No Loitering, No Unlimited Generation
Coffee shops ration the bandwidth for everyone's side hustles
The Janky Time Machine’s temporal GPS threw a fit somewhere between “soon” and “eventually”—the chronometer just displayed ¯_(ツ)_/¯ which is apparently what passes for diagnostic information in shoddy time-travel equipment. Ended up on a street corner that could be literally anywhere there’s third-wave coffee and people who type loudly in public.
This decal is stuck to the glass door of a café that definitely has exactly one (1) fern and probably plays that one Bon Iver album on repeat.
So here’s where we’ve landed: coffee shops now need to explicitly state that they’re “AI-Assisted Creation Friendly Zones.” Which means somewhere between now and whenever-this-is, enough people showed up to generate content that cafés had to develop policies about it. Like the whole “no shoes, no shirt, no service” thing, except it’s “yes prompts, yes headphones, no hogging bandwidth for more than two hours during peak.”
That hour limit is doing some heavy lifting. I guess people are parking themselves at tables with power outlets and generating enough video/music/whatever that it became a problem1. The kind of problem that requires laminated signage and official policy. You know things have hit critical mass when the service industry has to bureaucratize them.
Some city council somewhere had a meeting. There were probably presentations. Someone definitely said “think of the children.” Now there are numbered ordinances about what kinds of AI generation are allowed in coffee shops, which means there was definitely an incident that prompted the ordinance. I don’t want to know what that incident was, but I absolutely want to know.
Best part: the hand-drawn arrow pointing to “Human-Only Tuesdays 6-9pm.” Someone added that later, like a barnacle of cultural tension. It’s got real “we had to create a separate space because this got out of hand” energy. Three hours a week where you’re guaranteed everyone in the café is just… existing. Not generating. Not optimizing. Not producing.
The fact that human-only time is (a) scheduled, (b) limited to one evening a week, and (c) needs to be advertised suggests that the default assumption is that everyone’s got some sort of AI co-pilot running. You’re the weirdo if you show up without something generating in the background. Human-only time has become the exception you need to plan for, like karaoke night or trivia Tuesday.
There are coffee shops out there taking a hard line against prompting.
“NO GENERATED CONTENT. HUMAN VIBES ONLY. WE CHECK.”
I bet those places charge even more for their oat milk.
When did we cross the line from “look at this cool thing AI can do” to “please limit your AI usage to one hour so other customers can also use their AIs”? And which version is weirder—the café that had to make a policy about it, or the café that will inevitably ban it completely and charge you $9 for the privilege of being surrounded by guaranteed humans?
Pretty sure both futures exist simultaneously somewhere in the branching timeline. The Janky Time Machine’s odometer can’t tell the difference anymore.
The distance between idea and execution has gotten really short. The rise of solo creators is set to explode. Today’s DFD sparked while I read this article: https://pulse.mk.co.kr/news/english/11449123
Where was this, if not SF?