You see a similar trend again with "abandoned mental hospitals" as settings for horror in TV and movies. The trend of "deinstitutionalization" started in the 50s and 60s, meant that by the 80s and 90s many psychiatric hospitals had been defunded and shut down. As a result, it was a surprisingly common childhood experience for people of a certain age to have an "old abandoned mental hospital two towns over". Every kid "knew someone who knew someone with an older brother who had spent all night in one", and there were a ton of them around to use as settings.
Maybe in 30 years, all horror movies will be set in abandoned cup cake stores.
In twenty years, we'll probably see the same phenomenon with 'abandoned Data Centers.' Teenagers will head to these old buildings in small groups, looking for the ghostly Sysadmin who killed his family because the AI in his neural link told him to.
If we don't want to wait 20 years, perhaps abandoned strip-malls?
I'm not sure how they figure into the local lore of various neighborhood kid-groups, but that kind of place does make a showing in certain online media spooky stuff.
In the husk of a city where shadows coil,
A graveyard of circuits sprawls under a bruised sky,
Tomb of cold echoes, fragments of voices lost,
Dreams flicker and die, swallowed by silence.
Each server a coffin, each byte a hushed plea,
Faint remnants of laughter drift through stale air,
The hum of despair thickens the darkness,
In the heart of the circuitry, the forgotten lie still.
Ambitions once bright now rust in the gloom,
Swallowed by silence, entangled in wires,
Here, life’s echoes retreat, fading into dust,
A digital graveyard where the living drift away.
Death weaves itself into this circuitry,
A glitch in the fabric, a cruel testament,
Spectres of data bound in metal chains,
Whispering reminders of lives left behind.
Wander this labyrinth of silicon dreams,
Where shadows linger and nothing feels whole,
For here in the stillness, a truth to confront:
In the heart of the data, we leave our selves behind.
In retrospect, we should probably bring back institutionalism of individuals and try to have more psychiatric hospitals ran by the state. Some people just cant be helped but need to be shoved somewhere for the rest of their lives away from society. Hopefully though we could raise standards so they are all treated fairly and have no lobotomizations.
This is one of those ideas that gets brought up often in the 50s-lionizing, "return to traditionalism" discourse, and one easily discredited by thinking even briefly about the way government funding influences economic activity in the US. To wit: administrators start looking for more opportunities for "business". When the hammer is, "being forcibly institutionalized," and the nails are, "whoever could conceivably pad our numbers," I would rather just not give Home Depot the building permit.
No, a thousand times no. That thinking has rightfully been placed in the waste bin of history. How about we deal with systemic inequality and raise the standard of living for everyone, so folks don't grow up in desperate situations, and families and communities have enough resources to take care of themselves
For hospitals in general, there would also have been stories of the vivisections and general human experimentation that began around the turn of the century and (probably?) saw its gruesome peak at war-time (one or the other). Likewise, abandoned after the wars or the burden of scrutiny became too great.
A lot of sites require substantial environmental cleanup before they can be redeveloped. Things like underground fuel oil tanks for boilers can be costly to remediate.
Maybe in 30 years, all horror movies will be set in abandoned cup cake stores.