I will offer an alternate explanation:
Restaurants (and by extension, coffee shop) are inherently very risky businesses to start and operation, I think over 90 percent of them fail in the first year. So, to increase the chances of survival, you have to make sure your business is ran as efficiently as possible, things like rent and location is outside of your control, so you always want to maximize the value of every dollar you spend.
The first people notice when they go into a new restaurant is cleanliness, nobody wants to eat at a new place that looks dirty, you can only get away from that if you are a decades old local hole in the wall. Ease of cleaning, therefore, is the number 1 priority over everything else.
So, why the “industrial” concrete/tiled floor and metal chair? Because you can just hose them down at the end of the day. Same thing with big open wooden tables and sparce renovations, ease of cleaning.
The second thing is you have to avoid major renovations, make the with the space you have and maximize the amount of interesting decorations for the minimum money/work.
Why put subway tiles on white walls for decorations? Because you don’t have to hire painters, and subway tiles are cheap and interesting looking.
Why use big open windows and only dim Edison bulbs for lighting? Because hiring electricians to rewire the place you rent for lighting is a lot more expensive than using the big windows you already have.
Why avocado toast? Because coffee is your main focus, the food is important but secondary, and a piece of fruit on a piece of bread pretty much doesn’t require any cooking.
It’s really the operation efficiency, rather than some trend following “Instagram” asthetics that led to all these coffee shop looking the same, I think this is a better explanation than what this article proposes.
It is happening in my industry as well. A lot of our part suppliers are converging. Our systems look and act like our competition. It is a losing battle, I try to keep pushing but the problem is bigger than I am. Eventually all the value adds all the uniqueness gets removed and it becomes a race to the bottom. Who can make the same that hit the platonic form and do it for the least amount of money.
Interesting article. It reminded me of this story:
They frame that one as wholesome. I suppose in a way it is.
But it’s also kind of dystopian. People lost interest in a nice place that serves food and drink they enjoy… simply because it wasn’t trending on the internet. If you don’t actively participate in the phoney curated bullshit and stay on top of the mercurial whims of social media, you quickly cease to exist.
It’s like people forgot restaurants are there to serve you meals, not to be a photo op so you can enjoy a 15 second endorphin rush.
I’m not surprised, though. People put their own lives and the lives of others at risk all the time so they can drive and text. I see it every time I drive. Literally risking killing themselves and other people because of internet-brain.
As for the homogeneous nature of these cafes and places, I’m not sure that’s a very new phenomenon. Diners and hotels from the 1950s and beyond have always been pretty similar to each other. I guess social media also makes that worse, though. Copy everyone else faster or go out of business model.
Seems relevant … Ted Gioia’s article on “Signs you’re living in a world without a counter culture”: https://www.honest-broker.com/p/14-warning-signs-that-you-are-living
In general, it’s a very older-gen (boomer/x-gen) point to make at the moment, but it’s probably one of the nostalgic points worth taking seriously. I’m sure today there are certainly counter cultures. My bet is that compared to the past, they’re harder to find, generally more numerous and probably more nebulous and hard to pin down unless you’re “in them”, and, problematically, I’d imagine they tend to be “thinner” and more fragile … less “alternative world views” and more “particular vibe specific to a time and place”. Genuinely curious topic for me though.
I never thought about this but it certainly feels true. The vibe I mostly get from young people is a lot of resentment of boomers (understandable) and a general hopelessness / nihilism (also understandable) and a desire for inclusion and diversity (positives) but not a lot of cohesive fighting spirit.
There have been some serious efforts (protests about school shootings, Occupy Wall Street, BLM, ANTIFA, Greta, etc) but they all kind of fizzle out when the next big culture war diversion comes along. The establishment has mastered their ability to divide and conquer working class folks. As easy as it is to hold contempt for boomers, the hippie counterculture did have a massive impact.
As easy as it is to hold contempt for boomers, the hippie counterculture did have a massive impact.
Resonates with my personal critique of my generation (millennial) … however “unlucky” we are to suffer the transition out of the post-war period and “suffer” the boomers … we’re a relatively ineffectual and entitled bunch TBH, however much that is our fault or our circumstances.
We’re the generation that have gone ahead and made a bunch of life decisions because it was what we were “supposed” to do. We’re the generation that trusted and to some extent still trusts the system, and, expects there to be a system that is trust worthy … which aren’t bad virtues or expectations, but certainly helps explain how a generation can share a ubiquitous dissatisfaction with how the world ends up working and the future we’re heading toward but still struggle to work up the motivation to get up and do something about it. In a way, we’ve been betrayed by our elders and we don’t know what to do about it and how sad we and empty we feel about it.
And simultaneously, we’re the generation that’s as plugged in to consuming and responding to the input of big giant systems as ever. (Over-)Education[1], TV, Internet, social media, 24hr news, globalisation. Our attention spans are short, our concerns our ephemeral or fed to us by the mainstream, and we feel smaller and smaller against the great tide of content and input over which have no control and in which even less stakes. We’re the “stay in your lane” and doom-scroll generation … which makes us ill-prepared and ill-suited for changing the kind of systems we rely on. When something feels too big or too hard, we’re more likely to sit alone, pick up our phones and doom-scroll for some dopamine than we are to look around to our peers sitting next to us for support and dig in together.
And to bring this back to the fediverse … many on here celebrate how it feels like the old internet that the remember (old twitter or usenet). I’ve always personally found that problematic.
On a basic level, nostalgia can be dangerous in its indifference to the present … old twitter and usenet and the old internet are kinda dead and the fediverse should lean in to being its own thing, however much that borrows from what once was.
More specifically, social media for the younger generation is a different thing … they didn’t use the internet in the 90s and never will. Some of them have only seen twitter, youtube and tiktok and can’t help but compare anything like the fediverse, however much they might be interested in its ideas, to the social media they know.
So for me, us millennials, I think we’re kind of broken, and heading into the physical age where we’re custodians of our experience and the lessons that ought to have been learnt from it, and no longer “the generation” that the world should care about and be making social media platforms for.
We should be making an internet for the younger generations, one that is better than what our X-gen/Boomer capitalist seniors gave them and gives them a chance to understand and use the knowledge sharing, exploration and independence the technology can provide.
I’ve got nothing against education per se, but I feel that a lot of education is rather shallow, manufactured and focused on “certification” rather than useful and meaningful understandings, ideas and skills. ↩︎
I think when we discuss generations, a trap we all fall into (including me) is stereotyping. We tend to think of each generation as a monolith.
Within my own generation (X) I grew up with people who were extremely pro-establishment, people who were extremely anti-establishment, and many in the middle.
I agree that Millenials are better educated. As for the overall quality of that educational content, your criticism could apply to almost all of us. When I was in public school, you would barely know that other countries even exist. Geography, world history, and global subjects were barely covered. US “exceptionalism” eclipsed all of it.
The boomers outnumbered the Greatest Generation and the Silent Generation. And they were louder per pound, too. They still dominate in many ways (especially government and board rooms) even though they are quite old and 1/3 of them are gone.
So it’s not entirely learned helplessness among the young. It’s a true power imbalance.
Just hope it’s not too late after their power finally crumbles.
You make very well expressed and thought provoking arguments!
And while I can recognise myself in a lot of what you’re saying, I think that us millennials are just now beginning to reach the age (28 to 42 this year, by the definition I follow) where we have some weight to affect that system from the position in it that we grew up in.
Any of us who wants to make our own space: work on a good website, start a coffee shop the way we want it, run a node in a federated social network… I feel it’s not until now that any of us have had the skillset, long-term motivation and economical position to be able to do any of those things seriously. Building a better internet is what we are doing right here and now :)
Great response!
From a millennial perspective, the next 10-20 years are certainly going to be “our moment” … and yea, I’m personally interested in and looking forward to seeing how much the vibe shifts from a boomer dominated to millennial dominated world. Without wanting to shit on boomers or anything, I’d guess that it’ll be a mixed bag. There will be real sigh of relief as we shake off some simply old, privileged and egocentric perspectives … but also some frustrations as we have to face our own versions “douche bag” and shitty systems.
There have been some serious efforts (protests about school shootings, Occupy Wall Street, BLM, ANTIFA, Greta, etc) but they all kind of fizzle out when the next big culture war diversion comes along.
Either that or maybe the FBI has just gotten really good at disrupting them.
Probably to make people feel like they’ve been there before, so they won’t hesitate to buy things from a new store
