Silicon Luxembourg journalist Jess Bauldry reflects on the importance of places where buying stuff is the last thing on your mind.
June and the tech conference season is in full swing but the news that captured my attention last week was decidedly non-techy. Luxembourg City inaugurated a new park. That’s right, a park. Its biggest yet. The Ban de Gasperich Park spans the equivalent of ten football pitches. Visitors can stroll 4 kilometres of paths, watch the sun dance on the dainty Drosbach stream or play sports in the various facilities provided. In a few years’ time they’ll be able to picnic in the shade of native trees and feed ducks on the pond. Sure, there will be concerts and events hosted here. But on the whole, this park is free to use, for everyone. At a time when true public spaces are disappearing, it restores my hope that not everything has to be monetised.
In 2022, the World Health Organisation raised the flag on our growing global mental health crisis, reminding us that depression and anxiety went up 25% in the first year of the pandemic. Researchers have produced extensive empirical literature showing that spending time in nature affects human health positively.
It is not only real-life public places that are under threat – virtual spaces are battling with striking the correct balance of monetisation vs providing a service.
It was heartening to see last week to see some of the largest communities on Reddit go dark in protest at the social news site’s decision to try to monetise access to its data. But, what happens when it is the public that uses the space to generate revenue? You get situations like Twitch, the Amazon-owned, live-streaming service, which last week backtracked on its decision to restrict the size of streamer adverts after a mass exodus of streamers.
The bottom line is that to remain healthy, happy humans we need spaces where our time and attention are not monetised or measured for productivity and efficiency. In her book ‘How to do Nothing’, author Jenny Odell talks about how as products of a capitalist society, we all “consider life as an economic venture, as a race where there are winners and losers.”
She writes: “In a situation where every waking moment has become the time in which we make our living and we submit our leisure for numerical evaluation via likes on Facebook and Instagram, constantly checking on its performance like one checks a stock, monitoring the ongoing development of our personal brand, time becomes an economic resource that we can no longer justify spending on nothing. It provides no return on investment. It is simply too expensive. This is a cruel confluence of time and space.”
Her book is a call to not accept a freemium version of leisure but to fully reclaim one’s true leisure time by simply doing nothing. And the best places to do nothing? In public parks.
Enjoy!
