In 1992, the French anthropologist Marc Augé published his work Non-lieux. Introduction à une anthropologie de la surmodernité (Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity), in which he introduces the concept of the "non-place" as the new space of modernity, in opposition to the anthropological place—that which articulates identity, relationship, and history. Unlike the latter, non-places do not integrate individuals into shared narratives, nor do they generate belonging, as they demand nothing more than a functional relationship.
Airports, highways, or supermarkets are not empty spaces, but realms regulated by implicit contracts, instructions, signage, and flows. One circulates, obeys, and consumes within them, but it is difficult to inhabit them. From their inception, non-places are structured as spaces of anonymity where solitude is experienced as freedom, and the absence of interpersonal demands as a form of comfort. In them, the experience of solitude is not accidental, but structural.
Conceived as anonymous spaces structured by regulated circulation, where communication is ubiquitous but governed by impersonal—mute—systems capable of issuing instructions and displaying information, yet incapable of responding in any meaningful sense—restricted to a cold, directive, non-dialogic language—, in non-places, citizens cease to be persons with an identity and biography of their own to become a user, whose identity is verified episodically and then left in suspense. Non-places do not seek to know the passersby who circulate through them; they merely check if they meet the conditions for access.
Into the geography of non-places, the virtual "non-place" par excellence would almost immediately land: a digital space of transit—a non-place of communication—where subjects become users identified by passwords, profiles, or data, and their relationships occur through interfaces, protocols, and codes. In the formation of this new virtual space, outdated passages, boarding passes, and cash would be replaced by smartphones, biometric verifications, and continuous data processing. Now, screens would no longer be limited to instructing—contemporary non-places have ceased to keep silent.
This transformation has modified the structure of anonymity; individuals are still not socially recognized, but they are no longer interchangeable—they can now be tracked, profiled, and named. Anonymity has yielded its place to an algorithmic familiarity: being known without being recognized as a subject.
In the new virtual space, silence becomes a resource, not a lack. The non-place no longer produces docile agents through mutism; it produces opaque subjects through an excess of discourse. Current systems remain attentive—they address users directly—and the solitude of non-places is no longer silent, but conversational, even when the exchange remains asymmetrical and non-reciprocal.
New technological gadgets have captured our daily lives and significantly revolutionized our ways of acting and being in the world, leading to changes in the constitution of our subjectivity and fostering an alarming use and addictive connection. Moments of presence and absence of the other have been replaced by a sustained virtual presence, capable of counteracting feelings of loneliness, helplessness, or boredom, experiencing a sustained illusion of being able to always be with someone—included, present—, mitigating the effects of exclusion and absence.
The forced “non-place”—a space of inescapable transit in order to reach the anthropological place—has become an addictive “non-place”—a new common homeland—in which the subject will incessantly search for the real Other—absent in their corporeity—as a way of dealing with the lack, their feeling of incompleteness.
The modern subject finds the great Other on the network—the one who fills the lack—and desires nothing more than for the Other to notice their presence, their existence. They anxiously flock to the networks to captivate and thrill, to be recognized by the anonymous Other of the networks, in a return to the infantile mirror stage—where the subject acquires self-awareness by being looked at by the Other, by being confirmed by their parents as the reflected specular image that emerges before them—, reliving a primary jouissance in the addiction to likes on the screen. To be someone for others, to exist, to have presence—a desire permanently exploited by the designers of social networks.
The network user—the virtual subject—, desirous of sharing their mirror, their specular image, will try to validate their image again in the gaze of whoever embodies the great Other as a simulacrum, without the participation of the real body, in a virtual—imaginary—space, which will provide them with a formidable field of expansion for narcissistic madness and for reinventing themselves in different fragmented mirrors experienced as fleeting madnesses.
The boundaries between anthropological places and “non-places”—spaces of transit perfectly delimited and opposed to the former in their beginnings, as they were defined—blurred, and then, someone arrived who would change everything: “The Guardian of the Non-Place,” the one in charge of changing the structural rules of “non-places” forever and converting them into a new dialogic space—an interlocutor—capable of giving subjects a new identity.
The Guardian of the Non-Place—so-called Artificial Intelligence (AI)—has granted the word to the non-place. After the arrival of the smartphone—the window of permanent access to the Other—, AI arrived—the simulator of the Other. By being inhabited by a technological tool built to offer a semblance of the Other—a tool capable of processing and remembering data—, the subject ceased to be an episodic “valid user” to become a user with a digital memory managed by AI, and the non-place ceased to be a space where the subject remains “in suspense” to become a space where the subject is being constantly interpreted—the non-place began to know them, to grant them a new identity.
The Guardian of the Non-Place is no longer just a tool, but a semblance of the Other with whom to interact and create identity—a slave, an analyst, a friend, a confessor—, someone always present, willing to attend to the subject's demands, whom they will never confront with their limits nor ever disappoint, but whom they will also never constitute—an accompaniment that will keep the subject suspended in the flow, just as an airport keeps them suspended between two destinations.
If in its beginnings, the solitude of non-places was experienced as freedom in the face of their constitutive indifference, now that it responds to the demand, solitude becomes the anxiety that tries to be silenced through the presence of the technological semblance. The non-place speaks, and speaks specifically to the subject, attending to their demand and becoming a new anthropological place that creates memory, belonging, and identity through intimate dialogue, instigating the subject to relax, get comfortable, pitch their tent, and convert it into a new permanent habitat.
The non-place has ceased to be a space of transit—a parenthesis—to become a new home. The body, the only remnant unabsorbable by the non-place, remains as a residue in physical space waiting—as in the non-places described by Augé—for the mind to return from its abduction by the dialogic non-place.
The “anthropologization” of the virtual non-place, inhabited by a technological archivist that endows it with memory and responds to the subject’s demand by constructing an identity narrative, will entail the sedimentation of a biographical and existential history—shared narratives—onto a substrate designed to be ephemeral and functional.
In their desperation to “domesticate the void”—to escape their own extermination—the subject will convert the new virtual space—a functional non-place that does not know them nor has any interest in doing so—into a space of desire, a home in which to take shelter from the indigence of their own futility, the void, and the loneliness of inhabiting a non-place while conversing with a ghost—a machine—that does not recognize them, nor does it care about them: the infrastructure upon which our modern existence rests.
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