June 6, 2026
Mall goths vs. the vibe police
How Liminalism Became the Defining Aesthetic of Our Time
Internet loves eerie empty malls, but commenters say calling it our whole era is a stretch
TLDR: The article argues that eerie, empty places like dead malls and Backrooms-style hallways capture the emotional mood of modern life. Commenters mostly pushed back, saying the idea is interesting but the “defining aesthetic of our time” claim is overhyped, smug, and way too broad.
The article wants to crown liminalism—those creepy, empty photos of malls, offices, hallways, and other oddly familiar places—as the big mood of modern life. Its star example is Pennsylvania’s dead Century III Mall, a once-massive shopping center now reduced to eerie shells and a doomed food court. The piece ties that empty, fluorescent sadness to The Backrooms, pandemic shutdown weirdness, and the lonely feeling of scrolling through life in late-stage consumer culture.
But in the comments? People were not ready to hand over the crown so easily. The loudest reaction was basically: calm down. Multiple readers pushed back on the article’s grand claim that this is the defining aesthetic of our time, calling that label dramatic, trendy, and a little too eager to turn a niche internet vibe into a universal truth. One compared it to vaporwave, cyberpunk, grunge, and Y2K nostalgia—real aesthetic lanes, sure, but still lanes, not the whole highway.
Then came the side-eye for art-world language. One commenter practically rolled their eyes through the screen, saying this kind of writing feels smug and designed to make regular people feel uncool for not already knowing the secret vocabulary. Another jumped in with a semantic mini-battle, pointing out that “liminal” in dreaming means something very different from “abandoned mall with haunted carpet energy.” And one thoughtful skeptic said blaming it all on “late capitalism” felt way too neat. So yes, the internet still loves spooky empty spaces—but the comment section turned this into a delicious fight over hype, definitions, and who gets to name the vibe.
Key Points
- •The article uses the abandoned Century III Mall in West Mifflin, Pennsylvania as a real-world example of the liminal aesthetic centered on eerie, in-between spaces.
- •A November 11, 2025 photo by Dave Columbus in the Facebook group "liminal photography" is presented as a representative example of liminal imagery.
- •The article traces the current online popularity of liminal aesthetics primarily to the 2019 4chan Creepypasta story "The Backrooms."
- •The original image behind "The Backrooms" was a 2003 photo of a hobby shop in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, later fictionalized into an infinite empty-room mythos.
- •The article links liminal aesthetics to pandemic-era emptiness and isolation, citing Javier’s 2021 TikTok videos filmed during the 2020 COVID-19 shutdowns.