The Secret Mall Apartment documentary got significantly more collaboration from nearly everyone involved, including a dump of the significant digital video stash from the project. Lots of people have tried making this documentary but until this one, nobody's gotten anywhere close to this deep about it. I'm on the periphery of this particular art scene and have seen lots of the related stuff.
iaaan · 11h ago
Tangentially related question: I recently got into 99PI and love it, listen to every episode that comes put now. Any other podcast recommendations?
vunderba · 5h ago
99% Invisible, RadioLab, and This American Life were three of my favorite podcasts.
xattt · 10h ago
Have you listened to the entire back catalogue?
TrueGeek · 5h ago
Dear Hank and John
rv3392 · 4h ago
I love Dear Hank and John, but IMO it's nothing like 99PI.
zoklet-enjoyer · 9h ago
Great show. I'm actually listening to it right now haha. Been listening for years.
neom · 10h ago
One of the people involved in this "project" worked for me, and then during their term of working for me, worked very hard behind my back against me. I only found out about the project after I was fired and they had taken control of my startup, and I have to say: I wasn't at all surprised.
Boogie_Man · 10h ago
You should get a video crew to document you confronting them and release it as a competing film.
"Getting he ass 4: Chasing ideologues"
Loughla · 10h ago
How do you get fired from your own startup? I'm not involved in these things, but it seems like if you're the creator, you can't get fired?
dylan604 · 9h ago
it happens when you give up control to receiving funding. read your term sheets carefully and do not let those $$$ blur your vision on a bad contract. once a VC has done due diligence and you've shared all of your internal IP with them, you'd have to be one special snowflake to not be able to be replaced.
No comments yet
neom · 10h ago
Can't lead if nobody will follow. It was also my own fault- I'm not blaming them. They were a key leader in my exec team and I found out after they: hated startup, hated capitalism, and hated me.
BLKNSLVR · 10h ago
Wow, so they were a 'mole' from the beginning who only joined with the intention of destroying it?
That's sociopathic.
neom · 10h ago
I don't think it was that insidious. Once venture dollars got involved and we started to hire more "business people" - the folks who liked the social aspects of our work got turned off and became emotional, leading to a lot of shadow work I was totally unaware of, ultimately resulting in my ousting. I want to be clear: I have responsibility in the situation also, I was the CEO and it was my failure. I ultimately mismanaged.
brookside · 9h ago
I'm absolutely intrigued by your story and want to hear a fuller account, if there's any chance you are willing.
I'm still processing the whole thing myself to be honest, it was all quite a lot, traumatic, but once day I'll write a book about it.
joshstrange · 58m ago
WTF….
> Dardaris had entrusted her pooches to the care of a dog-sitter, who was Tang’s then-girlfriend, in the fall of 2019 while she acted in a play in South Carolina, she previously told The Post.
> Tang snuck into his girlfriend’s apartment when she wasn’t home and viciously tortured Dardaris’s white-furred companions Oct. 24, 2019.
> After fatally beating Alex, Tang was accused of taking Frankie to the building’s rooftop and punching, throwing and kicking him.
And he served no jail time and just got a slap on the wrist. Completely insane behavior, who does that?
vkou · 10h ago
Or, perhaps, the parent poster is not giving us a holistic picture of what occurred.
ghushn3 · 7h ago
The moment the OP said "they were anticapitalist!" like this was some sort of terrible black mark on their souls it became very clear the story being sold was one sided.
It reads very much like two parties got into one startup for different reasons. The OP wanted to make some money, others felt there were other motivations to pursue, OP stopped paying attention (or never had the trust of the other parties) and it all fell apart.
breppp · 6h ago
The story is currently one sided because it makes a lot of sense.
You got someone who is known to "fight against the man" in an an anti-social way, that has self proclaimed anti-capitalist tendencies, and that joins the ultimate instance of capitalism of all, ventured backed startup
what could go wrong
idiotsecant · 8h ago
The red flags OP is throwing off are visible from space.
uoaei · 7h ago
On a forum where ideology is most often unexamined, or waved away purely in terms of profit, this one-sided and biased account should be treated with the appropriate context in mind.
uoaei · 7h ago
That assumption certainly isn't warranted. More like, they had some skills and some opportunity to benefit from them, then realized that ideologically they were far from accepting the status quo as expressed through the innumerable decisions and actions over the course of participating in that enterprise.
gthompson512 · 9h ago
Sorry I read about this way long ago, what is meant by "worked for me" "project", "behind my back" and such. I didn't get the connotations for most of that from reading articles about this. What is the real story?
subjectsigma · 10h ago
Without knowing them, this seems exactly like the behavior of someone who thinks they can steal from others (mall owners) because those people are “in the wrong” (soulless capitalists).
And yes, unless they were running their own generator somehow, which the article doesn’t seem to imply, they were stealing
DrewADesign · 8h ago
The movie contains a lot of backstory that describes who they are, the economic forces in Providence at the time, and what lead them to do this.
You could speculate, automatically snapping to the least charitable assumptions, or you could actually watch it and find out.
(Everything in the apartment was purchased, and they anonymously gave money to the mall management every month by slipping an envelope of cash under the office door saying "thanks for the utilities.")
te · 7h ago
Really interested in seeing this movie, but lol at the thought that the owners of the mall ever saw a single cent from envelopes of cash stuffed under an office door.
ccppurcell · 5h ago
Ok but then who is stealing?
doctorpangloss · 7h ago
Yeah. Sure. Let me know how your wife will feel if someone was living in your crawl space as an art project, “slipping an envelope of cash” under your door every month.
palmotea · 6h ago
> Yeah. Sure. Let me know how your wife will feel if someone was living in your crawl space as an art project, “slipping an envelope of cash” under your door every month.
No. That's apples and oranges, especially when you're talking about feelings. "Your crawl space" is part of a very intimate and personal space: your home. This space (a void of the type where construction workers don't clean up their trash) was part of a impersonal and pseudo-public space: a shopping mall. Your analogy doesn't hold up.
ghushn3 · 7h ago
It's only stealing from someone if you recognize that person as being the owner of the thing. If you are someone who does not believe in private property (note, this is different from personal property), then you haven't stolen anything at all.
I'm not saying I agree with that position, I'm saying that's a position that is at least internally consistent (if at odds with our current legal framework.)
bigyabai · 9h ago
It sounds like they succeeded. If they can exploit a company's resources to their express advantage while not being a large enough problem to deal with, then capitalism is at a net loss. Getting the system to work against these types means investing in after-hours mall security, or getting investors to care about your hostile takeover situation. If the responsible individuals can't be assed to find a solution, then yeah, tough luck. The mall is theirs, the company is theirs too.
I applaud this kind of creative individualism. It should scare the people who think they're entitled to private property even when someone smarter comes along to whistle their same tune.
toofy · 10h ago
went to the documentary about this at a local theater a few days ago. was good, even kept my 10 yo niece’s attention.
for years i had been wondering why we didn’t have apartments/condos directly attached to malls, particularly in cold climates, so when the articles first started coming out about this it definitely scratched an itch. the movie has a ton of video footage they filmed back when they were using the space, including footage of them sneaking the couches, furniture, and 1000s of pounds of cinder blocks in. it’s pretty gripping in that “omg can they pull this off!!??” kind of way.
stego-tech · 8h ago
There's some in the US, but they're often considered "luxury" and significantly more expensive than comparable housing because of their "convenience" factor.
Having never seen the movie myself, I can sympathize to the take in the linked article. Once I finally spent time in a major city as someone who grew up in more rural suburbia, I could see how entire buildings and districts "switched off" for certain parts of the day or week, disused, underutilized, and segmenting society off into neat little pockets of specific activities - just like suburbia does. It's cold and lifeless, compared to the "lived-in" feelings of more international metros (NYC springs to mind as the only American equivalent, and even that's disappearing one building at a time), and I could totally see why a rebellious artist (or several) might protest a building designed to operate for a third of the week just to remain lifeless the other two-thirds.
That's what I was wondering, do I get the whole story from the movie review, or should I actually watch the documentary?
Stevvo · 3h ago
Amazing this can be a story and movie in America. In Europe people squat in any building suitable and this group would be considered just another nuisance bunch of homeless people.
palmfacehn · 7h ago
Here's another interesting story:
"Man built a bunker under Hampstead Heath and lived in it for two years"
Their act was cool. Post-hoc bolting a protest social action on top seemed dishonest.
It's fine to say you did something cool because you could, in fact the coolest things are done just because. Adding commentary that it was a protest for stolen / wasted space, spare me the minutes please
ghushn3 · 7h ago
You should hang more in anarchist circles. Squatting as a protest and as an art piece has been alive and well for far, far longer than I've been alive. (40-50 years)
Go read about the Paris Commune, Villa Road, Pieds Plats, Frances Street, or that group who squatted in NYC until the city capitulated and turned the buildings into low income housing.
What evidence do you have that they aren't genuine about their reasons, given it's not at all uncommon for squats to exist as a form of protest?
gravitronic · 6h ago
Well, I watched it. The archival footage makes it pretty clear they did it for the lulz and only in the present day interviews do they bolt a social action to it. I prefer if they kept it purely for the lulz because then it was art.
ccppurcell · 5h ago
All actions have social consequences.
deadbabe · 10h ago
I love secret living spaces. Has anyone here spent time inhabiting one?
dgunay · 9h ago
Some friends of mine drilled some plywood into the trunks of a set of overgrown trees by the side of the road when I was a kid, to use as an airsoft arena. We didn't live there or anything, but it was cool to have a secret space that was relatively spacious and secluded from view by all the leaves and branches. Some nosy neighbors eventually dismantled it because they thought a homeless person was living there or something.
toofy · 6h ago
if ya love learning about secret spaces, there is documentary named Dark Days about the hundreds of people who lived in the Freedom Tunnels beneath Manhattan in the 90s. incredible incredible movie.
the Freedom Tunnels where the crew did their filming are miles and miles of unused tunnels under Manhattan, formerly used for trains. once the trains stopped using them people built entire shanty towns, the director of Dark Days got thousands of hours of footage of the people inside one of these shanty towns. it’s amazing what the crew got footage of. people building entire little shanty houses and little villages. wild stuff.
i mean, i wouldn’t have lived there, but id be lying if i didnt admit a part of me finds it amazing what they threw together. for years, entire secret shanty villages right under the city with small village sized populations.
RandomBacon · 10h ago
No, but if anyone is interested: last time I visited the Ala Moana Center (an open-air mall) in Honolulu, I thought that would be a great place to do so: good temperatures, easy access to low-use back hallways, empty storage rooms off said hallways.
There might be other places in Honolulu. Because space has such a premium there, there are a lot of odd/conforming layouts in many different buildings, that it could be very easy to construct something in a corner or dead-end.
There are many walkable parts to the city and bus transportation, many people get by without cars there.
Just don't add to the homeless population there please. It's sad to see families with children in diapers, living in tents at a park :-/ It is not a place to "re-invent" or "discover" yourself, or "start-over".
sandspar · 6h ago
Interesting how the ringleader appears to be significantly older than the other participants. This is a common pattern. As I recall, the poet Ginsberg was older than his hippy hangers-on. And I've read of that "older leader" pattern in groups as wide apart as graffiti crews or revolutionary movements. I guess that forming these kinds of small scenes relies a lot of charisma and vision, people tend to accumulate those with age, and older people tend to have a magnetic effect on younger followers.
ccppurcell · 5h ago
Another explanation is that only a small fraction of the counter culture at any given time are in it for the long haul. It's tiring and expensive and complicated and more or less incompatible with having children. So the ones who stick it out inevitably have to collaborate with younger people.
dmurray · 4h ago
This, plus the part where the person who's been doing something the longest and has the most experience is likely to become the de facto leader.
GuinansEyebrows · 11h ago
one of my favorite cases of contemporary-ish american squatting.
[1] https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-accidental-room/
"Getting he ass 4: Chasing ideologues"
No comments yet
That's sociopathic.
I'm still processing the whole thing myself to be honest, it was all quite a lot, traumatic, but once day I'll write a book about it.
> Dardaris had entrusted her pooches to the care of a dog-sitter, who was Tang’s then-girlfriend, in the fall of 2019 while she acted in a play in South Carolina, she previously told The Post.
> Tang snuck into his girlfriend’s apartment when she wasn’t home and viciously tortured Dardaris’s white-furred companions Oct. 24, 2019.
> After fatally beating Alex, Tang was accused of taking Frankie to the building’s rooftop and punching, throwing and kicking him.
And he served no jail time and just got a slap on the wrist. Completely insane behavior, who does that?
It reads very much like two parties got into one startup for different reasons. The OP wanted to make some money, others felt there were other motivations to pursue, OP stopped paying attention (or never had the trust of the other parties) and it all fell apart.
You got someone who is known to "fight against the man" in an an anti-social way, that has self proclaimed anti-capitalist tendencies, and that joins the ultimate instance of capitalism of all, ventured backed startup
what could go wrong
And yes, unless they were running their own generator somehow, which the article doesn’t seem to imply, they were stealing
You could speculate, automatically snapping to the least charitable assumptions, or you could actually watch it and find out.
(Everything in the apartment was purchased, and they anonymously gave money to the mall management every month by slipping an envelope of cash under the office door saying "thanks for the utilities.")
No. That's apples and oranges, especially when you're talking about feelings. "Your crawl space" is part of a very intimate and personal space: your home. This space (a void of the type where construction workers don't clean up their trash) was part of a impersonal and pseudo-public space: a shopping mall. Your analogy doesn't hold up.
I'm not saying I agree with that position, I'm saying that's a position that is at least internally consistent (if at odds with our current legal framework.)
I applaud this kind of creative individualism. It should scare the people who think they're entitled to private property even when someone smarter comes along to whistle their same tune.
for years i had been wondering why we didn’t have apartments/condos directly attached to malls, particularly in cold climates, so when the articles first started coming out about this it definitely scratched an itch. the movie has a ton of video footage they filmed back when they were using the space, including footage of them sneaking the couches, furniture, and 1000s of pounds of cinder blocks in. it’s pretty gripping in that “omg can they pull this off!!??” kind of way.
Having never seen the movie myself, I can sympathize to the take in the linked article. Once I finally spent time in a major city as someone who grew up in more rural suburbia, I could see how entire buildings and districts "switched off" for certain parts of the day or week, disused, underutilized, and segmenting society off into neat little pockets of specific activities - just like suburbia does. It's cold and lifeless, compared to the "lived-in" feelings of more international metros (NYC springs to mind as the only American equivalent, and even that's disappearing one building at a time), and I could totally see why a rebellious artist (or several) might protest a building designed to operate for a third of the week just to remain lifeless the other two-thirds.
More recently, an early mall in Providence (within walking distance of the mall in the article) was converted to tiny apartments: https://www.businessinsider.com/americas-first-shopping-mall...
I have heard that Manhattan has buildings like that, as well.
https://santanarow.com/
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22493078
It's fine to say you did something cool because you could, in fact the coolest things are done just because. Adding commentary that it was a protest for stolen / wasted space, spare me the minutes please
Go read about the Paris Commune, Villa Road, Pieds Plats, Frances Street, or that group who squatted in NYC until the city capitulated and turned the buildings into low income housing.
What evidence do you have that they aren't genuine about their reasons, given it's not at all uncommon for squats to exist as a form of protest?
the Freedom Tunnels where the crew did their filming are miles and miles of unused tunnels under Manhattan, formerly used for trains. once the trains stopped using them people built entire shanty towns, the director of Dark Days got thousands of hours of footage of the people inside one of these shanty towns. it’s amazing what the crew got footage of. people building entire little shanty houses and little villages. wild stuff.
i mean, i wouldn’t have lived there, but id be lying if i didnt admit a part of me finds it amazing what they threw together. for years, entire secret shanty villages right under the city with small village sized populations.
There might be other places in Honolulu. Because space has such a premium there, there are a lot of odd/conforming layouts in many different buildings, that it could be very easy to construct something in a corner or dead-end.
There are many walkable parts to the city and bus transportation, many people get by without cars there.
Just don't add to the homeless population there please. It's sad to see families with children in diapers, living in tents at a park :-/ It is not a place to "re-invent" or "discover" yourself, or "start-over".