Earlier this year, the psychological horror film The Backrooms was released and has quickly become a hit with a Gen Z audience in the UK and around the world. The film is inspired by an internet concept of the same name, which imagines an infinitely large space of banal empty rooms inhabited by monsters, sparked by an image of an empty beige room posted on the anonymous online forum 4chan in 2019.
The backrooms concept helped popularise a broader internet aesthetic called ‘liminal spaces,’ featuring photos of real-world places that appear disconnected from reality. These are usually man-made spaces that may appear familiar or even nostalgic, but equally artificial and unnerving. Viewers find that these images give them the impression of being lost or trapped outside of reality, creating feelings of unease and dread.
What is a ‘Liminal Space’?
This aesthetic has much older roots. The term ‘liminal space’ originates from the anthropologist Arnold van Gennep’s research on rites of passage, where he uses it to describe an ambiguous middle stage between two spiritual states during religious rituals or ‘rites of passage.’ When someone enters the liminal space, they are inherently removed from their social identity and dislocated from the world around them. In these instances, one is also often under threat. To better understand this concept, a ‘liminal space’ features in many cultures’ coming-of-age rituals. Members of a group pass from being a child to an adult through a metaphysical liminal stage, usually by performing a dangerous task independently of others’ help.
Given this context, it’s telling that the liminal space aesthetic became popular on sites like 4chan and Reddit, which themselves mirror many aspects of liminality through anonymity and dissociation from material reality. So, Gen Z’s affinity with liminality tells us something about what this generation is going through. According to Ofcom’s 2025 Online Nation report, my generation is now spending an average of six hours and twenty minutes a day online, suggesting that our reality is less occupied by face-to-face interaction or physical space and more by a world filtered through an aluminosilicate screen. Growing up in a world that’s constructing a new, infinite semi-reality that we inhabit in isolation has had a profound effect on many of us, especially our political stance.
How Liminalisation Affects Gen Z Politics
It has been widely observed that as people’s perceptions of the world are increasingly dictated by the internet, their capacity to be misled has risen. Recent research by the Social Market Foundation has found that 4 per cent of news posts on Facebook and 28 per cent of news posts on X were misinformation. This means that false narratives can take hold of people far more easily. A good recent example is people’s changing perception of London, with a YouGov poll showing that 61 per cent of Britons think London is an unsafe place to live in. A report by the Greater London Authority found that there had been an increase of between 150 and 200 per cent in social media posts describing London as dangerous in the last two years, giving rise to a nationwide shift in perception. This illustrates the internet’s capacity to build a parallel dimension akin to the Backrooms — one that’s disconnected from the real world and tinged with fear.
As for me, the existential dread evoked by the liminal space aesthetic points to a deeper, almost philosophical imprint on society. As involvement with local communities and real-world issues shrinks, people appear to be occupied with less tangible problems, fuelling a rise in extremism paired paradoxically with nihilism. Research showing that young people in the UK are the least enthusiastic about democracy points to this, as well as the proliferation of conspiracy theories and extreme ideologies into mainstream spaces in recent years. The reality is that the growth of liminal spaces has had a significant effect on many people’s lives and the social fabric in general, driving social isolation and feeding feelings of anxiety and doom which spill over into people’s political convictions.
The effects of liminal spaces are therefore very real and to many, existential. This is partly caused by the basic structure of the internet. It is well documented that social media platforms and internet sites are designed to hold users’ attention by amplifying extremism and creating addiction. Many of these platforms were also created by individuals with a deep commitment to Silicon Valley liberalism, which prizes individual sovereignty, free markets and the ‘decentralisation’ of social institutions. These platforms have been built to echo Thatcher’s famous (or infamous) statement: ‘There’s no such thing as society.’
Saving Young Minds
Addressing the impact of liminal spaces on society is difficult. The UK Government has made many conscious efforts, such as the Media Literacy Action Plan published in March, which sets out a strategy to improve media literacy and combat online manipulation for a ‘digital future.’ More recently, the government announced legislation to ban under-16s in the UK from using social media in an effort to limit its harmful effects on young minds. But implementing preventative measures only goes part of the way. The deeper problem is with the nature of internet platforms themselves. A response should not just focus on restriction but aim to tackle the liminal spaces, those intangible zones of being, lurking at the heart of our society.
Policymakers should seek ways to steer the internet towards building and enhancing communities locally, nationally and globally in ways that are socially conscious and engage with material reality. We need to design platforms that empower people rather than anonymise them and, crucially, bring them closer together.
The government is right to say that a digital future is inevitable, but we must build one that combats the atomising forces of the internet and consigns its Backrooms to the history books.
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