On the morning that I spoke to Kyle Cheka, 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 were 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

mid-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 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 online through these apps,

like Yelp or Google Maps.

So it was a kind of like index.

I could use the phrase through the search

algorithm, through Yelps rankings and star ratings to find exactly what I was looking for.

...