What is the Purpose for Liminal Spaces? Jay Dyer breaks down the liminal horror

Added: 2026-06-02

[00:00:01]What if the purpose of all this and its purposelessness was actually to produce a kind of purposelessness in the humans themselves.

[00:00:13]Now, I'm not saying that every mall owner and I'm not trying to make some Marxist socialist critique [music] or something like that. That's not what I'm saying. I'm not a Marxist or a socialist, but I'm saying when you have a materialist capitalist society and the same goes for Sovietism, too, cuz they're both materialist atheistic presuppositions. If you have a monopoly monopoly capitalistic societies presupposition about the attainment of meaningless corporate goods that also become meaningless within a few years because they're no longer trendy and they're not actually made to last.

[00:00:46]They're actually made to through planned obsolescence go away.

[00:00:50]It speaks to the emptiness of the cycle.

[00:00:56]Right?

[00:01:00]Yeah, I've seen I think I've seen all of Cain Cain's videos.

[00:01:06]Yeah, I think Day of the Dead and Chopping Mall, although [clears throat] they're goofy B movies, they actually have some of these deeper philosophical themes in them.

[00:01:15]And we did a whole analysis of Chopping Mall. If you didn't ever watch that back in the in the old days.

[00:01:21]Um we actually hit on some of that back when we did Chopping Mall.

[00:01:35]Because if you don't remember, the villain in Chopping Mall is like a Robbie the Robot version. It's like a Terminator.

[00:01:46]But it's like a B movie version of Terminator.

[00:01:54]So, it's like Yeah, here we go.

[00:02:00]I see now I hate it when it doesn't come up cuz we did a whole stream on it.

[00:02:09]Anyway, I can't think of the name of our stream, but yes, we did we did do Chopping Mall. I'll have to find it later, but So, the liminal space speaks to all of these realities and some philosophers have called it I watched the guy's video on this it was pretty good. I'll give you a link to that video in a second.

[00:02:28]Where it's just a guy who does sort of philosophical ruminations on YouTube and uh I have disagreements with some of his assessments. I He comes off as kind of a existentialist sort of agnostic sort of character, but I did like some of his takes on uh the liminal space in the mall. And he noted that it's almost like as some philosophers are calling it a existential uh how did he put it? He said it's industrial gothic or corporate gothic.

[00:03:01]So, you know, go back to gothic literature uh in the UK and then in Victorian era and then we have in the US Southern Gothic with people like uh you know, Flannery O'Connor and and whatnot and [clears throat] Cormac McCarthy as well, but with the liminal space you have a modernized version of corporate industrial gothic where the great horror is the meaninglessness of what was so meaningful apparently at the time, right? In the 1980s and in the 1990s.

[00:03:36]And the mall ones are really interesting. And again, remember uh Stranger Things also uh I think played a huge role in this because what was the season 3? The [music] whole season was about the mall, right? The dead mall being this sort of portal to uh the in between to the hell world.

[00:03:53]And so it becomes its own aesthetic, its own vibe.

[00:03:58]And this is Kane's channel who originally sort of popularized a lot of these.

[00:04:05]And [music] his videos, his, you know, uh film school stuff was so good.

[00:04:12]And it became such a viral sensation over the last several years that they actually made him the director. So, I think he's going to do well. I'm expecting it to be really cool.

[00:04:22]But if you go back to his older videos, and I think I've watched most of these, >> [snorts] >> uh when he was doing film school stuff.

[00:04:34]Uh he did one here, and this was the original backrooms that's had like 80 million views, which is crazy.

[00:04:42]And it was a genius idea, right, to just kind of play around with looking into um abandoned buildings or abandoned um cargo stuff, and then you you walk in and you find another reality, another dimension.

[00:04:59]And then people started getting more and more philosophical with it. And he was filming it with this sort of uh old school VHS look.

[00:05:08]But also people helped contribute to the lore, right?

[00:05:12]You had Reddit people, creepypasta people telling their own versions of the backrooms.

[00:05:21]And then on top of that, you had TV shows that that came out, probably also influenced by this, even though I know this was from a book, but Severance. Everybody said, "What about Severance? Severance, Severance."

[00:05:33]I've meant been meaning to get to Severance for so long.

[00:05:37]But the reason that I haven't got to it is because I think there's so many other things that it ties in with, like the backrooms, the liminal space, that it makes sense we're going of talk about them all together.

[00:05:47]Because in Severance, the premise is that you have an intentional process that you can go through where they split your consciousness so that you are MPD DID to have an innie and an outie. The innie being uh the person that is at the work world and they have their own life in the work world and they are split so that they don't know the life of the person outside of work.

[00:06:12]So, it's actual like split, you know, multiple personality disorder, but it's engineered by a mega corporation that does it to benefit, supposedly, the workers and to help production and all this kind of stuff.

[00:06:27]And I've seen season 1. I thought it was really good and I'm about halfway through season 2 um and it's it's interesting, but it also, I think, speaks to even probably unknowingly the elements of the actual MKUltra projects and how they were studied and by how they were perfected by entities actually working for corporate structure, corporate interests. In other words, the Tavistock Institute which was the first to really study MPD DID through studying shell shock and then got all this money put into it through the Rockefellers. They brought in Carl Jung.

[00:07:03]Brought in all kinds of people over the years to [music] to study and perfect social engineering and human control.

[00:07:10]That's ultimately what Tavistock is about and it at what began as World War I wartime psychological operations actually turned into an entire global institute connected to MKUltra intent on engineering the human mind to be obedient and to be involved in group think. So, they really pioneered and mastered group think.

[00:07:36]And they did it to they were contracted out by not just the CIA, not just the US government, or the Pentagon, but the Fortune 100, Fortune 500.

[00:07:45]So, for example, when you see people like Peter Drucker who comes up with the business church model of Ruslan and all these other people, from Rick Warren to Rick Warren to Ruslan, business church model is this.

[00:07:56]It is Tavistock social engineering group think models of how to streamline the business side of the church to make it more efficient.

[00:08:08]Taylorism, etc. All the above, right?

[00:08:12]But to get back to the background, and to Severance, which because I haven't finished season 2, I don't exactly know where Severance is going to go, but um it is also consciously alluding to >> [snorts] >> the corporate MK Ultra elements within the show.