Sunday, November 26, 2006
(4:56 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
The Coffee Singularity
It would seem that in my neighborhood, there are six coffee shops in the space of two city blocks. Outside of this primary concentration, there are several satellite areas where one or two coffee shops can be found. There are two possible outcomes for this situation. The simplest would be that certain coffee shops would be driven out of business by market pressures. The disadvantage of this solution is that it assumes a relatively stable underlying demand for coffee, such that the number of coffee shops can, in the long term, be brought into proper relation to it.The other outcome is more likely: namely, that the increased number of coffee shops will produce an increased demand for coffee. There are several vacant storefronts in the neighborhood that could easily be converted into coffee shops -- the "general store" that's been closed since I moved here, along with the "big and tall" store that is currently in the process of closing. These businesses belong to the "old economy." When they are converted to coffee shops, our neighborhood will become a major hub in the "new economy" -- producing not discrete commodities, but rather time itself in the form of sleeplessness. This will create a feedback loop prompting the coffee shops to stay open 24 hours; local residents will flock to them desperately, sensing that a headache of world-historical proportions awaits them if they allow caffeine withdrawal the slightest foothold.
Certainly we all laughed at The Onion's invocation of Starbucks' "sinister phase two" -- meaning that it struck a chord in our political unconscious. Yet it is only now that we are beginning to understand that Starbucks is not the primary agent in this "phase two" of coffee culture -- indeed, is just as much caught in the flow of events as anyone else. As our bodies adjust to the historic shift of coffee from a breakfast beverage to an all-purpose social and professional lubricant, biology and economics begin to work together to produce a condition that can only be described as the wholesale zombification of the populations of the advanced capitalist countries.
We knew this was coming, this zombification. We may have originally expected it to come from the United Kingdom -- an understandable mistake -- but now we recognize that the "England" of the zombie movies is but a cipher for "late capital" as such. Similarly, we may have expected zombification to take hold first of all in a suburban shopping mall -- but again, we can now see that the "truth" of the shopping mall is in fact the urban "main drag" that has itself become re-suburbanized, the high incidence of Potbelly's outlets in our erstwhile urban centers serving as something of an index of the progress of this latter process. That it would happen precisely here, precisely in Chicago, has taken me -- and probably all of us -- a little bit off guard. We must, however, leave the analysis of the inner necessity of this occurence to future generations -- now is not the time for historical reflection, but for the stockpiling of ammunition.
