From Cosmopolis to Claustropolis: Accelerated culture and the case for a claustropolitan sociology of leisure

This paper introduces a claustropolitan sociology of leisure that seeks to explain how the acceleration of digital technologies reshapes both the experience and the significance of leisure in a post-pandemic context. Drawing on Steve Redhead’s later scholarship and Paul Virilio’s theorisation of speed, collapse, and technological risk, it argues that contemporary leisure is increasingly characterised by foreclosure— a narrowing of possibilities driven by predictive logics embedded in digital systems. The concept of claustropolitanism is presented as the condition of the “locked citizen”, whose leisure environments are governed by commercial digital platforms and bandit algorithms that anticipate, record, and commodify cultural participation. This paper, then, offers both an evolution of cosmopolitan and postmodern approaches to leisure and also a critique of their limits. Finally, it concludes that leisure studies must now grapple with and from inside the claustropolitan condition as the defining feature of a hyper-connected world.