Surrendering to the surface

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 Sam took a sip, he 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.)