In The Backrooms: Philosophy and the Liminal
You slip through the wall, falling into a maze of empty, yellow-hued corporate corridors that seem to stretch on forever. You are surrounded by nothing but the smell of damp carpet, the glare of uniform wallpaper, and the relentless, industrial hum of fluorescent lighting. This is the baseline reality of the Backrooms, a piece of vernacular digital culture that has struck such a deep nerve that a major cinematic adaptation is already underway. Kane Parson’s take on The Backrooms will soon be released via A24, and it looks to be a horrific encapsulation of the horror of the contemporary age. The persistent, low-level dread, the uncanny, and unsettling liminal spaces, the collapse of space, of meaning.By stripping away every familiar coordinate of our daily lives, this endless expanse of abandoned office space works as a brilliant, heightened metaphor for the modern institutional world. This all presents an aesthetic, a vibe, a mood that has come to be termed Institutional Gothic.
The catastrophic suddenness of this descent, that sudden glitch or "no-clip" out of reality, represents a sudden failure to keep pace with the hyper-efficient rhythm of modern life. If you stop moving along the tracks of productivity, you drop entirely out of the structured world. Michel Foucault defines these physical, marginal sites as heterotopias of deviation - the counter-spaces used by human culture to sequester individuals whose behaviour no longer aligns with the required economic norm:
"There are also heterotopias of deviation: those in which individuals whose behaviour is deviant in relation to the required mean or norm are placed. Cases of this are rest homes and psychiatric clinics, and of course prisons, to which one should perhaps add retirement homes, which are in some way on the borderline between the heterotopia of crisis and the heterotopia of deviation."
— Michel Foucault, Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias.
This territorial isolation relies on the raw architecture of physical confinement. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault demonstrates how modern spaces like schools, hospitals, factories, and offices are deliberately partitioned and standardised to categorise bodies, maximise economic efficiency, and facilitate observation. The Backrooms mimic and amplify this late twentieth-century corporate aesthetic, creating a total enclosure where the horizon of possibilities has been shut down entirely. This spatial arrangement is designed for absolute regulation. Foucault highlights this historical convergence of our everyday structures:
"Discipline sometimes requires enclosure, the specification of a place heterogeneous to all others and closed upon itself. It is the protected place of disciplinary monotony... Its aim was to establish presence and absence, to know where and how to locate individuals, to set up useful communications, to interrupt others, to be able at each moment to supervise the conduct of each individual."
— Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison.
The absolute silence of the yellow corridors executes a brilliant inversion of the Panopticon. In Jeremy Bentham's classic prison model, power functions because the central tower is visible while the guard remains hidden. The inmate can never verify if they are being watched, so they must assume they are under observation at all times. The Backrooms take this anxiety to its logical conclusion. Here, the tower itself is completely empty. The authority figure has vanished, yet the automated architecture continues to police the occupant, who must navigate the silence under the permanent assumption that any sound will alert an imminent threat. Power is fully disembodied:
"He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection."
— Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison
Rows of empty partitions, dead light switches, and corridors that lead only to more corridors shift the initial paranoia into the dread of absolute abandonment. There is no boss, no worker, and no actual system left to serve. The space is what Jean Baudrillard calls a simulacrum, a hyperreal environment composed entirely of symbols of office life that have completely detached from any actual productive labour. We are left wandering through a hollow imitation, a desolate landscape of signs that have outlived their meaning:
"Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being, or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory (precession of simulacra) that engenders the territory..."
— Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation
These empty symbols stack up into an infinite accumulation, forming a Möbius strip of what Marc Augé calls non-places. These are corporate transit zones stripped of human activity—windowless office elevator banks, generic business parks, and identical executive hotel corridors that lack the shared significance required to be regarded as true places. The destination has been removed entirely. The occupant is condemned to exist permanently within a transit zone, a permanent holding pattern that Jean-Paul Sartre captures in his play No Exit, reducing hell to a mundane, inescapable room:
"So this is hell. I'd never have believed it. You remember all we were told about the torture-chambers, the fire and brimstone, the 'burning marl.' Old wives' tales! There's no need for red-hot pokers…"
— Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit.
This endless transit zone built out of corporate debris has a fascinating historical precedent in the Arcades Project of Walter Benjamin. Benjamin became obsessed with the commercial architecture of Parisian shopping arcades, viewing them as a material collage that embodied the collective dreamworld of capitalist society. The Backrooms function as a contemporary, digital version of those dreamworlds, constructed from the architectural remnants and ghosts of the recent past:
"Our investigation proposes to show how, as a consequence of this form of production, the collective consciousness sinks into an ever deeper sleep, in order to dream a dream that repeats the past in a new way. In the dream in which each epoch entertains its successor, the latter appears wedded to elements of primal history."
— Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project.
The low-level discomfort many of us feel living today reveals a latent fear that contemporary life is defined by vast, labyrinthine institutions. The real power of the Backrooms is how it exposes this spatial anxiety, leaving us with a lingering question that outlasts the internet lore itself. If disappearing from the structured world reveals only a sequence of empty, indifferent corridors, are we truly escaping the system, or are we just uncovering the true, faceless shape of the institutions we already inhabit every day?
Recommended Reading
Marc Augé, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity
Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation
Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison
Michel Foucault, "Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias"
Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit
