0:00

Apple Card is the credit card created by

0:02

Apple. You earn 3% daily

0:04

cash back when you use it to buy

0:06

the new Apple Vision Pro or any products

0:08

at Apple. And you can automatically grow your

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daily cash at 4.50% annual percentage yield when

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credit approval. Savings available to Apple Card

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owners subject to eligibility. Apple

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Card in savings by Goldman Sachs Bank

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USA Salt Lake City Branch. Member FDIC.

0:30

Terms apply. Hi

0:39

Kyle! Hello, how's it going? It's good, how

0:41

are you? Thank you so much for doing this. Of course, I

0:44

love coffee shops. Kyle

0:47

Chica is a staff writer at The New

0:49

Yorker, and we met up in December of

0:51

2023 at a cafe on Manhattan's Lower East Side.

0:55

What's your order? Uh,

0:57

usually a cappuccino. Like, as small

0:59

a cappuccino as possible. Kyle

1:01

has spent a lot of time in coffee

1:03

shops. He's fascinated by them. A thing

1:06

that draws me to coffee shops is

1:08

they're such centers of displays of taste

1:10

and culture. They're almost like multi-sensory art

1:12

museums for the taste of the moment.

1:15

He works in them when he's at home and abroad. And

1:17

around 2015, 2016, he started to notice something about all of

1:19

them. Whenever

1:23

I would travel for work as a freelance journalist,

1:25

I would go to all these different cities around

1:27

the world. And wherever I would

1:29

land, I could always find essentially the same

1:32

cafe. It didn't matter if

1:34

he was in Beijing or Reykjavik, Kyoto

1:36

or Los Angeles, Bali or Brooklyn. The

1:38

places all looked identical. Like

1:41

a place with white subway tiles

1:43

on the walls and plants and

1:46

ceramic planters and reclaimed

1:48

wood furniture, wide windows in

1:50

the front, like storefront windows, maybe a

1:52

marble countertop. And the

1:54

Edison bulb, uncovered Edison

1:57

bulb. If you go to coffee

1:59

shops with any regular... you probably know

2:01

the kind of place Kyle's talking about.

2:03

We were having this conversation in the

2:05

kind of place Kyle's talking about. It's

2:08

minimalist with muted colors and there's good

2:10

Wi-Fi for millennials and zoomers on their

2:12

laptops. There's avocado toast on the menu

2:14

and foamy drinks just ready for their

2:16

photo op. Could always order

2:18

a cappuccino with good latte art. You could get

2:20

a cortado if you wanted. And,

2:23

like, you liked it, right? Yes, I definitely

2:25

liked it. Kyle started

2:27

to think of these places as,

2:29

quote, generic coffee shops. Like,

2:32

oh, look, I'm in another generic

2:34

coffee shop. And no one had told these

2:36

cafes to look the same. There was no,

2:39

like, parent company, like, a Starbucks, to be

2:41

like, you have to look like this. And

2:44

there was, like, I guess I

2:46

would say there was a tipping point at which I

2:48

realized it was weird that they all looked the same

2:51

and that they were all conforming to this one

2:53

standard. It was so odd, he

2:56

figured it would go away. Like, I

2:58

thought that this was a blip,

3:01

essentially. You know, for some reason, this

3:03

was popular right now and it would

3:05

disappear and dissipate and, you know, things

3:07

would go back to how they were

3:09

before. But that is not what

3:11

happened. Then they just kept

3:14

spreading. Like, the aesthetic was spreading its

3:16

tentacles farther and farther. And

3:20

also, it wasn't just coffee shops. This

3:30

is Decoder Ring. I'm Willa Paskin. The

3:33

saminess of coffee shops all over the world

3:35

was so confounding to Kyle Cheka that it

3:37

sent him down a rabbit hole. One so

3:39

deep that it resulted in him writing a

3:41

book called Filter World, How

3:44

Algorithms Are Flattening Culture. It's

3:46

about how the internet is shaping our taste

3:49

in coffee shops and

3:51

also way more than that. In

3:53

today's episode, Kyle's gonna walk us through

3:55

the recent history of the cafe to

3:57

help us see how digital behavior is...

4:00

altering a physical space hundreds

4:02

of years older than the internet

4:04

itself, and how those changes

4:07

are happening everywhere. It's

4:09

just easier to see them when they're

4:11

spelled out in latte art. So

4:14

today on Decodering, why do

4:16

so many coffee shops look the

4:18

same? Apple

4:38

Card is the credit card created by Apple.

4:40

You earn 3% daily cash back when you

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use it to buy the new Apple Vision

4:44

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4:47

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4:49

4.50% annual percentage yield when you

4:53

open a high yield savings account. Apply

4:55

for Apple Card in the Wallet app on

4:57

iPhone, Apple Card subject to credit approval. Savings

5:00

available to Apple Card owners subject to

5:02

eligibility. Apple Card and savings

5:04

by Goldman Sachs Bank USA Salt Lake

5:06

City branch. Member FDIC. Terms

5:08

apply. Coffee

5:13

houses are old. The first ones I

5:15

thought to have appeared in the 15th

5:17

century during the Ottoman Empire. And they've

5:19

had and continue to have a robust

5:21

place in many countries and cultures. But

5:24

in America, give or take a smattering

5:26

of cafes and scenes in urban bohemias

5:28

and college towns, there has

5:31

not historically been a vibrant

5:33

coffee culture. And

5:42

then something changed. Our

5:47

well-caffeinated guide, Kyle Chica again.

5:57

In the early 1980s, Howard Schultz, on his

5:59

way to becoming the CEO of

6:01

Starbucks, visited Milan and realized

6:03

espresso-based coffee drinks might do great

6:06

in America. By the

6:08

1990s, the Seattle-based company was expanding massively,

6:10

going from 84 to 2,500 stores

6:14

across the country, including in

6:16

Connecticut. It felt like a form

6:18

of progress because there was so few

6:21

coffee shops or cafe culture

6:24

examples before Starbucks. This

6:27

made oversized armchairs and Italian-style coffee

6:29

a bedrock possibility of American life

6:31

for the first time, a cafe

6:34

experience as available in the suburbs as

6:36

the city, as omnipresent

6:38

as gas stations. But

6:41

at the start, much, much

6:43

cooler. The

6:49

curmudgeon of Seinfeld famously fueled up

6:51

on black coffee in a diner, but

6:53

even they couldn't resist the siren song

6:55

of the cafe latte. Seinfeld

7:02

was far from the only piece of pop

7:04

culture to observe this strange

7:07

new phenomenon of people

7:09

becoming Starbucks customers.

7:20

In 1998, when You've Got Mail came

7:23

out, Starbucks was still such a notable

7:25

phenomenon, clever little observations about it could

7:27

go into your love letter. When

7:48

Americans fell for tall decaf cappuccinos,

7:50

it also led to a boom

7:52

in independent local coffee shops, places

7:55

that did not share some corporate

7:57

master plan. to

8:00

think about the other kinds of coffee shop

8:02

spaces that existed even in the 90s. There's

8:06

diners or a college coffee

8:08

shop with really gross couches.

8:11

And then there's just more independent coffee

8:14

shops where things looked different

8:16

in every single one. Yeah. I

8:19

think it was local. It was much

8:21

more localized in that way. You would have

8:23

work from local artists on the walls that

8:26

was often not very good. And then

8:28

there's the Friends Cafe, where they feel like they go out of

8:30

chairs with like velvet, like

8:32

high tops with velvet on

8:34

them. Upholstery. There were people

8:36

making design choices that

8:39

were not all identical.

8:43

I don't want to overstate the glory of the 1990s or 2000s

8:45

coffee shop. The

8:48

couches could be rank. The

8:50

lighting could be dim. The coffee could

8:53

be burnt. And the food

8:55

could come with a lot of sprouts. But

8:57

if you went to one in another state, let

9:00

alone in another country, it would have been weird

9:02

for it to be exactly like

9:04

your local spot. And

9:06

I know that because I thought it was weird.

9:10

I don't travel nearly as much

9:12

as Kyle's, but I visited Nashville

9:14

and I remember going into a

9:16

coffee shop, hip, minimalist, serious about

9:18

the beans and the cappuccinos, thinking

9:21

I've been in a cafe exactly

9:24

like this. And

9:26

then cafes exactly like this started

9:28

to be most of the cafes

9:30

around. I never

9:33

did anything with this observation. But

9:35

Kyle, he had to figure out what was

9:37

going on. Why

9:40

and how did these funky,

9:42

unique, not entirely reliable, occasionally

9:45

unkempt coffee shops converge?

9:48

The generic coffee shop, I think, is

9:50

a bit like my Moby Dick or

9:52

something. It's like the

9:54

idea I've been chasing in a lot of

9:56

writing. happened

10:00

to coffee shops couldn't just be

10:02

found inside of coffee shops. Instead,

10:05

it was all caught up with a phenomenon

10:07

that seems really different. Over

10:09

the course of the 90s,

10:11

you saw the invention and

10:13

development of the proto-mainstream internet.

10:15

I mean, what is internet

10:17

anyway? Internet

10:19

is that massive computer network, the

10:22

one that's becoming really big now.

10:25

At first glance, the only thing the internet

10:27

and cafes seem to share is that in

10:29

America, they started booming at the same time.

10:32

But that's not a coincidence. Before the

10:34

internet, there was only so much work you could

10:36

do outside an office. After the

10:38

internet, there was quite a bit you could do

10:40

outside the office, so long as you had a space

10:42

to do it. Cyber cafes and

10:45

coffee spots ballooned by providing

10:47

that space, giving people a

10:49

well-caffeinated location to plink away

10:51

on their laptops. And

10:53

there was a tremendous amount of optimism about

10:55

what you could do with all that plinking.

10:58

The internet seemed like the fastest, easiest way

11:00

to discover all the things you might like

11:03

that had ever existed. And you

11:05

could sort through it all. Even

11:07

back then, even in the mid-90s, there

11:10

was the sense that there's too

11:12

much information online. At

11:14

a time when there were only, say, hundreds

11:16

of thousands of websites, people were

11:19

already like, oh shit, oh

11:21

no, this is going to be too

11:23

much, we're going to have too much content. So

11:26

researchers, coders, hobbyists, and companies

11:28

started developing tools to help early

11:30

internet users deal with this flood

11:33

of information, deploying little bits of

11:35

computer code, which we now know

11:37

by another name. Algorithms.

11:40

An algorithm is just an equation.

11:42

It's a way to sort

11:44

out one thing from another. So

11:47

in this moment in the mid-90s, they

11:49

were starting to turn to algorithms and

11:51

these kind of automated systems to sort

11:53

the content of the internet and deliver

11:55

what was most relevant to you.

11:58

These algorithms did some really straightforward things. things

12:00

like sorting emails based on who sent them

12:02

to surface the ones likely to be most

12:04

important to you, or helping you to

12:06

find websites that reflected what you were actually

12:08

searching for, which was Google's great innovation.

12:11

Algorithms could filter out what you didn't

12:13

need to show you what you wanted

12:15

to see. And as helpful

12:17

as algorithms could be, you were still

12:20

deciding what that was. Like

12:23

in the mid 2000s when I was

12:25

spending a lot of time writing and

12:27

procrastinating in a coffee shop that turned

12:29

into a bar at night, being on

12:31

the internet meant reading blogs whose URLs

12:33

I had typed into my browser and

12:35

listening to songs that I had personally

12:37

loaded into my iTunes. But

12:39

a few years later, that would begin

12:42

to change. Circa, early

12:45

2010s, when Twitter is in an early

12:47

phase, Instagram is just getting popular. I

12:50

don't think we knew that they were going to take

12:52

over our lives in such a way. Social

12:55

media platforms initially seemed like fun,

12:57

convenient clearinghouses for content and connection,

12:59

a more streamlined way to be

13:02

online, a simpler way to waste

13:04

time at a cafe. And

13:06

of all the things social media platforms

13:09

were predicted to do in these early

13:11

days, changing the decor

13:13

of the place you were procrastinating

13:15

in was probably low on the

13:17

list. But when we come

13:20

back, we're going to explore how

13:22

that's exactly what happened. This

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15:52

when did you see the generic coffee shop aesthetic like

15:54

really take off? So I think in

15:56

the early, early 20 times more and more culture

15:58

was moving online like our consumption of

16:01

culture was increasingly flowing through

16:03

Twitter and Instagram and Tumblr

16:05

and YouTube. But

16:07

then I really point the kind of acceleration of

16:10

this culture to 2015-2016, which is when all of

16:12

the feeds of YouTube, of Instagram, of Facebook

16:20

kind of make the switch to becoming

16:22

more algorithmic. So rather than just

16:25

having a chronological list of like

16:28

every Facebook update that happened over the

16:30

past day, the feeds would start recommending

16:32

content to you based on what you

16:34

had already engaged with. Kyle

16:36

thinks this is an extremely important transition

16:38

because it changed the whole way

16:40

we're oriented towards the internet. Instead

16:43

of going out and selecting what we

16:45

want to see, now the

16:47

platform decides for us. The

16:50

message of algorithmic feeds of social

16:52

networks was like, we will give

16:54

you what you like. We

16:56

will approximate your desires and tastes

16:58

and preferences and like

17:01

customize and personalize something for you. Like

17:03

the TikTok feed is literally called for

17:05

you. And of course they're

17:07

not doing this to be nice. They're doing

17:09

it so we'll stay on the platform for

17:11

as long as possible. Over

17:13

the years a lot of attention has

17:15

been paid to the way engagement is

17:18

driven by outrage, by things that provoke

17:20

us, that we really mind. But Kyle

17:22

thinks that shortchange is something even more

17:24

common. How engagement is driven

17:26

by mindlessness. I mean

17:28

I think there's like different forms

17:31

of mindlessness. Like one

17:34

form of mindlessness is the ambient

17:36

lo-fi chill hip-hop beats, which

17:38

is like you're pointedly not

17:40

supposed to pay attention to them. You

17:43

are doing some other task or using

17:45

them as backgrounds. So it's like an

17:47

unobtrusive, you know, wash of sounds that

17:49

you can live on top of essentially.

17:51

And then there's a

17:53

different quality where it's like the mindlessness

17:56

of paying attention. Like you're

17:58

so immersed in paying attention. to

18:01

an Instagram Reel or a TikTok video

18:03

that you have no other thoughts in

18:05

your mind. Mindlessness is

18:07

the bread and butter of

18:09

social media platforms. There's the

18:11

fugue state when you're trapped

18:13

in the infinite scroll on

18:15

the one hand and the

18:17

ignorable perpetual Spotify backing track

18:20

on the other. And those

18:22

are our punctuating exceptions. In

18:24

general, the platforms don't wanna

18:26

serve you anything that

18:28

will snap you out of either of

18:30

these states. Because the

18:32

ultimate goal of all these platforms is just to

18:35

keep you looking at the

18:37

stuff or listening to the stuff,

18:39

it's guiding you toward the most

18:41

bland thing or the least defensive

18:43

thing or the most

18:45

unobtrusive thing. In writing

18:47

his book, Kyle talked to a musician named

18:50

Damon Krakowski, who has firsthand experience

18:52

with the platform's preference for the

18:54

innocuous. Damon was a drummer

18:56

in the indie dream pop band, Galaxy 500. They

19:00

put out some influential albums in the late 1980s and

19:02

very early 90s. They were minimal,

19:05

drenched in reverb and sounded like nobody else

19:07

at the time. But you

19:09

wouldn't know that based on the songs Spotify

19:11

recommends. Damon sounds

19:14

that Spotify would only promote

19:17

the most generic tracks by that dance.

19:20

Spotify algorithm somehow fixated on

19:22

this track Strange. Strange

19:28

had been a hit single. There had been no

19:31

music video for it. It didn't sound that much

19:33

like Galaxy 500. And

19:35

that's exactly why the algorithm pushed

19:37

it. It was because it sounded

19:39

like a generic 80s, 90s rock

19:43

bands track. And that was an

19:45

ironic conscious choice that the band had made at

19:48

the time to kind of be

19:50

like, isn't it funny we're playing a generic song? But

19:52

then Spotify runs with it and it's

19:54

like, oh wow, this is so effective

19:57

as generic music that everyone should listen

19:59

to it. Right, and the thing is

20:01

also that when you do listen to that

20:03

generic thing, then the algorithm just thinks you

20:05

want more generic things, and

20:07

it just keeps ping-ponging back and forth

20:09

until we're just in this sort of

20:12

beige, blonde wood, lo-fi

20:14

beats, generic world. Yeah, it's just

20:16

like, of course it becomes narrower

20:19

and more homogenized. All we're

20:21

being exposed to is what

20:23

the algorithmic system is showing us. You

20:27

can probably see the effects of all of

20:29

this for yourself. It's hard

20:31

to get Spotify to play something that

20:33

sounds different than what you've listened to

20:35

before. Netflix only suggests

20:37

shows and movies and genres

20:40

you've already watched. Your

20:42

TikTok for You page has you

20:44

pegged, and Instagram is awash in

20:46

ads for stuff you've already bought.

20:49

But the algorithmic feeds aren't just

20:51

serving blandness online. They're

20:53

altering our physical world, too. And

20:57

when we return, we head back to

20:59

the perfect place to see it happen. Can

21:02

I have a cappuccino? With

21:04

regular milk. Small. All

21:07

podcasts should be recorded in coffee shops.

21:16

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21:19

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21:21

use it to buy the new Apple Vision

21:23

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21:25

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21:28

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21:31

open a high-yield savings account. Apply

21:33

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available to Apple Card owners subject to

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22:22

Kyle had a theory about the generic coffee

22:24

shop. Over time, I came

22:27

to the conclusion that what was

22:29

behind the aesthetic and what was

22:31

behind the homogeneity was digital platforms.

22:34

But I still wasn't sure that I was totally

22:36

right. I wanted to kind of report out my

22:38

hunches. So he spoke with

22:40

cafe owners all over the world about

22:42

their shops and what they looked like

22:45

and what their customers wanted and how

22:47

they advertised and on and on. What

22:49

he found is that going into the

22:51

2000s, as the internet was starting to

22:53

spread, you still had distinctive local coffee

22:55

shop styles all around the world. If

22:58

you went to Scandinavia, you'd find a

23:00

minimalist blonde wood mid-century cozy aesthetic. Australia

23:02

created its own cafe culture featuring flat

23:04

whites and avocado toast. And

23:06

there was the steampunk inflected Edison bulbs

23:08

and raw wood decor of Brooklyn. And

23:11

the internet made it easy for the people

23:13

in these scenes to discover one another. So

23:16

I think first it created a web. Instagram

23:19

early on was this way that all

23:22

these different coffee shop owners connected to

23:24

each other so they could suddenly find

23:26

each other and see how, you know,

23:28

the barista in Berlin was making his

23:30

latte art versus the guy in Sydney.

23:33

It was a classic cultural exchange

23:36

happening over great distances at hyperspeed.

23:38

Cafe owners were globalizing, borrowing

23:40

from their faraway colleagues. But

23:43

once the algorithmic feed switched

23:45

on, baristas discovered that customer

23:48

demands were changing too. As

23:51

this community of coffee shop

23:53

creators came together, consumers

23:55

also started expecting similar

23:58

things from each one. Like,

24:01

there's a kind of singular

24:03

cappuccino format that

24:05

the consumer who's like very Instagram-savvy comes

24:07

to expect. Did they like feel like

24:10

people were coming in and being like,

24:12

do you have a flat white? Yes,

24:14

absolutely. These things very quickly became an

24:17

expectation of every coffee shop. Like

24:20

you kind of went from never knowing

24:22

avocado toast existed to it

24:24

being the most universal millennial-coated

24:26

food item that has ever

24:28

existed in the space of

24:30

like three years. So cafes

24:32

were feeling pressure to have the same menu,

24:35

but they were also feeling pressure to

24:37

look a certain way in real

24:39

life, but even more importantly,

24:42

online. As I talked to the cafe

24:44

owners, there's like certain ways in which

24:46

they have to conform. So

24:49

the first digital space that they have to conform

24:51

to is Google. Like they have

24:54

to be findable on Google search. They have

24:56

to make sure the photos on their Google

24:58

maps listing are good and like look nice.

25:01

And then a lot of them talked

25:03

about this pressure to be on

25:05

Instagram and post the top-down snapshots

25:07

of cappuccinos and latte art and

25:09

the nice natural light. If they

25:11

didn't do it, what happened?

25:14

One, they were gonna get far fewer new

25:17

visitors, like particular for

25:19

tourists traveling through some of these

25:21

cities, they weren't gonna like catch

25:23

their attention as successfully if

25:25

they didn't have the good photos and

25:27

the high star rating. The

25:29

threat of it too, I think is like failing

25:32

to stay in people's minds almost. And it

25:34

meant that they just had to like talk

25:37

the Instagram talk. You might

25:40

be listening to this and thinking, okay,

25:42

fine. Your business has to be

25:44

on Google maps. Maybe for whatever

25:46

reason, you even decided it has to be

25:49

on Instagram, but what makes it so it

25:51

has to be on Google or

25:53

Instagram or Yelp with the

25:55

exact same aesthetic as everyone

25:57

else. Why couldn't you do... something

26:00

different. Why do you have to do

26:02

minimalism and fiber art and cold brew?

26:05

Why can't you just do your own thing?

26:08

And you could. But there are risks.

26:11

One is that a platform like Instagram might

26:13

not surface your posts. The

26:15

economic incentives of algorithmic

26:18

feeds is like you will only get

26:20

attention and therefore money if you conform

26:22

to the most successful trips of this

26:24

platform. But the other maybe

26:27

even bigger risk is that you might

26:29

turn off your potential customers. The people

26:31

on the other side of the algorithm

26:34

looking for a coffee shop or

26:36

a restaurant or an Airbnb or

26:38

a piece of furniture or a

26:40

wall hanging. They'll be so used

26:42

to a particular aesthetic to certain

26:44

signifiers of quality and style. They

26:46

might ignore you if you don't

26:48

display them. And that

26:51

includes a customer like Kyle. Yeah,

26:53

I feel like I'm guilty of using

26:56

this to judge places as well. I

26:58

still prefer that generic aesthetic. I'm like,

27:00

oh man, this place doesn't have subway

27:03

tiles. This must suck. And

27:06

this is the really confounding thing about

27:08

the rise of the generic space. The

27:10

reason Kyle's been chasing it down like

27:12

Moby Dick. It's a

27:14

window into the homogenizing effect

27:16

algorithmic feeds are having on

27:18

culture experiences and locations. Yes.

27:21

But it's also a window into

27:23

the homogenizing effect they're having on

27:25

us. So

27:29

I told you about how Kyle's obsession with

27:31

the generic coffee shop started when he was

27:33

traveling all over the world as a young

27:35

journalist on assignment. And he had a ritual

27:38

whenever he would arrive in a new place. I

27:41

would open Yelp or Google Maps,

27:44

and I would search in the little search bar

27:46

hipster coffee shop that knew exactly what

27:48

I was talking about. And

27:50

it could just deliver the results of these

27:53

generic minimalist coffee shops that I was looking for.

27:57

He liked the places the algorithm found

27:59

for him. They made coffee

28:01

he liked. They had good Wi-Fi.

28:03

He could do work there. He

28:05

felt comfortable in them. But

28:07

over time, his feelings about them got

28:10

more complicated. I was both

28:12

looking for these cafes, and I liked

28:14

them and enjoyed being in them, and

28:16

I was grossed out. I

28:18

was both grossed out at the generic

28:20

quality of the design, and I became

28:23

increasingly grossed out at myself for

28:26

gravitating toward these spaces and maybe

28:28

enjoying them as much as I

28:30

did. I mean, I think it's

28:32

also so interesting is that obviously those spaces

28:34

are so uncomfortable

28:38

to so many people who

28:40

aren't affluent

28:42

millennials with their Apple

28:45

laptops. For sure. I think people often

28:47

describe them as oppressive because they feel

28:49

like they can't fit within it. There's

28:51

no tolerance for humanity

28:54

or diversity or difference. I'm

28:56

impugning myself when I say

28:58

this too. I think, holistically,

29:01

actually, it's not different than McDonald's.

29:03

Everyone's like, America,

29:06

we're exporting McDonald's to Paris and

29:08

Rome and China and all these

29:10

places that have their own culture.

29:12

It's not different. It's

29:15

just like coffee shops because they

29:17

have a different class signifier. They

29:19

resonate in a different way, but it's

29:21

just about going somewhere

29:23

else and just wanting

29:25

the same thing. Somehow, that's been

29:27

dressed up as being sophisticated. I

29:30

mean, I had this literal experience in

29:32

Paris where there's tons of

29:34

beautiful Parisian cafes that are historic,

29:36

and yet you go and get

29:38

a cappuccino and you're like, oh,

29:40

the espresso is dark roast and

29:42

burnt tasting and the foam is

29:45

too foamy. Clearly, this French cappuccino

29:47

is not what I wanted.

29:49

Then three blocks down the

29:51

way, there is a Parisian

29:53

cafe that was opened by

29:55

a bunch of Australians. It

29:58

has the perfect microphone cap and and

30:00

the ceramic vessels and the avocado toast.

30:03

I'm like, which ones did I choose

30:05

most often? Obviously the Australian

30:07

one, because it's like authentic

30:10

to my taste. This

30:12

is key. It's authentic

30:14

to Kyle's taste, or

30:17

rather the version of his

30:19

taste that he and

30:21

all the rest of us

30:23

have allowed the algorithms to help

30:25

mold. Ultimately, my

30:28

underlying theory is that

30:31

in the same way that cafes

30:33

became generic, or we've seen the

30:35

homogenization of cultural forums, like ourselves

30:37

are becoming more generic as well.

30:40

Like we are being flattened.

30:42

We are being made to

30:45

be more similar and less individual and

30:47

less interesting in a way because

30:50

of this hyper-globalization. The

30:52

generic coffee shop isn't just influenced

30:54

by the internet. It's become a

30:56

microcosm of it. But it's one you

30:58

can actually see and touch and smell, and

31:01

so it makes the homogenization happening there in

31:04

all its stultification, as plain

31:06

as the macchiato in front of

31:08

your face. And I mean,

31:10

I think the great problem with

31:12

the situation is that unusualness and

31:14

difference and like surprise and like

31:17

discomfort are core to what makes

31:19

culture valuable. And us interesting. Yes.

31:23

We are not interesting people when we

31:25

are just like going to the Australian

31:27

derived coffee shop. We

31:29

had this fantasy that being exposed to

31:32

everything online would make us more urbane

31:34

and intelligent, open-minded and even open-hearted. That

31:36

having the world at our fingertips is

31:38

something we would use to its fullest

31:41

advantage. A fantasy that we would want

31:43

to hook up to the mainframe like

31:45

Neo and the Matrix and let knowledge

31:48

just gush into us. This

31:50

was ignoring all the scungy, dark, vile

31:52

stuff that would have gushed in too,

31:55

but it was also ignoring the truth

31:58

that we can be satisfied. specified with

32:01

so much less. I

32:04

guess I'm curious, do you feel totally alienated from

32:06

the coffee shop experience? I mean, coffee

32:08

shops are a large part of my

32:10

life, I would say. I'm really committed

32:12

to my coffee shop going. So

32:15

I still enjoy those spaces and I still

32:17

like, that defines my

32:19

aesthetic of what a good coffee shop

32:21

is sometimes. And I still look for

32:23

the subway tiles. I still want

32:26

the latte art. I

32:28

love a good ceramic bowl for

32:30

my cappuccino. It almost feels like

32:32

I've seen outside of the matrix, but I'm still

32:34

happy in it. You're the guy who's like, I

32:36

just want a steak, I don't care that it's

32:39

not real. It's

32:43

really hard to buck your taste, however

32:46

it got made. That's the

32:48

latte art. You did it underneath the cap,

32:50

it's a heart. So pretty.

32:53

Like a beautiful surprise. This

32:59

is Decoder Ring. I'm Willa Paskin. If

33:02

you have any cultural mysteries you want

33:04

us to decode, please email us at

33:06

decoderring at slate.com. This

33:09

episode was written by me and produced

33:11

by me and Katie Shepard. Decoder Ring

33:14

is produced by me, Katie Shepard and

33:16

Evan Chung. Derek John is executive producer.

33:18

Merit Jacob is senior technical director. I'd

33:21

also like to thank Ben Frisch and Patrick Ford.

33:24

And I'd also like to direct you to go by

33:26

Kyle Chica's book, Filterworld, How Algorithms

33:28

Are Flattening Culture. What we

33:31

talked about here is just a small part

33:33

of the book which dives into these ideas

33:35

in so much more depth and breadth. Go

33:38

get it and then spiral about your taste

33:40

for weeks, but like in a productive

33:42

and good way. If

33:45

you haven't yet, please subscribe and rate our

33:47

Feed and Apple Podcasts or wherever you get

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your podcasts. And even better, tell

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the show, I'd also love for you to sign up

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Decoder Ring without any ads and your support is crucial

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to our work. So go to slayt.com

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slash Decoder Plus to join Slayt Plus today. That's all for now. See you

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