Walked into the coffee place in Fort Greene the other day. Weekend morning, around eleven. Two rows of people hunched over their laptops, a couple squawking into their cellphones so their nasal voices echoed all about the cafe.
They looked like electronic galley slaves, bent over so intently looking into their computers, the blue of their screens reflecting back on their faces. This is what people do in their spare time now – go to cafes and even bars and sit hunched over their laptops.
Like Johnny Rotten used to say, “boring, boring, boring!’
Whatever else the Obama era brings, I hope it makes life less inane, less asinine, less flipping boring.
City of strangers 
[…] An article in Canada’s Globe and Mail (‘Where Did Cafe Culture go?‘ more or less a rewrite of WSJ’s No More Perks: Coffee Shops Pull the Plug on Laptop Users) talked about the spread of laptops in cafes, how people are increasingly coming in for one coffee, opening their laptops and staying for hours (or even all day) so many owners are pulling the plug on wifi because they can’t make any money. I wrote before about the electronic galley slaves that have taken over many cafes now. […]