I know there's been a lot of people whining about the ISObar trend in New York but I want to defend it for a second. Cubical based bars certainly get a bad wrap. People find them anti-social, perverse, and even at time, unclean. But I want to share a really genuinely positive ISObar experience I had that maybe could change people's minds. First, let me tell you what my problem with traditional bars can be.
Socially, bars are obsolete. Traditionally, bars were a public social gathering point, a place where people could meet up, have some drinks, have a good time, because there wasn’t a good way of meeting up otherwise. Now, that is still the alleged notion of a bar, but ultimately, with everyone's social environment existing in both the physical world and in the cloud, nExtroing, Fluts buzzing, bars become a place to stand in the physical world while interacting in a different one. Very little time and space is even needed or used at most bars you go into. It has become a cruel joke on the consumer, selling them a physical space they don’t even use.
I feel alienated at most bars. There's so much buzz of social interaction on so many different planes, I honestly feel like I'm going to have a panic attack at any second. Maybe I'm just getting old. But the efficiency in which people can interact socially is staggering and it only leads to further social interaction. Meanwhile the actual physical space you're in is loud, crowded and dull. And everyone knows it. The attention is always moving. Moving from the person you're talking to, to what's going on, to what's going on with your friends connected at another bar, with the news, with funny videos, with the comments being posted and sent on the dozens of social apps engaged at all times, with sharing those comments with your friends standing there, back to the feed you were tapped into, MY GOD MAKE IT STOP!
The attention is every where and nowhere. Its roving, and scanning, locked on to its objective and ultimately it never finds what it's looking for. Everyone is unsatisfied. Because the bar for satisfaction has become unreasonably high. So after 30 minutes at the bar, it's not good enough for you, it hasn't provided you with the thing you're looking for, so you go some place else. Then the same thing happens there. Each bar distinctly unique and yet distinctly the same. Still fully open and yet fully empty. And the scanning roves through the night till everyone leaves. Unsatisfied.
Isobars contain you to a very small, very neutral, isolated space. Then, whatever network based roving you want to take part in, you have the privacy and the freedom to focus on it. An ISObar respects your space, it doesn’t trick you into thinking you don't have a right to it. Many people think the size of the space you end up with in ISObars is a joke, but would you rather be guaranteed a space which is never imposed on or to exist in a place where you’re constantly asked to compromise your space for others?
The other night I went into the ISObar down from my house called Stag Nancy. I walked in and I punched in my cube and settled in. I had brought all my devices and plopped my order into the system. Theres no competing for attention from a bartender, theres no god complex with the automized system. You order and it pops up at your station. Thats it. I get on my net and I start socializing. I'm contained and comfortable. There's no jerk synced to his phone unaware I'm walking by him to the bathroom. Have you ever gone into a bar and heard your favorite tune playing? Well thats every second at an ISObar because you control the music. Whatever annoyances I produce impact me and only me. I start nExtroing with some friends and sure enough I can focus on this one accounts feeds interacting near by. He was trolling this other guy and I could absolutely see it and it was brilliant. We end up on WillowFly together and we start giving each other crap all night. He was brilliant, we had the same taste in games, so I ended up disconnected from my other friends and focused on him. We decide to Vidge and to my surprise he was actually at THE SAME ISObar I was.
There was a gasp of awkwardness and tension in this moment. We had been so contained in our separate safe spaces, now knowing we were physically close, would we leave our cubes? We ended up going for it, shyly laughing as we met by the entrance. We left and walked down the street together, talking till dawn. He is one of my closest friends right now.
Now, I know what you’re thinking.
You're thinking, “But you ended up not being in your isobar. Why go to an isobar when you don't want to be isolated?" Because that's the brilliance of the isobar. When you focus your social attention, you can claim control of it. The isobar gives you the space you need to actually connect with people on a focused, unpretentious plane.
In our current culture, we always want more more more. Because nothing we have actually feels like anything and its starting to scare us so we just frantically grab for the next thing like a drowning baby deer. What I realized at that ISObar that night is that its not about more, its about the focus on the one thing. Enjoying yourself at an ISObar allows you to move from the ISObar to the next thing, the thing you are really trying to find. Whatever that may be. Its the one place where you can simplify the clutter and the noise and the static. In having that safe place in the physical world, you can manage your existence in the social world, and then, when you’re ready, you can exist in both.
So next time you have assumptions and social predigests towards someone who enjoys ISObars, maybe take a second and look at your own life. Ask yourself if maybe all that social pressure we put on ourselves isn’t actually all that fun, and the impulse to shame others who don’t buy into it might be a whole lot more about your own unhappiness then some ignorance to social norms that everyone seems to be failing at anyway. Maybe once you're left with yourself, away from the noise and the distractions, you'll have to confront that. If you're interested I have a great place for you to go...
