The Exorcist and the Machines

<p>In its seventeenth-century origins, the coffeehouse was quickly identified as an alternative to the court (and the tavern). It hosted polite speech, disputation, and the brokering of commerce, and its patrons belonged to the rising fractions of civil society: political dissenters, mercantile traders, and assorted writers; publishers, illustrators, and wits. Jürgen Habermas famously judged these establishments to be the cradle of what he called the “public sphere” (Öffentlichkeit), pushing its overcaffeinated snout into the affairs of state. Several incarnations later, the coffee shop has become the default work – place for a new generation of urban strivers, piloting their careers through the turbulence of the freelancing economy. Multi-gigging and task-juggling, this spirited DIY layer of the precariat piece together lumps of income from motley sources, at a far remove from the legal entitlements of the waged earner. With no ready access to an office, they forsake the privacy of their homes (Alvin Toffler’s “electronic cottage”) to work in public view, braving, or feeding off, the gregarious hum of society. In the daytime, they overlap, at the coffee-stained tables, with the flexible telecommuter, and during the after-hours shifts, with office employees on an unforgiving 24/7 leash…</p>