Pixel + Space Management

In our affluent post-capitalist society in which basic existential needs are satisfied with plenty to spare and the workaday world is seen as sobering and disi l lusioning,1 people have a growing demand for emotional stimulation—in concrete terms, the value of money earned for services rendered is exchanged for emotional consumption experiences. Thus, the new type of “experience consumer” is no longer even looking for reality, for authenticity, but rather for perfectly staged il lusions. And this is precisely what he is getting on a large scale: by 1998 there were already over 30 larger theme parks in France, about 20 in Great Britain, 15 in Spain, 10 in the Netherlands, seven in Switzerland, five in Belgium and three such largerscale parks in Denmark. If the statistics are to be believed, then 22 mill ion Germans (roughly one of four) and 2.6 mill ion Austrians (approximately one in three!) make the pilgrimage to these worlds of experience every year. Within the EU, the annual number of visitors to these theme parks is estimated at about 150 mill ion, which is sti l l relatively few in comparison to the 250 mill ion visitors who were counted back in the mid-1990s at around 100 larger theme parks in the US.