Welcome to Play Fool, a newsletter about the games we play and the games which play us. It is good to be writing again. This piece is about the allure of private spaces in which we enjoy the company of strangers. It is an invitation to a small act of refusal, and to reconsider the conditions under which we are able to enjoy the company of others. If you enjoy it, please consider sharing and subscribing.
When I first started working from home, I found it difficult to stay focused, and so I would punctuate my week with periodic working sessions a local coffee shop. The gentle ambience and the faint, unobtrusive presence of others helped to create an environment conducive to self-structured work. Every Tuesday and Thursday I would trot down with my laptop, pens, highlighters and an unlined notebook. As a workspace, it was worse than home: The chairs were uncomfortable, I didn’t have a second monitor, and I can make reasonably good coffee at home. What the coffee shop had that home didn’t was a good vibe.
I am interested in those words that seem to do a lot of work in our culture. Vibe is one of them. Unlike the energy or spirit of a thing, vibe is a little less harsh on the secular ear. The woo of vibe is tolerable. Vibe derives etymologically from vibration, and every committed materialist knows that sound is vibration and that quantum particles vibrate in and out of existence like flickering lightglobes. So good, sensible people with big brains and interesting job titles comfortably talk about people and places as having vibes.
Vibe tends to be used to describe an ineffable, yet intuitively apprehended quality possessed by a certain kind of private, convivial space. I am thinking principally of the cafe or restaurant, but also the group fitness class, the nightclub, and the farmer’s market. We experience the vibe as a harmonious arrangement of elements that are surplus to the product itself, and that vibe generates some value above and beyond the product. The vibe is the tattoo on the baristas arm, the painted black bricks and the cute desiderata on a side shelf (forever available for sale, never bought). The naive view is that we go to a restaurant for delicious food, a gym class to learn how to exercise, and a club to listen to music and dance. This is, of course, partially true, but I suspect we undervalue the vibe. I’m reminded, as an example, of Joshua Bell, the concert violinist who masqueraded as a busker in a Washington subway1. Of thousands of passersby, only six stopped to listen to his Bach concerto. Without the vibe of the concert hall, the music was perceived as worthless. There is also the well researched observation that people generally cannot distinguish good wine from bad wine, or even white from red2. A final example might be the trend of pop-up restaurants with focused launch campaigns, which effectively aim to create a vibe of urgency and exclusivity. They ride the vibe for a few months, either winding down when the vibe does or leveraging it into permanency if the vibe hits the market right3. All of this is to suggest that I didn’t work in the cafe that, strictly speaking, had the best coffee. Indeed, I’m not even sure I am capable of discerning good coffee from okay coffee. I didn’t go to the coffee shop for coffee: I went for the good vibes.
As a counterexample, when I lived in Tanzania, there was an Ethiopian restaurant which produced incredible food yet, outside tourist season, was always empty. The tinny music and cool porcelain tiles made always me feel as though I was dining in a hotel lobby, and so I ate with a sense that I was always moments away from being asked to leave. On quiet nights, the waitstaff were either bored or cloying, never in between. Their attentive gaze made me hyperaware of my own privilege, which had the impact of spoiling my curry, my injera and my South African wine. Bad vibes.
Picking apart the vibe into its constituent components (sounds, smells, service, and so on) would miss the point. The vibe is an animal: dissecting it kills it. However, we can listen closely to the heartbeat of the vibe, which I believe is a kind of intuitive, yet removed sociality. In plain English, the vibe derives from the company of certain kinds of strangers. The places I have described — the restaurant, the gym class, the club — are principally places where we are distantly present with the broader public. These spaces are sometimes called ‘third spaces,’ neither work nor home, and they derive their value in part because they are places in which we can enjoy the easy company of strangers. The principal thing that creates good vibes in the cafe is the gentle din of a randomised sample of folks from the neighbourhood. The bad vibes in the Ethiopian restaurant primarily came from its chilly, echoic emptiness and the searching, oppressive attention of the staff.
If we take the premise that the heartbeat of the vibe is a removed sociality, then this implies that our presence in these spaces is a kind of labour. When I put on my tortoiseshell glasses and crack open my colour-coded notebook, I am not just revelling in the vibe, I am contributing to it. Technology theorist Douglas Rushkoff coined the term: “If the product is free, you are the product,” to describe how supposedly free social media networks like Tiktok and Facebook leverage our inherent desire to create and share content to sustain their business model. Facebook provides the platform, users provide the content, and the attention users give is then sold to advertisers. Rushkoff argued this business model was a new, novel development afforded by digital technology. However, the original platform for free, social labour is the private, convivial space with a good vibe. In a cafe, I am the customer and the product. The vibe is free on the condition that I provide it.
The group fitness class provides a different, yet analogous social experience. In the small group fitness class, accolades, positive feedback, and aspiration are largely provided freely by other gym-goers. I develop a sense of motivation from watching more experienced people perform and I use other people’s workouts to gauge my progress. Camaraderie on one hand, and shame on the other, motivate me to attend the class at least as much, if not more than, my desire for a healthy body. On occasion, I have attended group fitness classes full of intermediate-level athletes completing structured, familiar routines. In these classes, the coach was essentially a casual supervisor, and no more useful than an unplugged security camera.
My argument here is that the vibe is a kind of surplus value on which virtually every convivial business depends. These spaces exist to extract, privatise and sell back to us a certain kind of social experience. The product (food, fitness, or dancing) is usually something that we could, in principle, pretty well provide for ourselves. Private, convivial spaces then operate based on an implicit social contract that require us to act in ways that sustain the vibe. In the spirit of keeping this newsletter on theme, I might remind the reader that an ‘implicit social contract’ is a kind of game we play that we do not necessarily know we are playing. We can note a few things about this implicit social contract, or this game that we all play.
Firstly, these spaces naturally tend to appeal to certain kinds of people who manufacture certain kinds of vibes. As a left-leaning, well presented professional I am well suited to the local organic foods cafe (as, almost certainly, you the reader are as well), but less fitted to Compton Burgers — their logo is a giant hat — down the road. In the case of a nightclub, the vibe is literally policed by door staff, but for the most part, the vibe is a self-reinforcing phenomenon. I am attracted to vibes that resonate with me, and that resonance strengthens the vibe of the place.
Secondly, following from the first, these spaces are always exclusionary. As modernity withers and dies around us, we increasingly seek refuge from the uncomfortable experience of other people in ways that we don’t experience as exclusionary. My neighbourhood has a fair amount of iterant homeless people, and the quiet of a cafe is an opportunity to momentarily forget that homelessness exists. Anyone who has worked in a cafe will know the subtle design decisions and labour required to ensure the riffraff are kept at an appreciable distance. Alfresco dining encourages them to retreat to the other side of the road. The recycling bins are brought in early to discourage people from rummaging through them for refundable aluminium cans. As a result, the good vibe is almost always attributed to privately owned spaces. It is harder to create exclusionary practices in public spaces.
The third point is key. In private, convivial spaces with good vibes, we can only ever enjoy strangers as strangers. The vibe requires a kind of permanent, arms-length distance in which we can know people only in an impressionistic, intuitive fashion, half-blurred, like trying to make out a conversation in a phone booth. The sum total of a half dozen particular conversations in a cafe is pleasant chatter about nothing in particular. The sum total of a dozen bodies fumbling towards a well executed squat is a coherent drive towards holistic wellness. The stinky, sweaty mass of a nightclub is a thrumming, energetic potentiality.
In each of these cases, strangers must remain as strangers so that they can conform to an imagined vibe. Once at my local cafe I was reading a thick, dense document held together with a bulldog clip. One woman dared violate the sanctity of stranger distance to grab my attention. She asked, somewhat excitedly, if I was writing a book. As I suggested, this is a fair assumption for a a thirty-something in tortoiseshell glasses sitting in a local organic cafe. To her disappointment, however, I told her I was in fact just reading a very long and dry government report for a client4. Terribly boring indeed, and a poor fit for the vibe of the place.
If we deign to tune in to the din of the cafe, and allow the conversations to resolve into their particulars, we find it a discordant mess: the cafe is a junkyard orchestra of petty ambitions, minor plans, and unsolicited opinions. The boutique gym often contains considerably less actual exertion than a cheap gym: A point made by countless athletes is that getting fit is simple, if not easy, and good health is free for almost anyone who wants it5. There can, of course, be a beauty in this too-human disharmony, but it is not a vibe. A vibe requires us to project our beliefs on to arms-length strangers. It is largely imaginary. To the strange woman who approached me at my local cafe, I was imagined as an interesting author rather than a boring consultant. Close, fertile attention to strangers returns them to us as people, but at the expense of the collective vibe which can only come from an anonymous mass and a narrow imagination.
We shouldn’t give up private, convivial spaces as a puritan act. Instead, we should simply see them, first, for what they are. The private, convivial space — the cafe, the restaurant, the gym, the club — exists because we choose to uphold a social contract in which we imagine each other as a certain kind of stranger. At times, this social contract may be useful to us, and it may be a helpful game to play. Consider, for example, how women, non-binary people and people with disabilities may feel safer and more included at a boutique gym than at a commercial gym6. A cafe is a good place for a first date, because we recognise that a certain kind of implicit social contract is helpful when we are still getting to know someone.
However, we can also make other choices. Notice that we are less inclined to describe a friend’s home as having a nice vibe because we know our friends too well. In the case of a house party, a positive vibe eventually collapses down into these particular people in this particular place. A cafe is full of strangers, but a dinner party has Amar, Lionel, Prakesh and Evaline. If the vibe is the harmony of a synthetic autotune, and the resolved din of strangers is a junkyard orchestra, then a gathering of actual friends is a well rehearsed jazz ensemble. Actual friends, family, and lovers don’t need to share a vibe, because we have learned to enjoy each other in our rich fulsomeness. The significance of the physical space recedes amongst friends, and we find that we can enjoy each other’s company in messy homes and damp parks, drinking coffee from the french press and cheap wine from the bottle. To have real friends is to rely less on imagined vibes. It is a small yet significant refusal of the privatisation of everything, and a broadening of the conditions under which we can enjoy the company of others.
I thought this story was apocryphal, but it actually happened.
I am writing a book, but I wasn’t at that moment.
This is not to take anything away from people with physical disabilities or rehabilitative requirements, let alone those with particular goals and ambitions suited to a specialised gym. It’s just my observation, as one of those people, that this only accounts for a minority of boutique gym-goers.
Commercial gyms are, of course, also a kind of private convivial space, so this is better considered a continuum rather than a binary.