https://interconnected.org/home/2025/03/07/schelling Interconnected A blog by Matt Webb * About * Archive * Work Subscribe for $0 * Email * RSS feed * (What is a feed?) Unoffice Hours * Book a call * (What is this?) a.k.a. genmon * Bluesky * X/Twitter * Insta * Mastodon * LinkedIn Building the AI clock * Check out Poem/1 Anti-Schelling points and waiting for my barista-made coffee 09.09, Friday 7 Mar 2025 Link to this post The phase space of coffee is large enough that many people can wait for their orders without collision, and that means the barista doesn't need to take names, and you don't need to memorise your place in line. By which I mean: the gap between ordering and collecting is, say, 5 minutes, and so there might be 5 people waiting. And given the permutations of drink type, sizes, and quantity, it's unlikely that two people will have the same order. So you can just stare at your phone or whatever until someone yells out your order. Handy! Until the flat white came along, and everyone got the same drink. Then it was annoying to be figuring out whether it was your flat white coming out or someone else's. But fortunately non-dairy milks got good around the same time. I wonder how many people shifted to "flat white with oat milk" simply to avoid having the same order as anyone else waiting. --------------------------------------------------------------------- So coffee is great for anti-Schelling points? A Schelling point(Wikipedia) being a solution that allows for coordination without communication. Such as: which side of the road to drive on. Each time they head out in their car, everyone in a country knows to choose a certain side and so magically people can share roads without colliding. Or Central Perk in Friends. Everyone knows to do the same thing. Whereas coffee includes enough variety such that people can avoid doing the same thing. You can deliberately avoid your go-to order being a Schelling point. --------------------------------------------------------------------- I think the variety in barista coffee is different from the variety in, say, fashion or wine because with fashion and wine there is social signalling and all kinds of things going on, and my claim with coffee is that it's explicitly about low communication distributed queuing; what matters is the bottleneck of waiting for an order in a crowd and wanting to expend minimal effort. (I'm also ignoring the fact that people may have different preferences about what drink they like, discriminating by taste, because honestly coffee all tastes more or less the same, doesn't it, you can get used to anything.) --------------------------------------------------------------------- Anyway I feel like we're currently seeing more variety in things. Normcore fashion has ended, no more uniforms; everyone is thrifting and putting together eclectic outfits unrooted in history. Or with the rise of vibe coding and the end of apps, we'll see everyone using AI to make and share their own micro-apps to do everything, and these apps will differentiate by personal weird aesthetic - here's the segment of my ThingsCon talk where I talked about that (YouTube, start at 13:55). Though I wonder how you allow for that, as a designer. I wonder how you build for it. More MySpace, less Facebook. Or the continuing shift away from the global timelines and shared social media, and even single web indexes like Google, and the fragmentation into discords and whatsapps and subreddits. Or the fracturing of political consensus country by country and community by community across the West. I don't know how this all relates. --------------------------------------------------------------------- Auto-calculated kinda related posts: * On the shift to oat and the milk hysteresis curve (20 Apr 2023) * Make tea great again (16 Dec 2024) If you enjoyed this post, please consider sharing it by email or on social media. Here's the link. Thanks, --Matt. Most recent posts * People I would like to meet 7 Mar 2025 * Anti-Schelling points and waiting for my barista-made coffee 7 Mar 2025 (This post) * My fantasy AI app is a voice mode travel buddy called Roadtrip 28 Feb 2025 * Reflections on 25 years of Interconnected 19 Feb 2025 * Uh so about that asteroid 14 Feb 2025 * Extending AI chat with Model Context Protocol (and why it matters) 11 Feb 2025 * Filtered for minimum viable identity 7 Feb 2025 * Strava when you're not as quick as you used to be 30 Jan 2025 * Photo stand-ins and other stuff that happened 22 Jan 2025 * The need for a strategic fact reserve 17 Jan 2025 * Keeping the seat warm between peaks of cephalopod civilisation 10 Jan 2025 * My top posts in 2024 30 Dec 2024 Continue reading: All in 2024 streak New posts for 258 consecutive weeks (see: blogging tips) New? 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