Plato’s cave as a co-working space

AI and Society. 2026. P. n.d.–n.d.

Zhdanov V.

The article reinterprets Plato’s famous allegory of the cave in the context of contemporary digital presence. Its starting point is the Argentina–England match at the 2026 World Cup, where the author notices spectators who, despite being able to watch Lionel Messi directly from the stands, prefer to record the action on their smartphones.

Unlike Plato’s prisoners, modern spectators are not chained to shadows: they voluntarily produce the shadows themselves. The stadium is therefore described as a kind of co-working space in which thousands of “operators” simultaneously create their own versions of the same event and their own evidence of having been there. A ticket becomes not only payment for an experience, but also access to a unique position from which to produce content.

The author argues that Plato’s cave has not disappeared but has become a business model. This shift changes the meaning of presence itself: what increasingly matters is not simply experiencing an event, but recording, preserving, and displaying evidence that one “was there.”

Keywords: rituals of media production and consumption, Neoplatonism, Experience economy