The Borg, The Devil and the Coffee Shop

There’s a difference between a coffee shop and a Coffee Shop. In a Coffee Shop, you’ll get high-concept, applied to a hundred franchised outlets nationwide (or thousands, worldwide). The overwrought menu will feature high-octane shooters with porno names, novelty ‘coffees’ and power smoothies, frou-frou fusion folly on twenty different types of stale bread slapped together according to the formula by underpaid high-turnaround staff. There is no owner, there’s a holding company. The manager will not be able to change the CD because there isn’t one, there’s a permanent shuffle of twenty prescribed popular trax. The rows of jars on the counter are décor, filled with coordinated coloured water. If you ask for Marmite toast they won’t have it. The patrons will be posers. They’ll click their fingers at the waitress impatiently. They’ll be networking, networking, networking. Many of them will have sunglasses on top of their heads. They’ll be loudly animated and will check to make sure everyone else has noticed how happening they are. You will not be allowed to ignore them.

By contrast, a coffee shop will serve real coffee, and you can ask the owner to change the CD if Eros Ramazotti’s annoying you. A coffee shop is where you can spend the space between the time and, unless a large table of lost Coffee Shop creatures has wandered in, which seldom happens, you can even spend it in peace. The décor is as invisible as good typography. If there’s a row of jars on the counter, they’re full of macaroni, or pickles, or tips for the kitchen staff. You’re assured of human kindness in a coffee shop, and of a menu which might be full of typos and amusing spelling but offers things that nourish, and that you can recognize. You’ll get honest sandwiches at a coffee shop and you can always get Marmite toast. If they’ve run out of Marmite they’ll trot down to the Spar and get some. Your fellow patrons will be people. They’ll greet the waitress warmly. They’ll be reading tabloids/Tolstoy/Time, or writing lists/letters-to-the-editor/literature, or chatting face to face. Or they’ll be playing backgammon, or agonizing over the lotto numbers. By and large, they’ll keep their business to themselves. You can eavesdrop if you want to.

So the coffee shop which used to be my home away from home is gone. One day it was there, and the next it was covered in paper which said, exciting new Coffee Shop opening soon. Sure enough, some weeks later, there was a Coffee Shop, where my coffee shop used to be.

This coffee shop thing is a symptom of a world gone Meta.

So is Wikipedia. I’ve been troubled by Wikipedia for a good long while now. I tell kids to stay away from it. But why? They ask. I stop just short of answering: because it’s the devil*, and say instead: because it’s often not accurate.

But it’s worse than that. Wikipedia is The Borg. And more direly even, it’s the Borg without a Queen.
Don’t get me wrong. In some ways I admire the The Borg (and I love dinner-time conversations that become incendiary when someone suggests that the solution to humankind’s angst could be to just go Borg), but everyone knows that there must be a Queen. Without one, the hive-mind disintegrates into useless units of hapless confusion. There are people who have found Wikipedia entries about themselves that range from wishful thinking to downright false, and after they’ve gone in and corrected the entry, they return to find that some kind soul has incorrected it back again. That’s the thing about popular opinion and the way it becomes canon, despite reality. The aggregate wins.

It also seems lately that Wikipedia and Google have some sort of galactic domination arrangement. I used to get a good variety of results on a Google search, from academe to news to popular opinion and all sorts of psychedelic stuff in-between, and I could more or less make my own mind up as to whose information I would get the most benefit from. These days, I have to sort through the first three pages of search results with a fine-toothed comb to get something that’s not Wiki. There’s a lot to be said for keeping information in context, and for keeping sources intact. When everything’s flattened out by aggregate, you get muddy puddles in isolation, with no paths leading to and from. When it comes to plain old information anyhow, I want a meritocracy. With Wikipedia, how do I know if the person telling me a thing is qualified to tell it?** And if all information is to become cast in this type of format in the future, as some people think it will be, what will there be to compare it against? There are whispers in certain circles, predictions of the imminent birth of artificial intelligence from deep within the womb of Google itself… who’d have thought? We thought it would be humanoid at least, didn’t we? Nuts and bolts, with an operator’s manual and an Off Button maybe – but humanoid. Or caninoid, or whatever. Reassuringly recognizable anyhow.
Wikipedia as AI’s 2-IC… I don’t even want to think about it. Not today. I’ll think about it tomorrow. Rhett, oh Rhett.

*What is the devil? Fundamentally, it’s things that scare us. It’s also things we don’t understand, and things that threaten to displace us, and things we can’t be bothered to investigate further. It’s the tokoloshe under your bed, it’s over here, it’s out there. It’s different things to different people and usually boils down to fear. So Wikipedia is not the devil, then. But maybe Google is.

**With apologies to The Cosmic Cabman, who does actually write good stuff for Wikipedia. If you wrote it, Dio, I’ll ratify it without question. This is flagrant cronyism of course, which excludes me from ever being considered by a lucid panel of experts for the post of Wiki Queen. Actually, Afrikaans Wikipedia is at this point probably a really reliable source of info, if only because the online community is small and cozy enough (by web standards anyhow) that everyone knows someone so credentials can be cross-checked… and anyone writing an inferior article risks have his biltong confiscated…