Surrendering to the Surface

This is a post from Robin Sloan’s lab blog & notebook. You can visit the blog’s homepage, or learn more about me.

The lie at the center of the Jony and Sam video is that the coffee at Cafe Zoetrope is ter­rible. I’m very sure Jony knows it — that’s his neighborhood — and if he took a sip, Sam knows it too. Me? I know it because, for sev­eral years, I had an office above the cafe, and it was a source of per­sis­tent con­ster­na­tion that the iconic, super­cute estab­lish­ment at the building’s base was not, in any sense, actu­ally good.

No big deal … except that this video is a presentation, an incantation, that wants to cel­e­brate deep taste and deep skill. It wants also to cel­e­brate San Fran­cisco — the city’s extra­or­di­nary qualities! But the ter­rible coffee gives it away: oh, no, this is all about surface. In that way, the video has the flavor of AI slop: Cafe Zoetrope is what we imagine a great cafe in San Fran­cisco should look like. Alas it is not the real thing — the extra­or­di­nary thing — the deep thing.

Should have walked the stacks in City Lights instead.

(In other respects, I endorse Jason Snell’s assessment: with sin­cerely all credit where due, this is not the team to figure out the suc­cessor to the smartphone. Now is the time for feral upstarts, not designers emeritus.)