Rebecca Nicholson in The Guardian:
To answer the question of what we’re losing, think about what nightlife has given us. It was always a haven for outsiders trying to find, establish or shape their own communities. It brings people together and remains an insistently communal experience in an increasingly individualistic and closed-off late capitalist society. Gigs and clubs require us to be together – as friends, but also with those we don’t know. Luis Manuel Garcia-Mispireta, an academic who researches dance-music scenes, calls this “stranger-intimacy”.
Nights out are not always utopian, of course. Hedonism can lead to trouble of the negative kind, but it can also lead to trouble that changes the world. After dark, revelations and revolutions happen. Marginalised communities have found freedom in nightlife, and gone on to push that freedom into the daylight. People who were at the Stonewall riots say that their protest emerged from an insistence on the right to dance freely.
More here.