Growing up in LA in the 90s, there was an astonishing variety of independent coffee houses, each themed their own way. The owners weren't making much money, the

Growing up in LA in the 90s, there was an astonishing variety of independent coffee houses, each themed their own way. The owners weren't making much money, they just liked having their hangout spaces. Van Gogh's Ear was art themed; Anastasia's Asylum rag rolled red with live singer songwriters; Cacao was tiki-meets-UFO: Stir Crazy was themed like a woodsy cabin; a place I don't remember the name of was like walking into an underground moonbase. There were dozens more. All gone. Dead as the late night politically engaged, literate, poetic, artistic and musical youth culture that supported them. They were places teenagers could go. Having worked the all-night shift at one after high school and served the employees of the new Starbucks across the street when it opened, I made a few observations about the death of all that. It wasn't laptops. People had those. Kids came and did their homework and hung out. A bigger deal was the smoking ban. That kneecapped them because all the underage kids went to these places to smoke cigarettes and feel like grown-ups. The rents all went up to the point where they couldn't survive. But the real ending was when socialization moved online. Sitting around a coffee place meeting new people just isn't done in America anymore. Coffee houses are purely workspaces now, and it doesn't matter for that purpose if they're all the same. What socializing there is moved to bars, where alcohol makes it easier. But the first question now is always "what do you do?" It's a shame. People are thinking like tinder robots instead of actually getting into conversations about stuff. The reason the coffeehouses died is that American-style global culture has no room for, and actively discourages unmediated and spontaneous social interaction. You can't monetize it on any kind of large scale, and it may be politically dangerous. This is actually why I live in Portland and love it... it's one of the last hold-outs. [edit] final thought: The larger trend of homogenization is something I've started calling a "change in the texture of the world" in the past decade. Many of the efficiencies are sold as improvements, but they diminish the lived experience of encountering the world, and the serendipity and uniqueness of one's life in it. A soulless, fully automated utopia leaves no room for aesthetic, intellectual or emotional diversity and strangles personal growth. The lack of differences between places eliminates the grounds on which to discover personal preferences.