Every Thursday I used to pick up the latest copy of The Republic at the Magpie book and magazine store on Commercial Drive, but today the Magpie is gouged and gone. I went past it anyway, en route to one of the other places where I could find the paper. The Magpie’s retail space was locked and empty and about as attractive as a socket awaiting a prosthetic eyeball.

It’s embarrassing to admit that I never bought many books there, as I do most of my book-buying at second hand stores. Still, I liked visiting the Magpie. It made Commercial Drive feel a little more like home. Like many people, I stopped by during its last week to offer its owner, Kevin Potvin, my sympathies and encouragement. While there, I mischievously told another customer that a Starbucks was moving in. A look of despair crossed her face in the second or two it took her to realize that I was joking. Though she laughed, I knew that I hit a nerve: we were both afraid that another humanizing space would be taken over by a homogenizing machine. I was voicing an anxiety that began growing inside me as a child back in Sault Ste Marie as the family-run convenience stores where I bought my comics were replaced by impersonal franchise operations—or “assimilated,” as the Borg say.

George Rizter, the author of The Globalization of Nothing 2 (Pine Forge Press, 2007), would say that my anxiety is a response to the rapid replacement of “something” by “nothing” in our communities. He uses these terms to mark the end-points on what he calls the “something-nothing continuum.” Things on the “something” end of the continuum are unique, they have local geographic ties, they reflect their times and yet retain an enduring character, they’re humanized, and they’re “enchanted”—that is, they have a psychological resonance. Things on the “nothing” end of the continuum are interchangeably generic, they lack local ties, they’re timeless but have no enduring character, they’re dehumanized, and they don’t have any real emotional significance.

Ritzer writes that “nothing” can be subdivided into four broad categories that he calls the “nullities”: nonthings, nonpeople, nonservices, and nonplaces. Unlike things, nonthings are centrally created and controlled and they lack distinctive substance: compare, for instance, a homemade sweater to one from Benetton. Nonpeople are people who don’t act as though they’re people, who don’t interact with others as people, and who in turn aren’t treated as people by others. The quintessential examples of nonpeople are costume-wearing employees at Disneyland, but the category also includes the floor staff at Wal-Mart stores, who are daily forced to don a corporate persona alongside their corporate aprons.

Nonservices don’t take into account people’s individual needs and demands, they remain the same no matter where or when they’re offered, and they don’t encourage the development of unique relationships between those offering the services and those receiving them. For instance, individualized, one-to-one assistance offered at a local business is a service, while automated dial-up aid is a nonservice.

Since I’m talking about the Magpie, the distinction between places and nonplaces deserves special attention. Compare independent bookstores like the Magpie with chains like Indigo/Chapters. Indigo/Chapters outlets are standardized, rationalized, and therefore identical to one another. They’re far more dependent upon decisions made by their home offices than by the flows of energy in the communities they squat upon. Relationships between customers and staff are brief, utilitarian and depersonalized, while relationships among customers materialize rarely if ever. Regardless of how large they are or how long they stay in one place, there’s something unreal about them: everyone knows that chains undergo occasional facelifts that can completely alter the appearance of their stores, and that chains often close or relocate their individual operations, so no one’s surprised when these things happen. While such changes may be inconvenient for customers, they rarely have a psychological impact upon anyone besides the employees who may be laid off, and even then only because of the loss of income, rather than because the store itself has been altered or taken away.

The story is different with independent bookstores. These bookstores differ from one another in many ways, and especially in the deeply humanized relationships formed among owners, employees, and customers. Owners and staff usually encourage conversations in their stores, conversations that often engage customers who are strangers to one another. Independent bookstores are typically deeply embedded in their local geography, and participate in the economic, social, and cultural changes in their communities. Because of their uniqueness, these bookstores emanate a feeling of presence and permanency, which is why people are so disoriented when they suddenly vanish. No one mourns the loss of a nonplace, but departed places leave spiritual wounds that can take a while to heal.

The reason we find “nothing” so disturbing is because until very recently human communities were made up solely of people who offered services and exchanged things in places. Even when we were cruel to one another—which was most of the time—because of the uniqueness of our relationships there was still a psychologically resonant quality to our interactions. Now, we live almost entirely as dehumanized nonpeople exchanging nonthings and nonservices in nonplaces in thoroughly disenchanted environments. A driving force behind this change is globalization, a process resisted by something but not by nothing. You can globalize McDonald’s restaurants or Chapters/Indigo bookstores, but not places like the Magpie. If you do, you inevitably destroy the very thing you’re trying to replicate.

Beyond its economic effects, the globalization of nothing has serious psychological, social, and ecological consequences, consequences that can be summed up by the word “alienation.” We’re left feeling that the world we inhabit is foreign to us, that we’re strangers in a strange land. Once we remove the layers of something from our identities and communities we lose our ability to perceive significance in our actions and our relationships. When this happens, our lives are poisoned by banality and meaninglessness. Is it any wonder that in their attempts to find something in this wasteland of nothing so many teenagers eagerly pursue catastrophically self-destructive “drama”? Or that in a world where nothing seems real we find it difficult to truly care about social injustice and ecological disintegration? Nothing disconnects us from the living world, from each other, and from ourselves.

I’ll mourn the Magpie not just because it was a place I cared about, but also because, being a place, being something, it motivated me to care. It made me feel a little more human and my world seem a little more real. Like an eye, it helped me to see, and without it I can see nothing, everywhere.