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The first home computers date back to the 1970s, but they didn’t go mainstream until the 1980s. That was years before most people had heard of the internet, let alone connected to it. So home computers sat in studies and bedrooms, isolated from one another.
To the extent that content was shared at all between users, it was on cassette tapes swapped in school playgrounds – and laboriously uploaded via a tape-chewing cassette recorder. Most of the time it wasn’t even worth trying, because the various makes of computer were incompatible. Software that worked on one kind of computer would not work on the others because their operating systems were different.
When it became easier to share data and software – thanks first to the floppy disk and then the dial-up internet connection – the profusion of incompatible formats became untenable. It became obvious that one of them would emerge as the industry standard, unlocking the benefits of inter-operability and therefore acquiring unstoppable momentum. It was, of course, the PC format and Windows operating system that took the prize. Most of the rival systems withered away, rendered obsolete by the network effect.
At first sight, none of this would seem to have anything to do with the interior design of 21st-century coffee shops. But bear with me as I unpack a thought-provoking article on the subject by Kyle Chayka for The Verge.
Chayka’s argument is that posh coffee shops and similar upmarket venues are coming to resemble one another no matter where they are in the world:
“The new cafe resembles all the other coffee shops Foursquare suggests, whether in Odessa, Beijing, Los Angeles, or Seoul: the same raw wood tables, exposed brick, and hanging Edison bulbs.
“It’s not that these generic cafes are part of global chains like Starbucks or Costa Coffee, with designs that spring from the same corporate cookie cutter. Rather, they have all independently decided to adopt the same faux-artisanal aesthetic.”
Thanks to social media, shared expectations can be created as to how high status social spaces ought to look. Needless to say, it’s not just coffee shops but also bars, restaurants, airport lounges, co-working facilities, hotels and Airbnb apartments. They share the same “hallmarks… of comfort and quality”:
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