In our model, the café is not the antidote of the office, but its annex, a well-lit atelier for the young urban professional. A string of new concept spaces that have sprung up in Paris in the last several years, appropriately named Anticafé, make this explicit. They are living room retreats for displaced but affluent workers. Their clientele is uniform, their connection to the neighborhood and its street life severed. The social model of the café is thrown out in favor of the bespoke refinement of the commodity served there. On our side of the Atlantic this social severing has gone even further, possibly to its logical limit. Recently, Starbucks launched an app that allows one to order and pay for a coffee before even setting foot in the establishment, allowing you to purchase “without speaking a word,” as tech reviews gleefully proclaimed. Now even the exceedingly minor friction of interacting with another human being at the register, already purely perfunctory, is erased, and the dream of instant and seamless connection with the commodity fulfilled. This is the logical expression of the neoliberal fantasy: frictionless consumption; human interaction reduced wherever possible, and when necessary then only for the sake of the transaction itself; the maximizing of an efficiency that optimizes the social while simultaneously recasting it as just is another form of business. You don’t have time for coffee. You have to get back to work.