Call this rain?

Thursday, March 01, 2007

The bad news is, we've run out of coffee

So I had to go round the corner to the legendary Zoka's to get post prandial coffees tonight. Zoka's (as featured on Olbermann no less) is something of an institution, a genuinely exceptional coffee house. It was, as usual at 8.30 in the evening pretty well-packed with students. Except they were all working. A good 60% had their laptops in front of them, taking advantage of the free wifi, the remainder had their coursebooks, and no one was talking. There must have been a good 70 people in there, 80% were obviously students, and there were about three conversations, in hushed tones, in the entire place. Astonishing to think how different this generation is from mine.

First, it's 8.30 and you should be in the pub by now (even leaving aside the famous UCL Union thursday nights), but far more than that you should be talking to each other. You should be arguing about Bismark's intentions in the kulturkampf, who is the most absurd Lacan or Baudrillrd, the relative merits of Hayek and Keynes, whether Fermat's last theorem is provable, Renoir or Truffaut, Leone or Kurasawa, Republican or Democrat, Dickens or Dostoevski, even heaven help us Blur and Oasis, but something.

When I was a child, sci-fi distopias consisted of clone like men sitting silently in front of computers that they were plugged into almost organically, we are getting there. Any bets why the discourse is so poor?