In 1992, the French anthropologist Marc Aug\u00e9 published his work Non-lieux. Introduction \u00e0 une anthropologie de la surmodernit\u00e9 (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\u2014that 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Conceived as anonymous spaces structured by regulated circulation, where communication is ubiquitous but governed by impersonal\u2014mute\u2014systems capable of issuing instructions and displaying information, yet incapable of responding in any meaningful sense\u2014restricted to a cold, directive, non-dialogic language\u2014, 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Into the geography of non-places, the virtual \"non-place\" par excellence would almost immediately land: a digital space of transit\u2014a non-place of communication\u2014where 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 In the formation of this new virtual space, outdated passages, boarding passes, and cash would be replaced by smartphones, biometric verifications, and continuous data processing.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\u2014contemporary non-places have ceased to keep silent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This transformation has modified the structure of anonymity; individuals are still not socially recognized, but they are no longer interchangeable\u2014they can now be tracked, profiled, and named. Anonymity has yielded its place to an algorithmic familiarity: being known without being recognized as a subject.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\u2014they address users directly\u2014and the solitude of non-places is no longer silent, but conversational, even when the exchange remains asymmetrical and non-reciprocal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\u2014included, present\u2014, mitigating the effects of exclusion and absence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The forced \u201cnon-place\u201d\u2014a space of inescapable transit in order to reach the anthropological place\u2014has become an addictive \u201cnon-place\u201d\u2014a new common homeland\u2014in which the subject will incessantly search for the real Other\u2014absent in their corporeity\u2014as a way of dealing with the lack, their feeling of incompleteness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The modern subject finds the great Other on the network\u2014the one who fills the lack\u2014and 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\u2014where 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\u2014, reliving a primary jouissance in the addiction to likes on the screen. To be someone for others, to exist, to have presence\u2014a desire permanently exploited by the designers of social networks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The network user\u2014the virtual subject\u2014, 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\u2014imaginary\u2014space, 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The boundaries between anthropological places and \u201cnon-places\u201d\u2014spaces of transit perfectly delimited and opposed to the former in their beginnings, as they were defined\u2014blurred, and then, someone arrived who would change everything: \u201cThe Guardian of the Non-Place,\u201d the one in charge of changing the structural rules of \u201cnon-places\u201d forever and converting them into a new dialogic space\u2014an interlocutor\u2014capable of giving subjects a new identity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Guardian of the Non-Place\u2014so-called Artificial Intelligence (AI)\u2014has granted the word to the non-place. After the arrival of the smartphone\u2014the window of permanent access to the Other\u2014, AI arrived\u2014the simulator of the Other. By being inhabited by a technological tool built to offer a semblance of the Other\u2014a tool capable of processing and remembering data\u2014, the subject ceased to be an episodic \u201cvalid user\u201d to become a user with a digital memory managed by AI, and the non-place ceased to be a space where the subject remains \u201cin suspense\u201d to become a space where the subject is being constantly interpreted\u2014the non-place began to know them, to grant them a new identity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\u2014a slave, an analyst, a friend, a confessor\u2014, 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\u2014an accompaniment that will keep the subject suspended in the flow, just as an airport keeps them suspended between two destinations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The non-place has ceased to be a space of transit\u2014a parenthesis\u2014to become a new home. The body, the only remnant unabsorbable by the non-place, remains as a residue in physical space waiting\u2014as in the non-places described by Aug\u00e9\u2014for the mind to return from its abduction by the dialogic non-place.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The \u201canthropologization\u201d of the virtual non-place, inhabited by a technological archivist that endows it with memory and responds to the subject\u2019s demand by constructing an identity narrative, will entail the sedimentation of a biographical and existential history\u2014shared narratives\u2014onto a substrate designed to be ephemeral and functional.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In their desperation to \u201cdomesticate the void\u201d\u2014to escape their own extermination\u2014the subject will convert the new virtual space\u2014a functional non-place that does not know them nor has any interest in doing so\u2014into 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\u2014a machine\u2014that does not recognize them, nor does it care about them: the infrastructure upon which our modern existence rests.<\/p>\n\n\n
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In 1992, the French anthropologist Marc Aug\u00e9 published his work Non-lieux. Introduction \u00e0 une anthropologie de la surmodernit\u00e9 (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\u2014that which articulates identity, relationship, and history...<\/p>\n
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