I drove to the cafe this morning to write—and my cafe was gone.

Paper covered the windows. The signage was gone. The outdoor seating area was bare.

I’ve been dropping in to write in this space for the better part of three years, so much so that I have—had—a favourite table and a couple of the staff recognized me. 

Not even a year ago I had sat in this quiet cafe on a cold winter morning and wrote about the diminishing of our physical third spaces and now it too was gone.

A book called The Great Good Place by Ray Oldenberg^[1] is commonly recognized as coining the term and the concept of the “third place” asserting that both community and civil discourse are often born and fostered in these informal locations—places that are neither our homes nor our workspaces. 

This is the second time in a month I’ve lost a physical third place, and it reminds me of that aforementioned article I wrote which was framed not on the idealism of third places but on the suggestion that our remaining third places are going digital and becoming filled to bursting with inhumanity.

Thus the crux of an idea that is being born and fostered in this absence and decay of third places: that the collapse of the public square into a digital commodity owned and managed by a small handful of corporate social media giants may be more troubling than many of us realize.

After all, when there are no more cafes to write in, no more community halls to enjoin conversation, or no more hangouts not owned and surveilled, where does that leave us?