Last week, I drove home from the Cumberland Mall on Route 41, which is a pretty typical retail strip in the Atlanta Metro area—car dealerships, fast food restaurants, massage parlors, pawn shops, low-slung single story office parks, billboards, Target, Walmart, McDonald’s, Golden Corral, Red Lobster—an ugly bricolage of clashing architectural styles and garish signs and billboards strung together by sagging strands of telephone wires. The strip is iconic 20th century America, evoking scenes from American Graffiti, Highway 66, and Las Vegas; the drive-in theatre you remember as a kid; the ice cream shop, diner, and tattoo parlor that still live in your dreams.
It is also an aesthetic crime scene—haphazard, tacky, and overwhelming.
Like most Americans, I usually drive the strip without a thought to my surroundings—tuned out and numbed out—but on this day I was paying attention. A spark of recognition was stirring in me. Where else in my life do I experience this assault on my senses and aesthetic sensibilities? Where else am I subjected to advertising like this, fired at me like a machine gun.
On Facebook, of course.
Yes, Facebook feels like a drive on a retail strip in Anytown, America. Trashy. Random. Cluttered with advertising. Overwhelming. Aesthetically atrocious. Facebook is a pillar of the new online ecosystem that facilitates things that were once done along a strip—shopping, eating, socializing, dating, politics, etc. The feed has not entirely supplanted the strip, but for many people, the act of scrolling on a social media feed is at least a secondary or supplementary mode for activities that were once done mostly by automobile (shopping, for example). So to the extent that many people are now “living online,” it seems appropriate to make an aesthetic comparison between the feed and the strip.
***
In his 1998 novel A Man in Full, Tom Wolfe offers this description of Buford Highway, which is just a few miles from where I currently live in Metro Atlanta:
…six lanes of black hardtop bounded by blasted heaths of concrete and hard-baked dirt studded with low tilt-up concrete buildings and wires strung with fluttering Day-Glo pennants, signs that rose far above the buildings on aluminum stanchions, and every other device that might catch the eye of someone driving along a highway at 60 miles an hour beneath the broiling Georgia sun,
This is the American retail strip, which can be defined as an area around a road that has been terraformed for commerce. It is the basic architecture of consumer capitalism for an automobile-centric society and a locus for the 20th century attention economy in America. Most Americans have lived their entire lives navigating these spaces in automobiles. They are as natural to us as a mountainscape, ocean vista, or city skyline.
For sure, a typical Facebook feed is different from a drive down the local retail strip. It’s an app, accessible on a phone—a virtual space not a physical one—and the content is dynamic rather than static, tailored to the individual user through an algorithm. Also, Facebook is ostensibly a medium for connecting with people and sharing information (though after the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Congressional hearings, and the devastating Netflix documentary, The Social Dilemma, we all know it is much more than this). But the experience of scrolling my feed is eerily similar to my drive down Route 41. As much as a third of the content on my feed is advertising and perhaps one in five posts comes from third-party sites that Facebook believes I will enjoy. This means that more than half of what I see in my feed is punching out at me from entities that are not my friends, much like the signage and billboards I see rolling by on the strip. On my feed, as on the strip, I am the passive recipient of highly charged commercial propaganda as I pass through a zone that is maximized to capture my attention.
The template for delivering advertising to a captive, receptive audience was already decades old by the time Facebook came online. Most Americans were already normalized to a consumer capitalist iconosphere in which the built environment is wrapped in a layer of advertising and propaganda (Wolfe might have been describing any number of retail zones in suburbia that were already 30 to 40 years old by the time he published A Man in Full). In urban and suburban areas, we often move through a mostly privately owned landscape that is littered with advertising and peppered with buildings and infrastructure that we had no hand in creating or even approving for construction. The highway overpasses and office buildings may as well be monuments from a long-dead civilization for what little knowledge we possess of how they came into being.
Billboards too appear on the landscape like megaliths. We are vaguely aware that monied interests are responsible for both the messages and the underlying infrastructure of billboards, but most of us do not assume that we can control this prominent feature of the civilizational landscape. In this way, we are passive recipients of advertising in both physical and online spaces. You drive or scroll, you see the ads and messaging, you do what you can to block them by looking away or scrolling through or deploying ad blockers or moving to advertising-free zones, but ultimately, the messaging that most of us see daily is profoundly undemocraticl, and most of us have acclimated to this reality.
For all the seeming disorder of a retail strip, they do follow a publicly visible plan. Learning from Las Vegas, a 1972 book that analyzed the mother of all retail strips, explains that “The image of the commercial strip is chaos” but then reveals the order behind the disorder: The buildings and signage of the Vegas strip may look overwhelming in photographs taken from a static vantage point, but all of its road features—stoplights, turnarounds, signage, entrances to parking lots, etc.—are perfectly regularized, consistent, and sensible to anyone cruising in an automobile. The physical infrastructure of the road is public, maintained by the city, while the signage and buildings are private.
Strips across the country are also more or less governed by the public interest in this way. The maps are usually public records, and citizens can attend zoning board meetings to follow the progress of new construction projects or even potentially organize to block or influence them. The size, styles, and location of signage, for example, are controlled by this process. So too are the size of lots, location of parking, and even the style of architecture.
The core infrastructure of Facebook, however, is private and an order of magnitude less transparent than the design of the average retail strip. You can spend all day scrolling your feed, surveying an endless, ever-changing array of messages and content tailored specifically to you—the strip on steroids—but you can never learn anything about the road itself or how most of the content you see on it was placed there. The algorithm controls this, and the algorithm is proprietary.
Facebook promises a personally tailored experience of the internet with a lot of choice built in, but as anyone who has navigated the maze of security settings and options will attest, there is no magic button for immunizing yourself against the most strip-like aspects of the user experience. Facebook wants you to keep scrolling, keep driving down that digital strip as long as possible, looking at stuff and consuming content while the app spies on you, records your location at regular intervals, and strip mines your data.
***
On the drive back from the mall, I turned left onto Cobb Parkway at an intersection that is overlooked by a Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant in the shape of a fifty-six-foot-tall red chicken, complete with lolling black eyes and a beak that opens and closes at regular intervals. The authors of Learning from Las Vegas would classify this as a “duck,” a building that is literally shaped like the service or product it provides (they derived the name from the humorous example of a duck-shaped store in Flanders, New York in the 1930s that sold ducks and eggs). We locals call it the “Big Chicken,” and while I sometimes mock this giant mechanical bird, at least it does not spy on me with those creepy black eyes when I drive past it. I cannot say the same about the phone in my pocket, with its Facebook app that regularly conducts NSA-level surveillance on me.
The Big Chicken always makes me smile. I’ve been to Vegas. I get it. A drive down the Vegas strip is supposed to be overwhelming—too much to process, too much period. This is the fun of it, one casino outdoing the next in sheer visual spectacle. This is the real America, when you strip away the pretense, idealism, and endless self-congratulation. America is the drive south from Atlanta to Florida on Route 75 South, which features seamless transitions between towering billboards advertising Buc-ee’s rest stop restaurant, warnings to the unsaved that they are going to hell, and the Adult Central Superstore. Social media is built on this foundation, not nonsensical platitudes about bringing the world together or building the new town square. Keep them driving down the strip. Keep the spectacle and titillation coming at a steady clip.
Facebook pumps the accelerator on the worst aspects of the strip while adding new, more dystopian features to it. The app bulldozes what were once healthy partitions separating public and private, neighborhood and shopping district, home life and street outside, politics and polite company, and it does so with little regard for any precedents or traditions that preceded it. It’s all there whether you want it or not, strung together in an endless feed—ads for movies and gaming companies and diabetes medication and Target and Honey Baked Ham; AI-generated videos from third-party sites you've never heard of depicting a whale-sized megalodon shark being hauled up in a trawler net and a monorail falling off its track; musings from your high school friends about a new restaurant in Phoenix or the outcome of the recent election; a post from your uncle about his prostate cancer treatments; a reel of a Bjork performance from the 1980s and a suspiciously too-good-to-be-true announcement for a new Massive Attack album in 2025; the quote from George Orwell that your college roommate posted to your feed; the photo of your nephew’s new baby. Forty years ago, you could leave the strip and its jarring juxtapositions behind as soon as you turned into your neighborhood. Now you carry the strip in your pocket everywhere, where it buzzes and vibrates at you all day, demanding your attention. The culture as we experience it on a smartphone has no separations anymore. It’s everything everywhere all at once.
Facebook has turned your entire life into a strip. The commercial mixes in with the personal and the ideological. Family history and off-hand observations from people you haven’t seen in decades mingle with the ads and the filler content that Facebook uses to keep your eyeballs on the phone. It’s mass culture as bricolage brought to you by a company that has mastered the art of collapsing the boundaries between public and private.
For many years, I simply accepted Facebook for what it was, believing in the beginning that it was, in fact, novel and potentially liberatory. Seventeen years later, we all know so much more about this free service and the company that created it. The thrill is gone for so many of us, and yet we find ourselves unable to quit the app, because it has somehow insinuated itself into the social fabric, becoming a kind of social infrastructure for everything from shopping online and sharing baby pictures to participating in politics and expressing condolences.
A mile from my house, I was stopped at a railroad crossing at the Marietta town square as a CSX freight train rumbled slowly by. Almost home, but not quite. I always cringe when I hear people refer to Facebook or Twitter or any combination of social media apps as the “town square,” but this nonsense is especially galling when it comes from billionaire tech entrepreneurs, who certainly know better, or should. Town squares are almost by definition always public spaces. Unlike Facebook, which has three billion users, the town square is built to human scale, and the institutions that surround it—town hall, the zoning board, school board, police, local firehouse, etc.—are governed by rules and laws and norms that are designed to serve a community at a local level, to be accountable to citizens. Facebook gives you the retail strip on steroids, not the town square.
I do not mind being stopped at a railroad crossing. In these moments, I find myself mesmerized by the graffiti on the side of train cars, because while most of it is as incomprehensible to me as the symbols of a long-dead language, I am comforted by the fact that people have broken the law to leave their mark on this vast landscape of depersonalized corporate- and government-owned infrastructure. I am happy to know that humans still feel free to humanize their environment. I leave my phone in my pocket and watch the decorated freight cars slide by.
Comments