I used to live next to a bar. A few times a week, I'd take my laptop down there, grab a beer, maybe order dinner, and code. Over a year or so of doing that, I t

I used to live next to a bar. A few times a week, I'd take my laptop down there, grab a beer, maybe order dinner, and code. Over a year or so of doing that, I think maybe two or three people attempted to strike up conversations. Now, that might be a side effect of working on a laptop, or it might be the famously insular Seattle culture, but it still feels like a very low rate of spontaneous personal connection. Going by old movies at least, it seems like pre-information-age, you'd expect to see far more social interaction in a setting like that.