The curling rink in the abandoned mining town of Kitsault, uninhabited for almost a quarter-century now, offers a very particular variety of isolation, of aloneness. An hour north of Prince Rupert by air, up the tendril end of Alice Arm, there is manifestly nobody around. Here inside, the Maple Leaf Pub is dark. In through the lobby, past the “Sunny Kitsault 2nd Annual Mixed Bonspiel” sign, I push open a creaking door and find myself on iceless rinks, the stones stacked useless in the ends. Even the structure itself announces emptiness with those thousand clicks and wheezes that empty buildings emit: high beams move microscopically in the light wind; a pipe shifts in joists underfoot.

And yet, I’m imagining this place full of occupants, against my will. I hear footfalls, purely illusory. I see flashes in the corner of my eye as if a door has just been opened. Outside in the parking lot – the handle of the front door stalagmitic with petrified gull guano – I find myself peering anxiously into the swaying saplings that are trying to take back the parking lot, to reclaim it as wilderness. For a moment, I can’t see where I parked the truck and my breathing quickens. I turn again, a motion right there at the eye’s periphery.

Nothing, nothing and nothing: I’m not being observed, I can’t be seen. Here, in the very middle of the most nowhere nowhere I’ve ever been – in a place that used to vibrate with the life of a thousand residents but where, one day, a mine closed and everything stopped – I am, for all intents and purposes, invisible.

It’s a hard status to achieve: geographic invisibility. Last May, I introduced the place branders, a priesthood risen up to serve a new hierarchy of location that is building itself in the world today, a hierarchy that links geography in one competitive grid of tradable locations. It’s a new reality that stems from our greater freedom of movement over the surface of the world, from the globalization of our business and culture. But it’s also a reality where Point Grey is Fulham is Pacific Palisades – not as mere comparables on the map, but as locations that could actually substitute for one another. These are places that are nearly interchangeable, parallel universes where virtually identical lives might be led. Queen East, Hackney or Williamsburg. Alberni Street, Lakeview or Butlers Wharf. Who doesn’t read the real estate listings when they visit other cities and imagine plausible lives?

Picture a place that doesn’t link to the grid. Not because it is remote; after all, remote places often acquire special value precisely because they’re hard to reach. The summit of Everest is so remote, you need to book five years in advance to have the experience of standing there – and even then, it’ll cost you. I mean off the grid in the microeconomic sense, unreachable by the market. A location that’s off the grid is, by my definition, one that’s invisible for its refusal to compete with other locations for attention.

Kitsault seemed to be one such rare location. Ever heard of molybdenum? It’s used to make industrial lubricant and the hills around Kitsault are loaded with the stuff. In 1980, an entire operation was completed to extract it: a mine facility, 100 houses and a few hundred more apartment suites, a shopping mall, a recreation centre, a school and, yes, a curling rink. Just 18 short months later, the market for “molly” crashed and burned. Everything was locked up and mothballed; people were shipped back to their originating locations. Kitsault before was a hot locale. Kitsault after was a blown-out candle. The best you can do is lean in close and get a whiff of a flame that used to be visible for miles.