The late Habermas, theorizing the public sphere, rendered the coffeehouses of the past as discursive hubs, places of free exchange, with every caffeine-head a constitutionalist of sorts. It was a nicely situated ideal, pulled from the annals of eighteenth-century English history — all that yak and verbal sparring hemming in the dull, unimaginative control of autocrats and bureaucrats at large. Joseph Addison and Richard Steele convened a “little senate” at Button’s coffeehouse; writers quarreled over the “ancients and moderns” at Will’s; regulars at London’s three thousand coffeehouses “assumed to themselves a liberty,” per Charles II, “endeavouring to create and nourish an universal jealousie and dissatisfaction in the minds of all His Majesties good subjects.” Their gab spilled onto the pages of London’s burgeoning weeklies and journals, sometimes quite directly. There was even, affixed to the west side of Button’s, a gilded lion’s head through whose jaws patrons could slip letters and commentary to be published in The Guardian. For over a hundred years, from London to Cairo to Vienna, it was as if citizens were sipping and chattering their way to a more democratic future. 

Now, for our troubles, we get Blank Street Coffee — that V.C.-backed, ruthlessly efficient, seafoam-green revenge against any existing remnants of cafe culture. Anti-rumpled and anti-eccentric, Blank Street™ organizes city life into 350-square-foot storage lockers for private-equity capital and automated Swiss coffee machines designed to reduce training and labor costs. Blank Street storefronts seem to spring up overnight and disappear just as quickly, opening and shuttering in the East Village, vacating Brooklyn’s McCarren Parkhouse. 

There’s much that’s impossible or inconceivable in a Blank Street: fanning out a newspaper; that Jamesian ceremony known as afternoon tea; largesse of any kind. Space, talk, the authentic, the de trop, the real: all jettisoned. A window counter in Midtown fits only a Trader Joe’s bag and a strung-out college student in sweats and headphones. Social atomization is here perfectly maintained. Minimum overhead, minimum interaction. The Robert D. Putnam reissue might be Buying Coffee Alone. 

Social scientists have yet to establish the precise link between the rise of fake coffeehouses and fake discourse. Yet somewhere along the road to Blank Street, a democratic faith in spontaneous talk, in banter, in spitballing, in bull sessions, in impractical visions got lost. In downtown bars, groups of podcasters and personalities thought they had recaptured this freewheeling spirit. But for all their irreverent, ironic talk, they forgot that speech has the capacity to create new constituencies, not just shock and polarize or flatter them. 

The arrival of the automated coffee machines coincided with the primacy of a set of automated ideas — a warmed-over liberal sympathy that offered barren commonplaces, or, more sinisterly, transactional currency for the elite and professional classes. By now, we are ready for souped-up artificial intelligence to do the thinking and the convening for us. We’ve entered A.I. Mode. It’s a wonder we still drink anything. (Cue OpenAI’s Sam Altman: “It takes like twenty years of life and all of the food you eat during that time before you get smart,” versus the mere half-liter of water a plagiarized ChatGPT college essay might require.) Nonhuman actors, not tepid editors and downtown contrarians, are fabricating public opinion on the sly. Bots and mercenary posters crowd out and drive discourse. A.I. summaries wipe out search traffic, even while mining the content of the same publications they are decimating. A.I.-ese, in turn, pollutes journalistic writing, instances emerging from outlets as varied as The New York Times, Architectural Digest, and Wired. Human voices battle their simulacra and increasingly become hard to distinguish from them. The latter train on us, and we perhaps retrain on them. Gmail spits out canned replies with our unfurnished personal details, mimicking our tones; ChatGPT punctuates its calm reassurances with yellow heart emojis. Odd that God did not engrave the Ten Commandments as a set of bullet points. 

It turns out Blank Street was named all too aptly by whatever neo-modern deity of seed rounds. It has the ring of a new cohort that Tom Wolfe should be brought back to chronicle: blank streets, blank stares, a blank generation. If the millennial social manner was exemplified by a cheerful, impersonal friendliness — feigning intimacy and informality through lols and girlish upspeak — the voice arising from the next generation, or from their precocious, Big Tech-sculpted hollowness, is a flatter, more arid text-to-speech style. 

Today, human voices transform into muted words flashing on screens, or Jenny Holzer LED signs made banal. Phones and new promises of fifteen seconds of fame mediate public encounters: “I know your videos from TikTok!” Conversation is one-sided, the lines pre-scripted. It has all been spoken in varying configurations a thousand times before. 

While Rome burned, they drank tasteless coffee and paid more for it than ever. They spoke little but cant. Or they were spoken for in a new post-democratic argot, dreamt up for them by dueling LLMs.