance trade with people outside of their community.

Think about it like this: when you’re part of a healthy community, you pretty much constantly owe everybody else favors, and they owe you favors in exchange. You’ve helped each other out so many times over the years that it’s pointless to keep track of. But in order to effectively interact with people who are far away from you, and who haven’t been part of this active relationship of exchange, you need some kind of basis for doing business with them: some kind of motivation for them to want to trade time, effort and other kinds of stored value with you. And this is where modern money comes into the picture - well, that’s a simplified way of explaining it anyway.

Family Discounts

When I was a kid, and we would visit my dads brothers around the holidays, one of the highlights was stopping by my uncle Louis Boucher’s religious bookstore in Worcester, MA, where we would be allowed to pick out something we liked to take home with us. I usually found the closest thing I could to a toy; and the specialness of the event stuck with me. When I do web development work and consulting for members of my family or close friends, I charge them much less (or nothing at all) than what I would charge someone who I am not as close to. Often this is a double-edged sword, but the free exchange of value with nothing expected or asked for in return is one of the cornerstones of a healthy community. Sharing when you have extra isn’t just a morally nice thing to do, it also just happens to be the most pragmatic survival strategy.

Another example of how this works: when I came of age to “get my drink on”, I was living in Baltimore. I cut my teeth in Irish pubs, at the feet of some of the finest teachers of bar etiquette I’ve ever known. The Golden Rule of establishing a good relationship with a bartender was to always pay for what you get. First of all, you have to come in with a lot of people, and come in often if you’re expecting to get free drinks and other perks. Second, when you *are* given free drinks, I was taught that you always pay for them: the difference in price would go into the tip to the bartender. It becomes, therefore, a reciprocal exchange between you and the bartender: you benefit because you get “free” drinks - better treatment - and they benefit with extra cash. The house benefits - if the bar is well run, and the bartender uses their powers judiciously - because of the spike in business good old fashioned hospitality brings. People like nothing more, it turns out, than being well-treated. It’s not only the cornerstone of good business, but of good community as well.

Complementary, Local, Alternative, Cyber Currency Renaissance

Community money, from the perspective of human beings seeking to live as part of a community is a very worthwhile thing because it encourages meaningful interactions and exchanges of values between individual humans. This is the very bedrock of what makes a community work: mutual respect, and mutual support. As such, community money and associated concepts are making a tremendous comeback among people who are interested in creating and sustaining healthy communities with sound business and economic practices which support these essential characteristics of the human need for exchange and recognition. One of the things I’m also deeply interested in learning more about when it comes to this subject is how to apply these concepts not just to immediate physical/geographic communities, but amongst also groups of people who are spread out in many places yet who all value the same basic things: the simple joys of sharing life with one another. I’m excited to delve more deeply into these topics over the coming months, as I’ve been asked to help edit a “currency design manual” (alongside the likes of media theorist Douglas Rushkoff) so I’m sure I will have more thoughts and research to share in this area. [I’m also considering options for getting involved in local and online currency projects, and I’d like to develop maybe a mailing list for people with a sincere interest in these subjects - to be discussed more at a later date.]

I have gotten a lot personally out of exploring these subjects (including but not limited to meeting and talking with other great people who are excited by this stuff!), and highly recommend other people do the same. You may just find that it helps you re-prioritize how you spend your time and energy into avenues which end up being more important than money at the end of the day: real human relationships.

*

Hint: You can search my site for more articles and research on this subject. Try the keyword “currency“, and also “shared value community” for further explorations. {See also, on Wikipedia: local currency, alternative currency, complementary currency, local exchange trading systems, Ripple Monetary system, scrips, social or peer-to-peer lending, Hawala}