The Membership Industrial Complex

& the radical act of unconditional access

It was 2004, the height of indie sleaze. Bass thumped through cigarette smoke while bodies pressed against each other. Hair straightened to submission, tank tops and skinny jeans clinging to sweat. We were misfits trying to make a name for ourselves in a scene that celebrated the unwanted. When I think of the places I've had the most impact, it wasn't on the campaign trail or in the halls of Congress. It wasn't in a boardroom or on a stage. It was in that nightclub.

Growing up, I'd always felt excluded. I had trouble communicating my feelings and was prone to frustrated outbursts. Despite that, I found professional success, but it left me isolated and as lonely as ever. So when I was presented with the opportunity to build a new kind of nightclub, the type of place that would welcome a person like me, I took it.

In doing so, I had my first taste of social success and popularity. The business was lucrative, too. We expanded the model, replicated it in city after city, and it eventually set me up for my second exit. But our success wasn't because the music was so good, the DJs were so talented or the bar specials were the best in town. It was because I let everyone in, unconditionally. It was the opposite of every velvet rope I'd ever been turned away from.

The party was called Crush. It was a small 500-capacity club on the edge of downtown Orlando, Florida. A dirty, smoke-filled room owned by a pair of brothers who spent most of their money on the sound system and left everything else to chance, for the better. It had plenty of dark crevices for good old-fashioned evil.

There was no vibe check. There was no dress code. There was no required gender ratio. Come in your cargo shorts. Don't bring a dollar. You and the boys or you alone. If you gave me your email address and arrived before 10 p.m., you could come in for free and kill the keg with us. So there was no economic exclusion either. This served a dual purpose. It meant there was a line around the block by 9 p.m., a packed club the second the doors opened, and I had tens of thousands of email addresses so I could do it all again the next week without spending a dollar on advertising.

We were the punk kids who had never really gone to a dance club before. We were the outcasts, the ones in bands or obsessed with bands. Our crowd wasn't wealthy or aspirational. Most of us were scraping together gas money to get downtown, but we all came to be together, to see our friends and maybe even to meet someone new, every Monday night.

Twenty years later, the world has inverted. The spontaneous community that formed at Crush has been replaced by curated experiences. The spaces we now worship demand tribute,$3000 in annual dues (on the low end), letters of recommendation like college applications, and membership committees that weigh your worthiness.

We've confused curation with community.

The most sought-after spaces today aren't welcoming “outsiders” but excluding them. The modern third space promises aspiration, but aspiration is just exclusion wearing designer clothes. It's the promise that if you're good-looking enough, rich enough, cool enough, you too can belong. But belonging that requires qualification isn't belonging at all.

The membership industrial complex has convinced us that exclusivity creates value. Even spaces that claim to build community sort us before we can connect. We curate our coffee shops through pricing, our social media through algorithms, and our dating through compatibility scores.

But here's what we've lost in all this curation: the unexpected.

When spaces sort for compatibility, they eliminate the friction that creates genuine bonds. The conversations that change your mind. The friendships that shouldn't work but do. The moments when someone completely different from you becomes essential to your story.

True third spaces require unconditional access. Not because it's nice or fair, but because it's the only way community actually forms. Community grows from proximity, not pedigree. Because if your community is built on exclusivity, you lose it when you no longer meet the requirements. That is not community. That is not resiliency. That is the very definition of fragility.

We're in the middle of a loneliness epidemic, and our solution so far has been to create more exclusive spaces. It's exactly backwards.

The antidote to isolation isn't curation but the radical act of unconditional access.