I remember when malls were the social hangout, your physically-instantiated social networking technology.
I’ve noticed many malls now ban people under 18 during most business hours.
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Old fuckers, if you can’t handle a few kids standing around and shooting the breeze, go the fuck home. And stay there. And die already.
But it was our mistake in allowing corporations to control our social spaces — both in the physical world and on the internet. There is no blame to be cast but in our direction. The rebuke belongs solely to us.
Though I believe that mall owners believe that they’ve “done the analysis” and demonstrated that malls that ban all young people are more profitable, this probably isn’t true. Like most things in life, power and control and fear and prejudices matter more than profit and thus the analysis will be massaged until what a bunch of scared old people wish to believe is found to be “true.”