Feature This crowd-curated digital movement is one of the most pertinent and explicit reactions to our particular slice of dystopian late capitalism.

February 9, 2026 — 8 min read

Giorgio de Chirico, "The Red Tower" (1913), oil on canvas, held by the Guggenheim Museum (photo public domain via Wikimedia Commons )

Had Century III Mall in West Mifflin, Pennsylvania not closed seven years ago, the shopping center — the third-largest in the world when it opened, with 200 tenants — would be approaching its 50th anniversary. Anchored by defunct local department store chains, including Joseph Horne Company, Gimbels, and Kaufmann’s, Century III had been constructed atop a slag heap — a mound of metallic industrial detritus produced as part of the steel-making process — maintained by US Steel. With a name meant to evoke the bicentennial of 1976, the mall made it four decades before finally closing like so many similar shopping centers throughout the country.…