The End of Authenticity
Why do all coffee shops look alike?
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Since being in Amsterdam, I’ve felt out of place, which must be karmic justice for all the times I’ve laughed at tourists in San Francisco. There’s something mesmerizing about watching waves of them wash over the kitschy, knickknack-driven economy of Fisherman’s Wharf or up winding, brick-laden Lombard street, past homes no one’s ever seen anyone walk out of. When I see those tourists, I feel compelled to get out of the car, shake them, and say, “No, not there. Literally anywhere but there.”
Now I wonder if I’ve taken their place. Am I doing the same in Amsterdam, sitting in a café whose authenticity I doubt less than Fisherman’s Wharf’s, but nonetheless displays the classic signals of an establishment bowed to the wants of the market, like a tree to wind?
As with most cafés, the wood on my table is dark and ridged and reclaimed, and the sugar in the sealable Ball jars on top of it is brown and raw and granular, like a handful of a young Sahara. The heart drawn on my latte begs for an iPhone and an Instagram filter like an urban center mural or a flower-headdressed Coachella-goer.
I see only one person with anything other than a MacBook, but even more telling: Everyone’s headphones are white. Books rest just out of reach on sagging shelving made of the same particleboard my dad and I used to outfit my sixth-grade locker, light and cheap. But the books on it look heavy and dusty, so it’s doing its job and has been for a while.
I find myself hoping that someone’s read those books, or at least intended to, because that would mean they’re here for a reason other than the aesthetic. But they look bone-dry and dusty like the top of the dresser in the spare room of my grandparents’ house, and they’re in a café, not a library. Next to those books are speakers from a different era that might still work but probably don’t. They certainly aren’t responsible for the music echoing softly off the walls — the same music, in fact, that plays not so gently in Apple’s AirPods spot and probably at least a thousand other cafés at this exact moment: “Down,” by Marian Hill.
Above it all, lamps clamped to frames rest askew, their cords scattered helter-skelter along the ceiling among bits of exposed ductwork…
