A Coffee Carol—The Hyperreal and Simulated Coffee Shops
As I write this I am sitting in my very own hyperreal coffee shop at home, complete with coffee, jazz music, my laptop computer, and the whole world—along with every friend and current and former colleagues—at my fingertips through the internet and Zoom. French philosopher and sociologist Jean Baudrillard argued that the lines between the real and the artificial have become so blurred that it’s now impossible to tell the difference between the two, resulting in what he termed the “hyperreal.”
Perhaps you’ve seen one or more of the increasingly popular simulated coffee shop videos on YouTube lately. These simulated coffee shops are illustrated in such lifelike detail that you almost have to do a double-take to decide whether they are real or simulated. And while they are clearly illustrations created by phenomenal artists, pure simulations in other words, it’s how I’m using these videos currently that gives them a hyperreal quality of the type that Baudrillard had in mind.
I don’t often frequent coffee shops these days, partly because no present-day coffee shop seems to live up to the magic of my experience working at Caffe Dolce as a teenager, partly because even at public places like coffee shops people seldom interact with any substance and depth anymore, partly because there simply aren’t any great coffee shops (yet!) in the town where I now live, partly because it’s simply cheaper to make my own coffee at home than to drink and eat out on my work days, partly because I have designs to open up my own coffeehouse in the not-too-distant future, partly because I can create a qualitatively coffeehouse-like experience at home through coffee convenience products like a Keurig coffeemaker and through streaming simulated coffee shop videos like the ones I mentioned previously. Why bother trucking myself down to a coffee shop in the snow when I can have nearly every aspect of the coffee shop experience woven into my work day at home? So goes the narrative of the 21st-century at-home coffee experience!
For reference, here are a few sample videos for those of you who have not yet seen these alluring simulated coffee shops on YouTube:
These coffee shop simulations are not, in themselves, hyperreal in Baudrillard’s sense, as they are still merely simulations. But the way in which I have created my own ersatz coffee shop experience at home with these videos and with other various other aspects strikes me as extremely Baudrillard. After all, in a quote-unquote “real” coffee shop I could reasonably expect to have lively conversation with friends and family who drop by for a cup of coffee. I can now do that from home with a hyperreal coffee meetup by Zoom, complete with a stand-in for almost every aspect of the formerly-real coffeeshop conversation experience!
Sure, the coffee at home may not be as good as that from an industrial espresso machine, the jazz is public domain, the hugs and handshakes are now virtual as well, but the friendships and warmth are just as real as ever, thus resulting in a mishmash of the real and the simulated that cannot be untangled, just as Baudrillard claims is a hallmark of the hyperreal in general—it’s intractability and its untangle-ability. Even in a so-called “real” coffee shop there are so many artificial constructs that it’s now impossible;e to untangle the authentic aspects of the coffee shop experience from the artificially created ones. Thanks, Starbucks, for that, by the way…. (As a side-note, check out the late-1990s film You’ve Got Mail for an extremely postmodern look at contemporary coffee culture and its Baudrillard-style hyperreality, which I would argue has become even more subtle and even more pervasive in the years from then to now.)
Baudrillard claimed that we have a tendency to want to reinforce the reality principle in any hyperreal environment, to obscure the artificial and to present it in a way that reinforces the sense of reality and authenticity that go along with it. My ongoing desire to open my own coffeehouse is in-line with Baudrillard’s insight here. Although I may attempt to open a coffeehouse that is somehow more “authentic” and less “artificial,” undoubtedly any attempt at manufacturing genuineness will already have so many artificially-constructed elements to it that this so-called authenticity will ever remain just out of reach, something glimpsed in our memories and imaginations but never quite grasped.
For the moment one attempts to create authenticity intentionally, that authenticity is already firmly in the realm of the hyperreal—a constructed and manufactured authenticity that always has the air of the plastic about it, now matter how impressive of a simulation it is, with the same air of hyperreality seen in the simulated coffeeshop videos but brought somehow to life, breaking the fourth wall of the YouTube player and bringing the artificial into the customers’ days and evenings, like the big color reveal in the The Wizard of Oz, but with the so-called “real” itself being put on display in real living Technicolor (trademark and all) for all to see and marvel at—perhaps with myself playing the wizard responsible for the ambitious re-injecting of reality energy and manufactured authenticity into my future patrons’ mornings and lives!
So am I predicting the death of traditional coffee shops and coffeehouses? Quite the contrary! Some people will choose, like I am today as I write this, to enjoy their hyperreal coffeeshop experiences at home with the aid of simulated coffee shop videos, jazz playlists, Keurig coffee machines, Zoom video chats with friends and colleagues, and other hyperreal accoutrements that feed reality energy into our virtual days and lives. Others, however, will continue to choose to venture out to so-called “real” coffeehouses in search of a long-past authenticity packaged and presented to them with plastic veneer—or even genuine woodgrain counters and tabletops—worthy of those very same coffee shop simulation videos.
All of society arguably has this quality of plastic reality—work, play, travel, home life, coffee shops, hobbies, even so-called “nature” with the well-branded Yosemites and Yellowstones of the world complete with well-stocked gift shops that look like they belong inside a museum but somehow manage to see right at home in the surrounding wilderness—invisible mustaches drawn on the faces Half Dome and El Capitan, on postcards and posters, on plasticware and souvenir keychains, and as popular as the omnipresent museum gift stores around the world full of mustached Mona Lisas.
Just as people queue up for entry to Disneyland and Disney World—as Baudrillard pointed out in his book Simulations—and just as cars queue up like giant, metallic ants for entry into America’s national parks, with their ubiquitous gift shops being either the first or last stop (even in the 23rd-century, judging by Captain Kirk’s “Go Climb a Rock” t-shirt procured during his visit to a future Yosemite gift shop in Star Trek V: The Final Frontier), coffee drinkers either queue up their simulated coffee shop jazz playlists on YouTube or queue up in lines as literal customers in search of some semblance of the real—in coffeehouses and in all of 21st-century life—a “real” that is already anachronistic and hyperreal in the very quest to find it.
So drink up! And enjoy those hyperreal 21st-century Zoom conversations, backed by a YouTube public domain jazz and/or simulated coffee shop playlist and with all the genuine warmth that conversations between friends and colleagues have ever had! Or, even more interestingly, enjoy those post-pandemic face-to-face conversations once again in so-called “real” coffee shops that have themselves become plasticized and packaged, indistinguishable from the supposedly more-authentic coffeehouses and coffeehouse conversations of old revisiting us from time to time like the ghosts of coffeeshops past in some caffeinated version of A Christmas Carol—A (Hyperreal) Coffee Carol!
