Your Third Place Is Someone Else's Workplace

Leftists do not dream of labor, but only for themselves.

Photo by Jaredd Craig on Unsplash

You’ve probably seen any number of posts on the social media platform of your choice bemoaning the fact that there is an increasing lack of “third spaces.” Some people will get specific about the type of third place they want—an all-hours cafe, a bookstore open late at night, alcohol-free dessert bars, and in a recent tweet that stuck in my craw for some reason, all-hours libraries that are dog-friendly and have blankets and hot chocolate.

I like hanging out as much as (maybe more than) the next person, but for some reason this genre of post was annoying me, and I couldn’t figure out why until recently. These third places were being presented not just as daydreams but as revolutionary fantasies, yet they are not revolutionary fantasies. They are fantasies of being served by other people.

The idea of a “third place” was first theorized by the sociologist Ray Oldenburg in the 1980s as a place that is not home (your first place) or work (your second place). The ideal third place would be a familiar public place where you could run into friends and friendly strangers, share a shared interest or activity, and have a low financial barrier to entry. Although the “low financial barrier to entry” was a key component to Oldenburg’s conception of a third place, many of the businesses he listed as examples were for-profit commercial enterprises of sorts, such as cafes and British pubs. He saw them as important for community cohesion and grassroots political development.

The idea of a third place saw resurgence over the past few years, for obvious reasons. COVID-19 lockdowns made people nostalgic about what we were missing—and proved economically fatal to many beloved third places. Even before then, the gentrification of cities in the United States and beyond was forcing many beloved community spots to close down, replaced with places that seem to still fit the bill, but often had a much higher financial barrier of entry.

After these events, the idea of the third place became even more popular among leftists and progressives, at least online. The theory has been developing for years beyond Oldenburg’s initial writing (and Oldenburg, by all accounts, was hardly a progressive himself) and pushing in progressive directions. Online theorists and posters found it a useful concept to explain the growing alienation people feel due to longer work weeks, the growing cost of living, and gentrification.

However, despite the third place becoming more prominent in the leftist imagination, the imagined third places people come up with are not leftist or progressive. Most of them—bookshops, cafes, and libraries—would rely on the additional labor of people who are already grossly underpaid and overworked¹.

There is nothing wrong with imagining businesses one would like to patronize. After moving to my current city, which I love but which does not have a lot of the “mess around” places that a place like New York City does, I definitely do a lot of my own. It’s also an interesting thought experiment to look at types of businesses that operate in other countries but which for some reason do not exist in the United States, even though there is a desire for them. People in my replies on Twitter mentioned manga/anime cafes in Japan, but I also think the US could stand a lot to learn from Balkan neighborhood spots, where the divide between cafe and bar is a lot less rigid than it is in the States and you can hang out with friends and order coffee at 10 P.M. (although they usually aren’t aesthetic and instead are ran by some dude named Stipe that will eventually warm up to your presence).

However, the problem for me comes when people frame these imaginations as leftist or revolutionary, as I’ve noticed a pattern of “anti-work” fantasies that get passed around leftist Twitter where the labor of other people is rendered invisible. A few summers ago, people were posting about how they were not meant to work but to eat fruit by the beach all day—and only San Juan-based food writer Alicia Kennedy pointed out that to grow and pick fruit requires a lot of labor, which is currently done by people who are underpaid, overworked, and often in precarious legal conditions.²

Obviously you can’t fit everything in a social media post (not if you want people to read it at all) so I don’t expect people to post “I want a bookstore open at night and of course all the workers will be well-compensated, unionized, and only work 5-hour shifts.”³ However, I do think it’s worth thinking about the kinds of worlds we are imagining, and if they are reliant on further invisibilizing and outsourcing labor that is already largely treated as invisible.

The second reason why I’m so insistent we recognize the labor inherent in these fantasies is that I’m actually interested in making some of those possible! I also like visiting bookstores and having coffee with my friends after work! However, if we ignore how much labor goes into opening and maintaining spaces like these, then we are never going to have them—and are probably going to be less appreciative of the spaces we do have if they don’t measure up to our fantasy, without realizing why there may not be dogs and hot chocolate fountains and books all in one place.

Finally, if we’re already imagining stuff leftistly, I want to encourage people to have a little more imagination⁴. Surely we can think of third places that are not amalgamations of existing businesses and the plot of 2347 cozy video games on Steam. Surely we can do better! If we are already imagining, then why does our imagination still revolve around consuming and still revolve around the labor of other people?

Capitalism has restrained our imaginations. It has forced us to only imagine that we can have fun if someone else is serving us and the place looks like something out of a Pinterest moodboard. I would just like us to imagine a little further.

I also think we all need to do better by the third places that already exist because if there is one thing I think we can all agree on, it’s that third places that don’t cost an arm and a leg to enjoy are slowly disappearing.⁵ My favorite third place in my town is AKC Fuzz, an underground DIY rock club that’s like “The Mods” from Buffy if they were in a grotty post-socialist industrial complex. The place has been open for only about 3 years, and since then underground rock in our town has exploded, alt kids have a place to go and people to hang out with, and so many people have started bands. They were the first business to open in an abandoned industrial complex that has seen a lot of new businesses since then. Of course, now the owner is kicking them out, and finding a new space is hard, because nobody wants to host an underground rock club held together by donations and a prayer.

That’s the thing, third places of all kind require work—both the work of the people running the place, serving drinks, and cleaning toilets, and the work of the community to attend get-togethers, organize their own events, and fight like hell for their favorite dive bar/club/library/bookshop when it is inevitably threatened.

1. While there are people who would like to work in these places if they were open all hours (as the many tweets accusing me of being discriminatory against people with sleep disorders and nocturnal types because I pointed out the labor involved in running a 24/hour library said) I’m mostly responding to a genre of post that, tellingly, usually lists wanting to go to a place like that but not actually work there. There are also serious health problems that come with working night shift which my friends and relatives working these jobs have experienced. And while many librarians, booksellers, and baristas find their work at the moment rewarding, there are also gross problems with their labor conditions that need to be acknowledged. At least if we’re imagining leftistly we do.

2. I can’t find the link to this post for some reason - sorry Alicia!

3. The constant hedging I do in essays really gives me away as a person that spent time on Twitter a lot.

4. Even though I was accused of not being a real leftist because leftists say “l’imagination au pouvoir” and I had an issue with people imagining other people’s invisibilized, extensive labor. Okay, last footnote of me being salty about Twitter responses.

5. Even though people (rightfully) point out that bars and clubs are usually the only third places open in the evening, at least in the US, the truth is that even these spaces are disappearing, especially those that cater to the community such as music venues, queer bars, and dive bars or community bars.