The idea of retail ruins is, admittedly, unusual. Ruins typically imply some temporal distance that allows for contemplation. The new ruins, including retail ruins, are different in this regard. We may remain absorbed by retail as a mundane version of spectacle, but we are now seeing it fade in brightness and in function, in some places more than others. With consumption and retail, we are still living in the socio-cultural forms that are not so much dying or falling apart, as transforming into digital worlds, a process with great consequences for our cities and their built environments. Retail ruins force a confrontation with some nagging questions about authenticity, identity and selfhood that have dogged us ever since the commodity form invaded our lives. If ruins are typically spaces that contain spatial evidence of a previous way of life, then these voidlike retail spaces should be considered as ruins insofar as they once had a particular function that is no longer present, even if the material pieces are still in place, and even if other bits of that infrastructure remain functioning alongside them. Even as the spectacle invades life, sending a tremor through the authenticity of our desires, a real fusion nevertheless takes place amid these landscapes of retail and consumption. We might not agree with it, but we must acknowledge it, even in its partiality. That is to say, not everyone is impacted in the same way evenly across space. In fact, the manipulative powers of spectacle sometimes fade into the background while other social lives unfold (Gibson-Graham, 1996, 2006; Rose et al, 2010), adding further emotional texture to this contemporary scene of retail collapse.

The retail ruins are potentially so disruptive not because they provide some escape from the alleged bores of capitalist spectacle (Garrett, 2013), but because they force us to acknowledge how meaningful the spectacle can become in everyday life. Personally, I continue thinking about theories of spectacle because I feel like something has been tampered with inside, in desire itself, a tampering that has ramifications, namely, for the formation of subjectivities that link us with wider environments, both human and nonhuman, across large populations.