Renewing Communities: Beyond Technocratic Management

Being Willing to Lose In Order to Be Free From Eternal Digital Life

This is a continuation of this brief series of engagements with the work of cultural theorist and former priest, Ivan Illich. You can see the introductory engagement here but the full post is only available to paid subscribers.

I’m sitting inside the Starbucks close to my house this afternoon to mix things up, which is a good setting for this reflection, in at least three ways. I won’t make this error again, but it was close by: mea maxima culpa. I’ll make the observations first, and then say why these are related:

1. This location was apparently completely renovated during the COVID shutdown: prior to COVID, it had two levels of seating, with lots of nooks and crannies. This has been replaced by one level, flattened to eye-level with the baristas, the open floor plan, and diminished seating.

2. Starbucks, as a chain, has been ground-zero for some of the recent culture war debates, offering abortion-related travel to its employees, while refusing them the ability to unionize.

3. Starbucks’ coffee is not good, consistently homogenizing regional flavors into a single “dark roast”, with its regional blends on display for boutique prices, offering a mishmash of coffees as its go-to brew, the liquid equivalent of World Music.

For all of its flaws, you have to hand it to Starbucks at finding a way to be utterly coherent. The flattened space inside mirrors the ways in which Starbucks deeply depends on there being a seamless global chain. Enjoy our regionless coffee, brewed by employees stuck in the effortless global flow of capital, all in a flattened physical space with as much character as a dinner plate. Starbucks’ model of ubiquity, of intentional cannibalization of the market of other franchises, is designed toward total market domination: we will have all the space, and all the space will be easily accessible. Why offer people something difficult when you can offer them something seamless?

The reason that Starbucks flourishes in this way is because it is reflecting the kinds of communities we have: effortless, interchangeable, and (importantly) increasingly monetized. Abilene does well by its families in providing a lot of park space for kids to play freely, but when the world is melting, Starbucks’ A/C and WiFi is more attractive. And so, there are other alternatives for people to be in public that don’t require payment, but fewer and farther between.

COVID, of course, complicated whatever was left of on-ground gatherings, either by making them sites of epidemiological concern or physical representations of how you felt about COVID. In her provocation of a book, Shoshanna Zuboff details the ways in which social media relationships increasingly operates in a mode of “surveillance capitalism, that our digital communities are only possible because we are being surveilled and monetized to death.

But I want to leave aside the concerns of digital life and ask what it means that our physical gatherings are increasingly monetized, and monetized in a way which flattens the gathering spaces such that what you get in one space is equivalent with what you would get elsewhere.