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Apple. You earn 3% daily

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the new Apple Vision Pro or any products

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Card in savings by Goldman Sachs Bank

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USA Salt Lake City Branch. Member FDIC.

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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... Already you probably know

2:01

the kind of place Kyle talking about.

2:03

We were having this conversation in the

2:05

kind of place Kyle talking about it.

2:07

Minimalist was muted colors and there's good

2:09

wise I for millennials. And Zuma as

2:12

on their laptop is avocado toast on

2:14

the menu and so me. drinks just

2:16

ready for their photo op. could always

2:18

order a cappuccino escobar they are you

2:20

could get a quarter of you on

2:23

and would you like death? Just say

2:25

that way. like the. Kyle

2:27

started think of these places as

2:29

quote generic. Coffee shops like

2:32

oh, look. I'm in

2:34

another generic coffee shop and no

2:36

one had Soldiers Cafes or for

2:38

Sam Servo a parent company like

2:40

a Starbucks to build your house

2:42

or break the American flag. I

2:44

guess there's a there's a tipping

2:46

point at which I realize that

2:49

was weird that they all look

2:51

the Sam another all conforming to

2:53

this on standard. It was so

2:55

odd he figured it would. Go. Away. Like

2:57

I I thought that this just

2:59

a blip. Essentially, you know for

3:01

some reason this was popular right

3:03

now and it would disappear and

3:05

disappear and be no things and

3:08

go back to how they were

3:10

before. But that is not what

3:12

happened. Then they just kept spreading

3:14

like this. that it was spreading

3:16

it's tentacles farther and farther. And

3:20

I'll it wasn't just coffee shops. This

3:30

is decoder ring I will have hoskin

3:32

the same enough of coffee shops all

3:34

over the world with silken sounding to

3:36

Kyle take us since send him down

3:38

a rabbit hole one so deep that

3:40

resulted in him writing a book called.

3:42

Filter World. How algorithms are

3:44

flattening culture. It's about how

3:46

the internet is seeping out.

3:48

Haste in coffee shops and also

3:51

in way more than that. in

3:53

today's episode kyle's gonna walk us through

3:55

the recent history as a cafe to

3:58

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

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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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4:55

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

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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. Like

8:00

think about. The other kinds of coffee

8:02

shop spaces that existed even in the

8:04

nineties layer the others diners or like

8:07

a college coffee shop with really gross

8:09

couch as a system of and then

8:11

you know there's just were independent coffee

8:14

shops where. Things. Are looked

8:16

different in every single one. Yeah arena

8:18

think it was like local. It was

8:20

much more localized about where I like

8:22

he would have. Worked. From

8:24

local artists on the walls. that was

8:26

awesome. Not very. goes. And then like there's the

8:28

friends cast say when it's like the kind of. Chairs

8:30

with i can sell that like

8:32

high tops would sound than on

8:34

them upholstery like there were like

8:37

people making design choices that we're

8:39

not all. Identical.

8:43

I. Don't want to overstate the glory

8:45

of the nineteen nineties or two

8:47

thousand coffee shop couches could be

8:49

rank. The lighting could be them,

8:51

the coffee could be burnt and the

8:54

food com with a lot of sprouts

8:56

but if you want to one in

8:58

another state let alone in another country

9:00

it would have been. Weird for

9:03

it to be exactly like

9:05

your local spots. And I know

9:07

that because I thought it. Was weird.

9:10

I don't travel nearly as much

9:12

as Kyle, but I visited Nashville

9:14

and I remember going into a

9:17

coffee shop here. The minimalist serious

9:19

about the beans and the cappuccino

9:21

was thinking i've been in a

9:23

cafe exactly like this. And

9:26

then cafes exactly like this started

9:28

to be most to the cafes

9:30

or rounds. I never did anything

9:33

with this observation. a Kyle he

9:35

had to figure out what was.

9:37

Going on. Why?

9:39

And how did these

9:42

funky, unique, not entirely

9:44

reliable, occasionally unkempt coffee

9:46

shops. Converge. The

9:48

generic coffee shop event years ago at

9:50

my job, Moby Dick, or some settings.

9:52

It's like verse the the idea of

9:54

been chasing and a lot of writing.

9:57

He realized pretty quickly that the answer.

9:59

To what is. happened to coffee shops couldn't

10:01

just be found inside of coffee

10:03

shops. Instead, it was all

10:05

caught up with a phenomenon that seems really

10:08

different. Over the course

10:10

of the 90s, you saw

10:12

the invention and development of

10:14

the proto-mainstream internet. I mean,

10:16

what is internet 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 need

12:13

to show you what you wanted to see.

12:16

And as helpful as algorithms

12:18

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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savings will vary. So

15:20

when did you see the generic coffee shop aesthetic really

15:22

take off? So I think in

15:25

the early, early 2010s, more and

15:27

more culture was moving online. Our

15:29

consumption of culture was increasingly flowing

15:32

through Twitter and Instagram and Tumblr

15:35

and YouTube. But then I

15:37

really point the kind of acceleration of this

15:39

culture to 2015-2016, which is when all

15:44

of the feeds of YouTube,

15:46

of Instagram, of Facebook, kind

15:49

of make the switch to becoming more

15:51

algorithmic. Rather than

15:53

just having a chronological list

15:55

of every Facebook update that

15:57

happened over the past day, the feeds

16:00

would start recommending content to you based

16:02

on what you had already engaged with.

16:05

Kyle thinks this is an extremely important transition

16:07

because it changed the whole way

16:09

we're oriented towards the internet. Instead

16:12

of going out and selecting what we

16:14

want to see, now the

16:16

platform decides for us. The

16:19

message of algorithmic feeds of social

16:21

networks was like, we will give

16:23

you what you like. We

16:25

will approximate your desires and tastes

16:27

and preferences and customize

16:30

and personalize something for you. The

16:32

TikTok feed is literally called for you.

16:35

And of course, they're not doing this to be nice. They're

16:38

doing it so we'll stay on the platform for

16:40

as long as possible. Over

16:42

the years, a lot of attention has been paid to the

16:44

way engagement is driven by outrage, by

16:47

things that provoke us, that we

16:49

really mind. But Kyle thinks that

16:51

shortchange is something even more common,

16:54

how engagement is driven by

16:56

mindlessness. I mean, I

16:58

think there's like different forms of mindlessness. One

17:02

form of mindlessness is the ambient

17:05

lo-fi chill hip-hop beats, which

17:07

is like, you're pointedly not

17:09

supposed to pay attention to them. You

17:11

are doing some other task or using

17:14

them as backgrounds. So it's like an

17:16

unobtrusive, you know, wash of sounds that

17:18

you can live on top of, essentially.

17:21

And then there's a different quality where

17:23

it's like the mindlessness of paying attention.

17:27

You're so immersed in paying attention to

17:29

an Instagram reel or a TikTok video

17:32

that you have no other thoughts in

17:34

your mind. Mindlessness

17:36

is the bread and butter of social

17:38

media platforms. There's a fugue

17:40

state when you're trapped in

17:42

the infinite scroll on the

17:45

one hand and the ignorable

17:47

perpetual Spotify backing track on the

17:49

other. And though there

17:51

are punctuating exceptions, in general, the

17:53

platforms don't want to serve you

17:55

anything that will snap you out

17:58

of either of these Because.

18:01

The ultimate goal of all the spot for hims is

18:03

just to keep you. Looking. At

18:05

the staff are listening to the

18:08

staff it's guiding use horde the

18:10

most bland saying are the least

18:12

offensive thing or they're the most

18:14

unobtrusive. bang. In writing is

18:17

but I'll talk to me as isn't

18:19

meme. Dame Krakowski, who has first hand

18:21

experience with the platforms preference for the

18:23

innocuous, even was a drummer. And indeed,

18:26

Dream Hop and Galaxy Five hundred.

18:29

They put out some influential albums. In the

18:31

late Nineteen eighties and very early nineties, they.

18:33

Were minimal, drenched in reverb and sounded

18:35

like nobody else that the time. But

18:37

you want know that based on the

18:39

songs. Bother Fi recommends. Them

18:42

and Sounds That spot. If I

18:44

would only promo the most generic

18:46

tracks by that as. Modify

18:49

algorithm somehow fixated on the

18:51

track strands. Change

18:57

happens in a hit single and had been

18:59

no music video for it didn't sound that

19:02

much like Galaxy Five Hundred. A

19:04

month. Exactly why the algorithm pushed at

19:06

it was because it sounded like a

19:08

generic lack eighties nineties rock bands track

19:10

and I was is ironic conscious choice

19:12

that the band had made at the

19:15

time to kind of like isn't it

19:17

funny were playing a generic song but

19:19

then spot if I run so then

19:21

it's like oh wow this is the

19:23

so effective as generic music that everyone

19:25

should listen to it right in. The

19:28

thing is also that like when you

19:30

do listen to that generic thing as

19:32

and the algorithm just thinks. You want?

19:34

More generic things and it just keeps

19:36

ping mugging back and forth until we're

19:39

just in this. Sort of like. Pays.

19:41

Blonde would lo fi be it's

19:44

generic world Yes. Dislike? Of course

19:46

it becomes narrower and more homogenized

19:48

like all were being exposed to.

19:52

Is what the algorithmic system is showing us.

19:55

You. can probably see that sacks of

19:57

all of this for yourself it's hard

19:59

to Spotify to play something that

20:01

sounds different than what you've listened

20:03

to before. Netflix only

20:05

suggests shows and movies and

20:08

genres you've already watched. Your

20:10

TikTok for You page has

20:12

you pegged and Instagram is

20:14

awash in ads for stuff

20:16

you've already bought. But

20:18

the algorithmic feeds aren't just serving

20:21

blandness online. They're altering

20:23

our physical world too. And when

20:25

we return, we head back to the perfect

20:28

place to see it happen. Can I have

20:30

a cappuccino? It was regular milk,

20:34

small. So like all

20:36

podcasts should be recorded in coffee shops? Hi,

20:47

I'm Una Chaplin and I'm the host

20:49

of a new podcast called Hollywood Exiles.

20:52

It tells the story of how

20:54

my grandfather Charlie Chaplin and many

20:56

others were caught up in a

20:58

campaign to root out communism in

21:01

Hollywood. It's a story

21:03

of glamour and scandal and political

21:05

intrigue and a battle for the

21:07

soul of the nation. Hollywood

21:10

Exiles from CBC podcast and

21:12

the BBC World Service. Find

21:14

it wherever you get your podcasts. The

21:17

history of HIV and AIDS is the history

21:20

of people who were told to stay out

21:22

of sight and who refused. Gay

21:24

men but also injection drug users,

21:27

women and yes children who contracted

21:29

the virus. Join us

21:31

for the series, Blind Spot, The Plague and

21:33

the Shadows. How much pain

21:35

could have been avoided had we

21:38

paid attention sooner and what lessons

21:40

could we have learned from History

21:42

Channel and WNYC Studios? Listen wherever

21:44

you get podcasts. So

21:50

Kyle Had a theory about the generic

21:52

coffee shop. Over Time I Came to

21:54

the conclusion that what was behind the

21:57

aesthetic and what was behind the homogeneity

21:59

was. Digital platforms, but I still

22:01

wasn't sure that I was totally right. I

22:03

wanted to kind of report an hour my

22:06

hunt says. Till he spoke with

22:08

cafe owners all over the world about

22:10

their shops and what they looked like

22:12

and what their customers won it and

22:14

how they advertised in the and on

22:16

and what he found his a going

22:18

into the two thousands of the internet

22:20

was starting to spread. He still had

22:22

distinctive local coffee shop styles all around

22:24

the world. You want to Scandinavia you'd

22:27

find a minimalist blonde would midcentury cozy

22:29

aesthetic. Australia created it's own half a

22:31

culture. Featuring flat whites and avocado

22:33

toast. And there was the

22:35

steampunk, inflected addison bulbs and raw wood

22:37

decor. Brooklyn and the Internet made it

22:39

easy for the people in these scenes

22:42

to discover one another. So. Thing

22:44

for us to created a web

22:46

Instagram. Early. On was this

22:48

way that. All. These different coffee

22:50

shop owners connected to each other

22:52

so they could suddenly find each

22:54

other and see how you know

22:56

the breweries down. Berlin was making

22:58

his latte art versus the guy

23:00

and said need It was a

23:02

classic cultural exchange happening over great

23:04

distances as hyper speed. Cafe

23:06

owners were globalizing, borrowing from

23:09

their far away colleagues. Once

23:11

the algorithmic feed switched on,

23:13

this researchers discovered that customer

23:15

demands. Were changing to. As.

23:18

This community of coffee

23:20

shop creators came together.

23:22

Consumers also started expecting

23:24

similar things, some each

23:27

one like. There's. A

23:29

kind of singular cappuccino for him.

23:31

Perhaps that the consumer who's like

23:33

very Instagram savvy comes to expect?

23:35

Do they like feel like people

23:38

were coming in and being like

23:40

do you have a flatline? Yes,

23:42

Absolutely. These things very quickly became

23:44

an expectation of every coffee shop.

23:47

Where. You kind of went from never

23:49

knowing of a con artists existed

23:52

to it being the most universal

23:54

Milenio coded food i them that

23:56

has ever existed. and the spaces

23:58

like three years. So cafes

24:00

were feeling pressure to have the same menu,

24:03

but they were also feeling pressure to

24:05

look a certain way, in real

24:07

life, but even more importantly,

24:10

online. As I talked to the cafe

24:12

owners, there's certain ways in which they

24:14

have to conform. So the

24:17

first digital space that they have to conform to

24:19

is Google. They have to

24:21

be findable on Google search. They have

24:23

to make sure the photos on their

24:26

Google Maps listing are good and look

24:28

nice. And then a lot

24:30

of them talked about this pressure

24:32

to be on Instagram. And post

24:34

the top-down snapshots of cappuccinos and

24:36

latte art and the nice natural

24:38

light. If they didn't do it, what

24:41

happened? One, they were gonna get

24:43

far fewer new visitors, like,

24:46

particularly for tourists traveling through some

24:48

of these cities. They weren't

24:50

gonna, like, catch their attention as

24:52

successfully if they didn't have the good

24:54

photos and the high star rating. The

24:57

threat of it, too, I think, is, like, failing

25:00

to stay in people's minds, almost. And it

25:02

meant that they just had to, like, talk

25:05

the Instagram talk. You might

25:07

be listening to this and thinking, okay,

25:10

fine, your business has to be

25:12

on Google Maps. Maybe, for

25:14

whatever reason, you even decided it has to

25:16

be on Instagram. But what

25:18

makes it so, it has to

25:20

be on Google or Instagram or

25:22

Yelp with the exact same aesthetic

25:24

as everyone else. Why

25:26

couldn't you do something different? Why do

25:29

you have to do minimalism and fiber

25:31

art and cold brew? Why

25:33

can't you just do your own thing?

25:36

And you could, but there are risks.

25:39

One is that a platform like

25:41

Instagram might not surface your posts.

25:43

The economic incentives of algorithmic feeds

25:45

is, like, you will only get

25:47

attention and therefore money if you

25:49

conform to the most successful trips

25:51

of this platform. But the

25:53

other, maybe even bigger risk, is that you might

25:56

turn off your potential customers, that the people on

25:58

the other side of the platform side

26:00

of the algorithm, looking for

26:02

a coffee shop or a restaurant

26:04

or an Airbnb or a piece of furniture

26:07

or a wall hanging, they'll be so

26:09

used to a particular aesthetic, to

26:11

certain signifiers of quality and style,

26:13

that they might ignore you if

26:15

you don't display them. And

26:18

that includes a customer like Kyle.

26:21

Yeah, I feel like I'm guilty of using

26:23

this to judge places as well. I

26:26

still prefer that generic aesthetic. I'm like,

26:28

oh man, this place doesn't have subway

26:30

tiles. This must suck. And

26:33

this is the really confounding thing about

26:35

the rise of the generic space. The

26:37

reason Kyle's been chasing it down like

26:39

Moby Dick. It's a

26:41

window into the homogenizing effect algorithmic

26:44

feeds are having on culture, experiences,

26:46

and locations, yes. But

26:49

it's also a window into the

26:51

homogenizing effect they're having on us.

26:56

So I told you about how Kyle's obsession

26:58

with the generic coffee shop started when he

27:00

was traveling all over the world as a

27:03

young journalist on assignment. And

27:05

he had a ritual whenever he would arrive in

27:07

a new place. I would open

27:09

Yelp or Google Maps and

27:11

I would search in the little search bar

27:14

hipster coffee shop that knew exactly what I

27:16

was talking about. And it

27:18

could just deliver the results of these

27:21

generic minimalist coffee shops that I was looking

27:23

for. He liked the places

27:25

the algorithm found for him. They

27:28

made coffee he liked. They had good

27:30

Wi-Fi. He could do work

27:32

there. He felt comfortable in them. But

27:35

over time his feelings about them got

27:37

more complicated. I was both

27:39

looking for these cafes and I liked

27:42

them and enjoyed being in them and

27:44

I was grossed out. I

27:46

was both grossed out at the generic

27:48

quality of the design and I became

27:50

increasingly grossed out at myself for

27:54

gravitating toward these spaces and maybe

27:56

enjoying them as much as I

27:58

did. I mean I think it's also so interesting. interesting

28:00

is that obviously those spaces are

28:02

so uncomfortable to

28:06

so many people who aren't

28:08

like affluent

28:10

millennials with their Apple

28:12

laptops. For sure. I think

28:14

people often describe them as oppressive because they

28:16

feel like they can't fit within it. Like

28:20

there's no tolerance for humanity

28:22

or diversity or difference. I'm

28:24

impugning myself when I say this

28:26

too. I think like holistically,

28:29

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

28:32

Everyone's like, ugh, America, we're exporting

28:34

McDonald's to Paris and Rome and

28:36

China and all these places that

28:38

have their own culture. It's

28:40

like, it's not different. It's

28:43

just like coffee shops because they have a

28:45

different class signifier. They resonate in

28:47

a different way, but it's just like, it's just

28:49

about going somewhere else

28:52

and just wanting the same thing. And

28:54

somehow that's been dressed up as being

28:57

sophisticated. I mean, I had this literal

28:59

experience in Paris where there's

29:01

tons of beautiful Parisian cafes that are

29:03

historic and yet you go and get

29:05

a cappuccino and you're like, oh, the

29:07

espresso is dark roast and burnt tasting

29:09

and the foam is too foamy. Like

29:12

clearly this French cappuccino is

29:14

not what I wanted.

29:17

And then three blocks down the way,

29:20

there is like a Parisian cafe that

29:22

was opened by a bunch of Australians.

29:25

I'm like, it has the perfect microphones

29:27

cappuccino and the ceramic vessels and the

29:29

avocado toast. I'm like, which ones did

29:31

I choose most often? Obviously

29:34

the Australian one, because it's like

29:37

authentic to my taste. This

29:40

is key. It's authentic

29:42

to Kyle's taste or

29:44

rather the version of his

29:46

taste that he and

29:48

all the rest of us

29:50

have allowed the algorithms to

29:53

help mold. Ultimately,

29:55

my underlying theory is that

29:57

in the same way that cafes are,

29:59

I think, very became generic or we've

30:01

seen the homogenization of cultural

30:03

forums, like ourselves are becoming

30:05

more generic as well. We

30:09

are being flattened. We are being made

30:12

to be more similar and less

30:14

individual and less interesting in a

30:17

way because of this hyper-globalization. The

30:20

generic coffee shop isn't just influenced by

30:22

the internet. It's become a microcosm of

30:24

it. But it's one you can actually

30:26

see and touch and smell. And so

30:28

it makes the homogenization happening there in

30:31

all its stultification as plain

30:33

as the macchiato in front of

30:36

your face. And I mean,

30:38

I think the great problem with

30:40

the situation is that unusualness and

30:42

difference and like surprise and like

30:45

discomfort are core to what makes

30:47

culture valuable. And us interesting. Yes.

30:51

We are not interesting people when we

30:53

are just like going to the Australian-derived

30:55

coffee shop. We

30:57

had this fantasy that being exposed to

30:59

everything online would make us more urbane

31:02

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

31:05

having the world at our fingertips is

31:07

something we would use to its fullest

31:09

advantage. A fantasy that we would want

31:11

to hook up to the mainframe, like

31:13

Neo and the Matrix, and let knowledge

31:15

just gush into us. This

31:18

was ignoring all the scungy, dark, vile

31:20

stuff that would have gushed in too.

31:23

But it was also ignoring the truth

31:26

that we can be satisfied with

31:29

so much less. I

31:31

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

31:34

the coffee shop experience? I mean, coffee

31:36

shops are a large part of my

31:38

life, I would say. I'm really committed

31:40

to my coffee shop going. So

31:42

like I still enjoy those spaces and I

31:44

still like that defines

31:46

my aesthetic of what a good coffee

31:48

shop is sometimes. And like I still

31:50

look for the subway tiles. I

31:53

still want the latte art. Like I

31:55

love a good ceramic bowl for

31:57

my cappuccino. It almost feels like I am.

32:00

I've like seen outside of the matrix, but

32:02

I'm still happy. I was

32:04

like, I just want to steak. I don't care that it's

32:06

not real. It's

32:11

really hard to buck your taste. However,

32:14

it got made. It's

32:17

beautiful. You did it underneath the cap. It's a heart.

32:21

Like a beautiful surprise. This

32:27

is decoder ring. I'm Willa Paskin. If

32:29

you have any cultural mysteries you want

32:31

us to decode, please email us at

32:34

decoderring at slate.com. This

32:37

episode was written by me and produced

32:39

by me and Katie Shepherd. Decoder ring

32:41

is produced by me, Katie Shepherd and

32:43

Evan John. Derek John is executive producer.

32:46

Mary Jacob is senior technical director.

32:48

I'd also like to thank Ben Frisch and

32:50

Patrick Ford. And I'd also like to

32:52

direct you to go by Kyle Jacob's book, Filter

32:55

World, How Algorithms Are Flattening

32:57

Culture. What we talked about here

32:59

is just a small part of the book

33:01

which dives into these ideas in so much

33:04

more depth and breath. Go get it

33:06

and then spiral about your taste for

33:08

weeks, but like in a productive

33:10

and good way. If

33:12

you haven't yet, please subscribe and rate our

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