The image above was made with stable diffusion using the prompt 'Minneapolis counterculture city and computer code colorful.'
2013 and 2017. I'm not sure if I should be proud of this or embarrassed by it.I've spent a fair amount of time at my local coffee shop over the years. The sign hanging outside @caffetto was painted by me. You can clearly see me sitting there on Google street view in
For a long time, this was my co-working space. Along with a score of others in tech or the arts, I'd go there most days to draw or write or edit or code or trade. We were all friends and we'd help each other out without a second thought. I regularly repaired or gave away laptops to people in need who I met at the shop. And more than one good work contract came from a coffee shop referral.
A friend of mine was working on a Macbook there in 2020 and the device suddenly vanished, stolen by a bold thief who ran to a waiting car and drove away. Since then I haven't felt comfortable bringing my laptop to the coffee shop. So I stopped going as often. These days, I pop in for a coffee here and there, but I don't really linger.
For many years, @caffetto was a hotspot of counterculture and mutual aid. Maybe it still is, but the crowd has changed. My brand of iconoclasm was never really fashionable, yet I always felt at home with the coffee shop's other misfits. Now I wonder if anyone there even questions authority anymore.
Beyond counterculture, spending my 30s at the coffee shop put me firmly in touch with street level urban America. Living in poverty myself, relying on the informal economy when the formal economy wasn't cutting it, I spent countless hours sipping coffee with panhandlers and addicts and various kinds of misfits, talking about everything. From this vantage point, our leaders are clowns, our economy is a meat grinder, and nothing at all is dependable. It's a perspective held by millions and the powers that be relentlessly exploit it.
Youthful rebelliousness is often tempered by age and maturity. Revolutionaries become reformers and reformers gradually turn into enforcers of the status quo. My own development hasn't followed this trajectory. In my youth I favored radically transforming many of society's systems. Today I favor abandoning these systems entirely in favor of better systems that we ourselves create.
In our distant past, it was possible to go to the town square, stand on a soapbox, espouse your views, and quickly make friends with people of like mind. More recently, it was possible to put up a website espousing any perspective and Google would send like-minded people to the site. We don't have anything like that anymore, though Meetup.com was a good try. Our physical and digital environments now mostly separate us instead of bringing us together.
At the end of the day, it's hilarious that Google mapped me at the coffee shop.
Read Free Mind Gazette on Substack
Read my novels:
- Small Gods of Time Travel is available as a web book on IPFS and as a 41 piece Tezos NFT collection on Objkt.
- The Paradise Anomaly is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
- Psychic Avalanche is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
- One Man Embassy is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
- Flying Saucer Shenanigans is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
- Rainbow Lullaby is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
- The Ostermann Method is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
- Blue Dragon Mississippi is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
See my NFTs:
- Small Gods of Time Travel is a 41 piece Tezos NFT collection on Objkt that goes with my book by the same name.
- History and the Machine is a 20 piece Tezos NFT collection on Objkt based on my series of oil paintings of interesting people from history.
- Artifacts of Mind Control is a 15 piece Tezos NFT collection on Objkt based on declassified CIA documents from the MKULTRA program.