Decoder Ring - Why Do So Many Coffee Shops Look the Same?
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Slate
3.9 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 14 February 2024
⏱️ 30 minutes
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Summary
The eerie similarity of coffee shops all over the world was so confounding to Kyle Chayka that it led him to write the new book Filterworld: How Algorithms Are Flattening Culture. In today’s episode, Kyle’s going to walk us through the recent history of the cafe, to help us see how digital behavior is altering a physical space hundreds of years older than the internet itself, and how those changes are happening everywhere—it’s just easier to see them when they’re spelled out in latte art.
This episode was written by Willa Paskin and produced by Katie Shepherd. Decoder Ring is produced by Willa Paskin, Katie Shepherd and Evan Chung. Derek John is Executive Producer. Merritt Jacob is Senior Technical Director. Special thanks to Ben Frisch and Patrick Fort.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi Kyle. |
| 0:08.0 | Hello, how's it going? |
| 0:10.0 | How are you? |
| 0:11.0 | Thank you so much for doing this. |
| 0:12.0 | Of course, I love coffee shops. |
| 0:14.1 | Kyle Chika is a staff writer at the New Yorker, |
| 0:17.5 | and we met up in December of 2023 |
| 0:19.6 | at a cafe on Manhattan's Lower East Side. |
| 0:23.0 | What's your order? |
| 0:25.0 | Usually a cappuccino, like as small a cappuccino as possible. |
| 0:29.0 | Kyle has spent a lot of time in coffee shops. |
| 0:32.0 | He's fascinated by them. |
| 0:33.8 | A thing that draws me to coffee shops |
| 0:35.5 | is there's such centers of like displays of tastes and culture. |
| 0:39.0 | They're almost like multi-sensory art museums |
| 0:41.7 | for the taste of the moment. |
| 0:44.0 | He works in them when he's at home and abroad. |
| 0:46.2 | And around 2015, 2016, he started to notice something about all of them. |
| 0:51.6 | Whenever I would travel for work as a freelance journalist, I would go to all of them. Whenever I would travel for work |
| 0:53.0 | as a freelance journalist, I would go |
| 0:54.4 | to all these different cities around the world. |
| 0:57.0 | And wherever I would land, I could always |
... |
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