Liminal spaces, and why people keep photographing hallways
An article about thresholds and the ghosts between analog and digital.
I’ve been noticing it for a few years now, but only at the edge of my attention: Images on social media of empty places, hallways, deserted malls, old office buildings that look like they have been photographed on a Sunday afternoon, but 30 years ago.
Fluorescent lighting, carpeting that is too familiar, that one filing cabinet that reminds you of your old dentist’s office. Empty corridors, pool rooms with no swimmers, playgrounds at dusk. No one’s there, nothing happens. It’s ordinary enough to feel safe, and just strange enough to feel wrong.
They feel like something is hiding just beyond sight. If you stare long enough, maybe you’ll figure it out? Or not. Maybe there is nothing to find, nothing to figure out. And still… the images look like they are hiding something, something important.
These photos have been floating around with hashtags like #liminalspaces, and silently multiplying. Am I thinking about them because I’ve seen too many of them, or are they so popular because they show us something that’s already in our minds?
The word “liminal” comes from the Latin word for threshold. Liminal spaces are transitional: between rooms, between uses, between meanings. They are places where one state ends and another hasn’t fully begun. You don’t live in a corridor, you merely pass through it.
Is that why they are so popular? We are, increasingly, people in between, and in particular, in between the analog and digital world, between the real and the virtual.
Why are we drawn to these places?
When there is friction in the analog world, we escape to the digital, but we can’t move there completely. We wait for a train, and we scroll, and we wait. (We rarely wait without scrolling something, anything.) Also, we transition from one job or identity to another, in infinite beta mode. We can always re-invent ourselves, but maybe that means we have to re-invent ourselves, if we want or not. We pass through platforms, feeds, layers of UX, none of which feel like destinations. They are like hallways pretending to be living rooms.
The tools we use encourage this liminality: They speak of onboarding, pipelines, funnels, user journeys, transformation, but never of arrival. We move from one system update to the next, from rebrand to relaunch, from soft launch to sunset. Always mid-process, always not-quite-there. When we join a service or platform as early adopters, sometimes we are “grandfathered in”, given special discounts or privileges, but probably none of these platforms will ever be as old as an actual grandfather.
Almost there: “Androids, Dreaming” is set in liminal spaces
When I began writing “Androids, Dreaming”, I didn’t know I was writing about liminal spaces. I don’t remember if I even knew the term back then. Certainly I didn’t plan consciously to write about them. But taking inventory of my work in progress now, I see that nearly every chapter lives in the threshold:
Airport hotels, conference centers, coworking spaces - all places designed for movement, not permanence.
Crypto projects that never quite launch but are always about to.
Relationships that flicker on the edge of intimacy but pull back before arrival.
The narrator, Ruth, travels through cities, not as a tourist, not as a local, but as a contractor, a consultant, a placeholder. She is both inside and outside the system, always observing, almost like a ghost, but not quite. She is between the analog and the digital, but sometimes only because she still has a body that anchors her to the world.
This makes her a perfect inhabitant of liminal space. She sees it all, but nothing quite belongs to her: the tech platforms she helps design are not hers, the cities she sleeps in are not hers, the money that flows through whitepapers and wallets and Telegram groups isn’t hers (for long).
What happens when you live on thresholds for too long? Maybe you become fluent in systems, but illiterate in intimacy.
As Joan Didion said (see my previous article): “A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself... loves it so radically that he remakes it in his own image.”
At first, Ruth doesn’t love places radically. She’s always too aware that she’s only passing through, that this city here is just a stopover, that this project there might fail. That someone else is paying for the plane ticket and the hotel, and most of the time not even a person.
And yet… she begins to remember. Through writing, through memory, she starts to shape what these places can mean to her. She allows them to mean something.
Liminal space, seen that way, is unclaimed territory, like a peaceful wild west with wide horizons. Nobody wants them, nobody even really notices them, there’s no pressure or expectation or competition. And maybe that's what all the Instagram hallways are really doing: they’re reclaiming spaces that were not meant to be loved, but maybe you can start by loving the freedom they provide. And then they too become part of the story.
Tech promised us seamlessness, but we live in the seams
One of the things that drive me to writing is the tension between designed experience and lived experience, in other words: between how a platform (a world!) is supposed to work, and how it actually feels.
There are so many starting points: the seamless app onboarding that leads to a glitch, the upbeat startup culture that wears people down, the hotel hallway where someone realized they had been chasing someone else's idea of success.
We live in those places of transit too, not just in the sunny spots where we imagine ourselves to find ourselves one day when we are successful, whatever that means. And I want to map those places of transit, not with dashboards or data, but with narrative.
Stories can do what articles and papers can’t: They can linger and ask open-ended questions. Why do I keep looking at this place as if there was something I needed to see? Is this staircase I remember from an actual memory, from a dream or the scene of a movie? Or something that I imagined when I read someone’s Substack article on liminal places?
So, this summer, maybe you’ll be in a train station that smells very distinctly of nothing and echoes strangely. Maybe you’ll look up at a strip mall in the evening light and feel oddly sad, or peaceful. Maybe you’ll stand in a hallway waiting for something you’re not sure will happen.
If you do: take a photo, write it down, or just remember that the between-places are not dead space. They are where our lives happen.