The eerie similarity of coffee shops all over the world was so confounding to Kyle Chayka that it led him to write the new book Filterworld: How Algorithms Are Flattening Culture. In today’s episode, Kyle’s going to walk us through the recent history of the cafe, to help us see how digital behavior is altering a physical space hundreds of years older than the internet itself, and how those changes are happening everywhere—it’s just easier to see them when they’re spelled out in latte art. This episode was written by Willa Paskin and produced by Katie Shepherd. Decoder Ring is produced by Willa Paskin, Katie Shepherd and Evan Chung. Derek John is Executive Producer. Merritt Jacob is Senior Technical Director. Special thanks to Ben Frisch and Patrick Fort. If you haven’t yet, please subscribe and rate our feed in Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. And even better, tell your friends. If you’re a fan of the show, please sign up for Slate Plus. Members get to listen to Decoder Ring and all other Slate podcasts without any ads and have total access to Slate’s website. Your support is also crucial to our work. Go to Slate.com/decoderplus to join Slate Plus today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Hi, Kyle.
Hello.
How's it going?
It's good.
How are you?
Thank you so much for doing this.
Of course.
I love coffee shops.
Kyle Chayka is a staff writer at the New Yorker, and we met up in December of 2023 at a cafe on Manhattan's Lower east side.
What's your order?
Usually a cappuccino.
Like, as small a cappuccino as possible.
Kyle has spent a lot of time in coffee shops.
He's fascinated by them.
A thing that draws me to coffee shops is they're such centers of, like, displays of taste and culture.
They're almost like multisensory art museums.
For the taste of the moment.
He works in them when he's at home and abroad.
And around 2015, 2016, he started to notice something about all of them.
Whenever I would travel for work as a freelance journalist, I would go to all these different cities around the world, and wherever I would land, I could always find essentially the same cafe.