By James Kirkham, Founder, Iconic

I'm old enough to remember intervals at the cinema. They existed because of the projector, which ran two reels so when one ran out someone had to load the next one in. The pictures stopped and the lights came up while a few hundred people who'd been sitting in the dark together were suddenly talking, going to the loo, buying a little pot of ice cream they didn't need. It was a limit of the machine, and yet the gap turned an audience into a crowd, giving the evening a middle and a shared pause, where the thing you came for stopped and the people you came with became briefly the point.

It was the same with vinyl. A side ran out and you had to get up and turn it over, and this was part of how you listened, a small ceremony of the flip and the few seconds of talk while the needle was off. The band ELO liked the moment enough to write it in, hiding a backwards message that you could only hear by spinning the vinyl the wrong way. It was the same with cassettes and tape decks. Every one of these was a limit of the format, and every one handed you a stop. A place where the thing paused and you came back into the room.

We spent twenty years removing those stops. The reel-change went with digital projection, the turn-over went with the stream, and the buffering, the ad you couldn't skip, the wait for the record to arrive, the closing time, all of it sanded off as fast as we could manage, until seamless became the highest thing you could say about a product. Then we arrived at an endless surface with no middle and no edge, but have since found it oddly hard to feel anything .

The old iPod held a thousand songs and we thought that was the miracle. A thousand, imagine. It sounds almost sweet now against a library of a hundred million you'll never reach the end of, but the thousand was the better number. A thousand songs is a bounded thing with your fingerprints on it, songs you chose and lived with and skipped past a hundred times on the way to the one you wanted. 

Almost everything people reach for now is a way of buying that edge back; Fred Again plays shows announced days ahead, in cities that only learn the address the afternoon of, shot with the audiences phone cameras taped over, so the night stays in the room and everyone else gets the proper shots afterwards. You had to be there. 

Kids are stapling fanzines together again like the 80s / 90s and leaving them in cafés for a stranger to find, seventy copies and no reprint. People are paying to be sent something once a month in the actual post, made by a hand, gone if you miss it. 

What these share is that they end. There's a last copy, a night you were at or you weren't, and in exchange for the inconvenience they give you the one thing the feed can't, which is everyone else who chose to be there too.

I think the finish is the part we underrate most. 

For anyone making brands this cuts against most of what the platform years taught, which was to strip out every wait and get the person to the thing in as few taps as possible. But the gap was where the meaning sat the interval isn't the dead bit of the evening, it's the evening's social heart, the part people carry home. 

Every one of these stops was born from a limit nobody wanted originally be it two reels and a projectionist or a side of vinyl that held twenty minutes or a tape you had to flip. When the limits went we found the constraint turns out to have been the culture, so the moment you get rid of it you've taken away some of the reason people came.

There's a cinema in east London which still brings the lights up halfway through sometimes, an interval kept on purpose  but nobody has to change a reel instead the lights come up because a few hundred people standing in the light for three minutes in the middle of a film is worth more than the three minutes of film we lose.

The lights are up, talk amongst yourselves, part two starts in three minutes.