“It was paradise; now it’s Disneyland!” Antonia Muratori laments in Emily in Paris season 5 after a swarm of tourist zombies invaded her beloved Solitano. It’s not just her – tourismphobia is a recent global consensus. Cluster-like masses of foreigners, armed in selfie sticks, camera-strap necklaces and tour guide headset, refuse to sync with locals, colonizing their living space and transforming it into theme park-esque commodities. Tourist-coded activities can be broken down into a choreography of selfie staccatos, Google Maps pivots and gravitational pulls of algorithmic recommendations. At the core of their behavior lies a form of consumerist entitlement and ignorance that legitimizes arriving at a destination, engaging with it in ways detached from local intentions, and departing after a temporary stay having extracted maximum pleasure and a one-sided sense of satisfaction. The world is their oyster and they’re going to slurp it dry.
Since the contemporary tourist is likened to a taxidermist who chokes locals and their homes out of life, the distaste for this consumer category has been growing, reaching all-time highs in destinations suffering from overtourism. Their residents come up with different ways to repel unwanted visitors: organizing protests, increasing city fees, “Tourists go home” signs or hiding instaworthy landmarks. This summer while I was walking in the streets of Barcelona, where tourists are occasionally welcomed with hostile graffiti, water guns and angry protest chants, the air felt thick with “not welcome” signals and side-eyes from locals. My tourist-label felt like a socially imposed stigma. Tbh, it hurt. Call me delulu but I’m not like other tourists… I am just a girl who like many others felt the mental impact of the enshittification of life in 2025. Exhausted from the constant influx of bad news and personal hardships, I felt like the least I could do for myself is book a flight to a place that had lived on my bucket list for years. Before I even got to the point of booking the trip, the algorithm already decided for me – relentlessly feeding me Barcelona content and making all kinds of tempting recommendations. How nice would it be to stroll down La Rambla, check-in on the ever-evolving Sagrada Família, unwind at Barceloneta Beach or Ciutadella Park, enjoy a tapas walking tour or a passionate flamenco night? Whether in Barcelona or elsewhere, we deserve to occasionally reward ourselves with a change of scenery, where we can forget about problems, visit a museum or two, take some cute pics, eat great food and make beautiful memories. I know you can +1 me on this.
SABBIA MED®SAND AND LIGHT SYSTEM. Source: http://www.kurland.pl/spa-worlds/sabbia-med/
SABBIA MED® Sunlight Therapy.Source: https://www.spavision.com
With a society chronically fatigued and burned-out, people attempt to compress maximum pleasure into the meager 25 days of time-off which for many means leaving their usual environment. The virus of 2020 deprived us of the privilege to physically travel the world. With masses stuck at home, people had to reinvent this involuntary staycation into an experience that could replace travelling with virtual substitutes. “Coming to a virtual place is the equivalent of going on vacation, except that you never have to leave your own backyard. The virtual place transports the public space of the foreign into the private space of the home”[1]. Worldwide, people managed to integrate tourist-coded activities into their daily routines. But tourist-mode exceeded holiday season and physical travel. It became a universal lifestyle category defined by perpetual disengagement, indulgence in self-soothing tendencies and subconscious denial of one’s existence. The tourist condition became embedded in systems designed to minimize effort, duration, and commitment – the smooth architecture of the platform. We are all permanent residents of a holiday that requires nothing more than a single thumb-swipe.
Unpacking the Tourist Figure
Tourism 1.0 was a 17th-century aristocratic endeavor. It began with The Grand Tour, a journey where the elite sought to deepen their bond with European heritage through a circuit of self-cultivation. This paved the way for the Romantic archetype—Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog-inspired—who transformed the traveler into a seeker of the remote and Unknown. A shift from 1.0 to 2.0 was a result of the Industrial Revolutions which through technological advancements improved transportation, communication and techniques of mass production, lowered costs allowing the working-class to participate in a rapidly expanding consumer culture. The emergence of the tourist as a mass consumer category coincided with new forms of leisure and the transformation of travelling into a commodity accessible for wider society. Thomas Cook, the first group tour organizer, believed that “masses could be enlightened and society improved through tourism”. By popularizing the self-improvement and pleasure aspect of travel, Thomas Cook & Son became the first successful travel agency and signaled that tourism was here to stay.
As machines smoothed out the travel experience, a framework for a new form of flâneuristic non-need consumption emerged. Spectatorial detachment originated in 19th century France in glass-roofed, marble lined and gas-lit corridors of the Parisian Arcades, which flâneurs navigated guided by their gaze. For tourists too, everything at their destination is a commodity and an exhibit that is the object of their neutral, passive gaze; one that views the entire world as an arcade or shopping mall. This brings about the association of digital platforms that led us to become 24/7 flâneurs stuck in department stores of the infinite-scroll. The (user’s) gaze is tracked through interaction patterns analysis—watch time, pauses, replays, and micro-engagements—and incorporated into recommendation algorithms to rank, filter, and personalize content. Its goal is to guarantee maximum engagement, making sure you keep scrolling until you find something you want to interact with.
The platform became defined by behavior that feels calculated, insincere and optimized for an audience, aggravating the society of the spectacle, in which capitalism has led people to become more obsessed with aesthetic value rather than experiences. The platformization of the gaze emerges from the aesthetization of experience and is rooted in the historical relationship between the tourist and the camera. Tourism and photography evolved as twin industries, with the photograph not only proving tourist activity, but a validation of the tourist’s existence. The picture became more important than the lived experience.
Technology fundamentally changed the tourist’s relationship with space. As low-cost carriers stripped away the friction of physical travel, the internet collapsed borders as we know them and democratized access to global experiences via the screen. The gap between the next door and the next continent imploded. Unprecedented real-time connectivity positioned the tourist within a cybernetic loop of access and communication. Fittingly, the root of the word cybernetics is the Greek kybernetes (steerman, guide) and kybernan (to steer or pilot a ship), linking its etymology to voyagery.
In 2020, the smooth, borderless plane of the Global Village collapsed. The COVID-19 pandemic caused countries to close their borders, making travel unattainable for the first time since World War II. This bio house arrest, as Geert Lovink described it, intensified the tourist-user dynamics, and became the formative period for Tourist 3.0. Forced to replace real-life exploration, we turned to the Explore page and became Internet Explorers. Realizing that screen windows were the closest to the outside world we could get, motivated many to reinvent quarantine into a high-speed, low-friction simulation of living life to the fullest. During the first peak of COVID lockdowns, Jeroen Gortworst, a Dutch NOS News reporter, replicated an airplane flight with the help of his washing machine. Captioned “Quarantine day 14 got me like…” it quickly evolved into a global social media trend known as the #washingmachinechallenge. Millions across TikTok and Instagram began replicating the “flight” using their own laundry appliances, suitcases, and household props. Adjusting to the pandemic by utilizing domestic space to bypass the physical limitations of lockdown, besides being an entertaining coping mechanism, was also an indirect critique of the performativity of travel content. (Recently, I saw a Reel which looked like a peaceful moment by the sea, with water touching someone, until it turned out to be a floor mopping video).
Another behavioral adaptation of a society, which was held hostage by the dangerous virus turned agoraphobic overnight, was Google Street View travelling through GeoGuessr. By early 2021, the geographical discovery game saw its user base explode into millions. Terry Nguyen identified this as a “low-stakes thrill” that satisfied the human “urge to be elsewhere” while being stuck at home. The digital tourist’s playground got elevated further through the immersive social spaces of VR. Inside the VRChat metaverse, users—who describe it as an immersive, futuristic utopia—can choose which “maps,” or world, they wish to explore in their avatar form. VR venues are free of charge, so the sole cost is hardware, and while high-end hardware can cost over $5,000, “it is way cheaper than paying a holiday in Thailand” , said Katarina Ammann, author of a dystopian docuseries set in VRChat environment. AFK (Away From Keyboard) consists of 3 episodes tackling the complexities of digital immersion through e interviews during which a lot of people referred to VRChat as taking a vacation. The context of many VRChat players is similar to pandemic lockdown realities – “Most people that use this game are people living in 20m2 (or smaller) spaces in a block, so their situation is very different to what’s possible in the game. This is also the market for it – people that really do not have access to going to beautiful places, people who are stuck somewhere. […] A lot of people start playing VRChat because its worlds are very interesting. There are over 25.000 worlds that users can access. They are all made by users and form whole universes by themselves. You can go from place to place, be in very complex worlds, explore a lot, walking for hours and hours. […] Thinking about tourism and social VR, there are a lot of similarities for example when it comes to learning about a specific culture and about the communities you go to. It’s more of a low-key tourism – not necessarily about the big attractions that everybody goes to, more so the possibility to meet people from all over the world and build close connections with them. You can have someone from across the world be standing literally next to you. I would compare it to the same shock the internet had at first, which is now transmitted to the VR space.”
Military simulation cabin. Source: https://www.pcmag.com/news/how-simulation-games-prepare-the-military-for-more-than-just-combat
Modular Dome Projection Screen.Source: https://virtualsimulationsystems.com/newsit
VR solidified a homebody economy as a new fixture in the post-pandemic world, persisting long after restrictions were lifted. COVID-19 led to massive losses for tourism-dependent economies, which were soon followed by an intensification of anti-tourist movements in response to the post-pandemic influx. There are echoes of colonialism in the way well-subsidized tourism enterprises take over urban infrastructure, generating costs beyond the reach of most local residents. Even excursions that seem too brief to affect a site’s future are part of a history of temporary and pop-up strategies, testifying to ongoing gentrification processes. The future of mainstream holiday destinations appears to favor a transient population—tourists, remote workers, and wealthy exchange students—over permanent residents. Those who sustain these markets largely remain unaware of the harmful dynamics at play.
Hitomi and Lei Fang, Dead or Alive fighting game series. Source: Are.na / john zobele / images for slideshows, 2016 – now
The tourist as a distinct consumer category cannot be delinked from a drive for capitalistic gains. It is not the link to capital itself that renders the tourist problematic, but rather the overdetermination by things like TX (tourist experience, much like UX catering to the consumer category of platform users). The fabrication of authenticity in experiencing locations, and propagating polished and sanitized versions of destinations, not only generates unified impressions of places but contests the realism of the experience on-site altogether. The touristic illusion is glued onto the site’s actual topography and what remains is an exploration of synthetic nature. Since mainstream tourist behavior is designed by marketing teams, who study their desires on day-to-day platform activity, it creates conditions of ultimate convenience for the tourist who enters into a state of ultimate passivity. In Umberto Eco’s Travels in Hyperreality, total passivity is exemplified by organized vacationing in Disneyland where “visitors must agree to behave like its robots. Access to each attraction is regulated by a maze of metal railings which discourages individual initiative.” For him “The world is swarming with tourists who move around in amusement parks of full-scale authentic copies”. What is disseminated for the tourist to see are only staged images.
Seagaia Ocean Dome,a former indoor waterpark in Miyazaki, Japan. Source: Reddit / r/IsaacArthur
Source: Pinterest / @lsacikauskaite
The platform maxxxed the real-fake blur, and AI carries on its legacy. We are witnessing the final stage of what Jean Baudrillard called precession of simulacra – where the image no longer represents a destination but precedes and dictates the experience of it. The tourist today does not travel to see a place per se but to verify the image they have already seen online. The generational pic or didn’t happen mentality represents the desire to prove access to the simulacrum. We are seeing a distinction collapse between fictional sets and geographic reality [2]. Tourist industries, subject the world to the process of Disneyfication, and transform real places into themed versions of themselves. In an economy of simulated experiences “Disneyland not only produces illusion, but—in confessing it—stimulates the desire for it. […] We are giving you the reproduction so you will no longer feel any need for the original” [3] – Exhibit A. Hallstatt – the world’s most famous (Austrian) village which has been replicated in China. “But for the reproduction to be desired, the original has to be idolized.”[4].
That desire is crafted in platform environments through subliminals, advertising and the customized For You Page. Lengthening exposure to “light, cascading through the shiny, polished glass of the screen”—as Alex Quicho pointed out during her GIRLSTACK lecture in 2023—became the main incinerator responsible for behavior-modelling. Digital herds of individuals relinquish personal agency to follow a perceived majority. Machinic recommendation engines flatten individual preference into a collective of mimetic desirers, catering to the unconscious need for social alignment. Through platform-determined behavior design, the tourist is cognitively offloaded from the decision fatigue of autonomous curation, relying on algorithmic shortcuts to mitigate the social and financial risk of choosing a flop experience. What motivates the tourist-herd is the ultimate FOMO of fumbling their trip. Peer-pressured tourists prefer coordinated inauthentic behavior (to queue to internet-famous spots for hours for the picture) rather than serendipitous exploration of off-the-beaten-tracks. Affective contagion pushes tourists into the same viral topographies leading to acute overtourism in areas affected by the trend, solidifying Instagram tourism as the global default for contemporary travel.
Source: Are.na / EM S-K / delete yr account
Following these logics morphed the (platform) tourist into a technology of replication conditioned by the tourist experience. Trevor Noah’s 2018 sketch, Son of Patricia, humorously highlighted how visiting the homes of locals (what he called poverty porn) was marketed to tourists as “an authentic Bali experience.” In Bali “death and funeral rites have become commodified for tourism where enterprising businesses begin arranging tourist vans and sell tickets as soon as they hear someone is dying.” This act of staging experiences manifests often in tourists detaching from the sensitivities of visiting a foreign culture. Instead, they approach it like a show they paid for, acting like passive spectators indifferent to acts of cruelty, injustice and horror encountered on location. Examples include the development of tourist genres such as slum/poverty tourism which involves visiting impoverished areas (originally slums and ghettos of London and Manhattan in the 19th century) in South Africa, India, Brazil, Kenya, and the Philippines, disaster tourism – practice of visiting locations at which an environmental disaster, either natural or human-made, has occurred with areas surrounding volcanic eruptions being the most popular one or in some cases regions affected by disasters, such as nuclear fallout zones like Chernobyl or Fukushima, or dark tourism which involves travels to places associated with death and suffering e.g. Holocaust tourism. The most dreadful expression of tourism emerged in lunatics who opted for tourist activities branded as war tourism and bought themselves a human hunting safari in Sarajevo. Wealthy foreign nationals were enabled, for large monetary fees, to shoot at civilians in the besieged city with sniper rifles for entertainment purposes. The most sickening allegation regarding this event is the “price list,” with a witness stating that “tariffs were higher if a child was hit.” TX induces a state of moral anesthesia and behavioral detachment which pushes us further into hyperreality.
Construction site cover-ups. Greetings from Kazakhstan, 2018 © Tomasz Padlo. Source: anothermag.org
#Adventuremaxxxing, Slop Souvenirs and Catching Flights Not Feelings
The relevance of platform tourism becomes evident looking at a TikTok post from December 2025 when 10 News (@10newsau) shared a Reel from their news broadcast reporting on NEW RULES FOR TOURISTS GOING TO AMERICA with a caption informing “If you’re planning to visit the US in the next few years – be prepared to hand over […] social media, biometrics and family details before they let you in. #america #immigration. In October the same year, Benjamin Bratton held a lecture titled Speculative Philosophy of Planetary Computation pointing out that at this point “everyone has multiple digital profiles, doubles of you that are housed in the primary architecture of our time, data centers. As [we] interact with the stack and the platforms, it is really that double that is interacting on our behalf. For example, when you go through the airport, and the man at the gate stops you and wants to scan you and verify whether you should be allowed through, what’s being evaluated is your double, your shadow. It may feel like he is evaluating you, but he’s not. Your shadow is being interrogated for its propriety, and if your shadow passes, then you are allowed to pass through the door”.
Unity-powered portal shader by Reizoko.Source: Instagram / @eighty_level
Whether offline or online as long as we are willing to submit to external surveillance and control systems, we have a right to be a tourist. Access is granted through evaluating data in the form of passports/accounts. They’re like keys to the world embossed with your name and photo. The passport as such transcends its physical form. Passports in the form we know today serve as the main identity certificates when crossing borders. On as little as 125mm by 88 mm, they hold information from full name and citizenship to biometric identifiers such as fingerprints, face, and iris structure. The current standard for passport pictures is a black-and-white mugshot, with face and eyes fully visible and mouth closed in a neutral (non-smiling) manner. Neutrality generates better matches for face-scanning software. The now omnipresent technology, capable of matching a human face from a digital image or a video frame against a database of faces, originates from a commission by the CIA in 1963 to Woody Bledsoe. As an early trailblazer in artificial intelligence, specializing in devising algorithms to conduct pattern matching, and a crucial predecessor to modern machine learning, Bledsoe was contracted to develop a system that would use computers to identify people by looking at pictures of their faces. As restricting as the passport picture is, a 2022 platform trend altered how people perceive it. Started on TikTok by @georgia.barratt as a make-up tutorial, it became a viral guide on how to redefine mugshot-photography into a new standard of attractiveness – bare and natural invitations to engage with our profiles. Worldwide, users began updating their profile pictures by this self-defined go-to format. The unified platform-face-phase made an impact for a few seasons until circa mid-2024.
“In algorithmic spaces, your face isn’t actually yours. It functions as infrastructure: a regime of recognition that makes individuals legible and computable, comparable and operable”. The face unlocks tourist mode which becomes the primary OS of platform users, hijacking the mind of its (human) host beyond vacation period. Since “acting as a tourist is one of the defining characteristics of being modern”[5] platforms repackage the everyday as a seamless holiday retreat. Platform architecture plays a decisive role in sustaining this condition. Social media platforms operate as walled gardens referring to closed ecosystems in which platform providers exercise total control over content, applications, and data. While the internet was originally architected as a decentralized, interconnected web of nodes, the contemporary social media landscape functions more like a series of corridors that subtly funnel users forward, restrict lateral movement, and minimize exits the goal of which is to maximize time on site. The subliminal vertigo of platforms reminds me of the Overlook Hotel of Kubrick’s The Shining – the longer we stay online, the more we explore, the more lost and stuck we become. “The trick is to make the trap seem like a transit system”. Designers of the trap aka “technicians of instinct and appetite” possess a deep understanding of the tourist’s behavioral patterns and seduce him with a promise of custom tailored, personalized experiences. The invitation to extend your trip is constant and difficult to refuse – it just feels so good to be immersed in the smooth pool of infinity content. So good that you would like to stay there “forever and ever and ever”…
Your mom would probably say that you are doomscrolling your life away. But what about the time when you improved your skin through touring on #skincaretok and purchased Korean products that made you reverse-age? Or the time when you started your financial literacy journey and got a bunch of books on the topic which made you start a savings account and invest in stocks? What about the supplements recommended by nurse practitioners that improved your focus, gut health, and general sense of being on top of things? The language of tourism seamlessly merges with the language of advertising. In platform capitalism brands are trying to meet users where they are by bringing goods into online marketplaces, e-tailers and affiliate links – the platform’s souvenir shops. Whether physical or digital, platform souvenirs are engagement milestones rendering hours of scrolling “productive” rather than compulsive consumer indulgences. Trends channel consumer power into highly specific objects engineered for visibility and virality. Majority of them are slop souvenirs – high-visibility products engineered for platform circulation. From Starry Light projectors and sunset lamps to Stanley Cups, Sonny Angels, StickyGrippies, red-light masks, and Labubu—the ultimate slop souvenir of 2025—these objects exist less for use than for proof of participation, signaling that you were there and aligned with the flow.
“Maybe we died in 2020 and this is hell…” How else does one explain the world right now? Wars, climate collapse, financial inequality, AI job displacement – the list goes on. None of these are reasons the tourist came to the platform. Issue fatigue justifies self-indulgence and a preference of liking harmless content. This logic spills beyond media consumption into broader patterns of social behavior. TX explains the growing population of people who “don’t really want to get involved right now” – relationally, politically, or existentially. Gen Z became accustomed to running away from commitment, responsibilities and problems all together forming a group of people whose mindset can be explained through the leavingthecountryaholic hashtag. “booking flights may not solve all my problems but at least it postpones them” {cowboy emoji} that’s why we book one flight after another… and problems magically disappear :)” posted @serenaatthompson on TikTok. In another video dubbed with “i love to go i love to leave” and captioned “any minor inconvenience” @sexilexisexi strutting cheerfully on a beautiful beach captures the core of tourist mode. Platform interfaces provide relief in times of polycrisis and platform tourists, faced with continuous streams of disasters and polarizing content, developed detachment as a coping mechanism. Tourist mode is activated at the smallest inconvenience – leaving the country, leaving the conversation, leaving the relationship. If there’s something that I learned from my time on the platform is that it’s better to catch flights not feelings. Platform tourists exhibit the energy of contemporary hookup culture belonging to an age of ironic detachment since they’re “not looking for anything serious atm”.
Source: TikTok / @avintagefit, Source: TikTok / @izzydilg, Source: TikTok / @dsbp_
Though highly enjoyable, the position of the tourist is rarely claimed willingly. To identify as one would mean admitting to contributing to a problematic cohort. Instead, the tourist rejects categorization all together, insisting on exceptionality. This gesture closely mirrors the I’m not like other girls trope – a delusional strategy of self-extraction that allows individuals to remain embedded in the systems while narrating themselves outside of them. The refusal to claim the identity of the tourist is what Slavoj Žižek (following Freud) identified as disavowal. The platform tourist acknowledges the extractive nature of the industry—data harvesting and algorithmic radicalization—yet proceeds as if they are an exception to the rule. The main excuse for tourist mode is protecting our mental health, disguising it as a productive energy saving mode. Mental health walks along airport terminals, ♪ flying outta town for some peace of mind ♪ (Travis Scott’s FE!N) are examples of TikTok trends responding to how users learned to apply tourist mode as resistant strategies for the high-pressure environment of the 21st century. Like a beta blocker—which reduces physical symptoms of anxiety without addressing its psychological root— scrolling, liking and following functions as the ultimate sedative of a society for which “being in the world is reduced to killing time” [6]. Geert Lovink in Platform Brutality introduces Copium as the drug of the exhausted self. When we can no longer change the system, we change our physiological response to it through the interface. This is the essence of Copium – taking a hit of digital content to survive the unbearable now. Lovink’s framework highlights how platforms allow us to “manage the self” as a brand to avoid the pain of being a person.
My prediction for 2026 is that platform tourism will intensify. The remaining question is what will it look like once it reaches peak detachment.
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Patrycja Fixl (2001) is a graphic designer and researcher who formed her practice between The Netherlands and Austria. She experiments with research-driven storytelling across digital and physical formats, weaving together narratives informed by media culture and technological shifts. Her work spans exhibitions, collaborative projects, and independent research.
This text is an updated and expanded version of her Bachelor Thesis that she graduated with from the Royal Academy of Art in the Hague (KABK). The original thesis can be read here.
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[1] Acconci, Vito. Public Space in a Private Time. Galerie Hubert Winter; Coracle, 1992.
[2] Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. University of Michigan Press, 1994.
[3] Eco, Umberto. Travels in Hyper Reality: Essays. Translated by William Weaver, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014. Google Books, https://books.google.com/books?id=YFDOAwAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false
[4] Eco, Umberto. Travels in Hyper Reality: Essays. Translated by William Weaver, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014. Google Books,
https://books.google.com/books?id=YFDOAwAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false
[5] Urry, John. The Tourist Gaze: Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Societies. Sage Publications, 1990.
[6] Lovink, Geert. Platform Brutality: Closing Down Internet Toxicity. Valiz, 2025.
