On the morning that I spoke to Kyle Chaco, I dropped my son off at preschool and stopped

to get some coffee on the way to work. And I wanted Kyle to try to guess what the

coffee shop that I went to looked like. I wondered if that was something he

could do. I think so. I mean I'm going to use my mental

magician powers and say that there was some hanging pendant lamps that may have had

Edison bulbs in them. There might have been some white subway tiles on the wall

behind the counter, which might be like a nice marble or even concrete,

if it's really cool.

Some nice reclaimed wood furniture or some vintage

bit century pieces that make you feel like you're in a nice hotel from 1955, and then probably some nice ceramic cups that your

cappuccino comes in.

It was a latte to go, but the rest of this description is pretty spot on.

Because Kyle has thought a lot about what particular signifiers a coffee shop today might

possess.

He's a staff writer at the New Yorker and and has just written the book, Filter World,

how algorithms flattened culture.

In one part of the book, Kyle talks about how

whenever he was traveling,

he would type hipster coffee shop into Yelp and Google Maps.

Hipster in the 2010s at least was the signifier of kind of

millennial era consumerism and taste.

And the coffee shops all had to kind of project their image

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