Nuts to your poncey hipster coffees, I want a TESLA ELECTRO-CAFE

Caged and confused

In Vancouver, an apparently irony-free pop-up coffee shop recently opened under the name of Faraday Café whose unique selling point is total disconnection. Not content with just failing to offer customers the weediest of Wi-Fi, Faraday Café has been purposely enclosed in mesh (it says here) to shield customers from electromagnetic signals. This renders all digital devices redundant (it says here) while you’re inside. You can’t even use a phone.

The principle is to ‘encourage digital downtime’. To help customers enjoy the experience of bonding with their fellow Johnny-no-mates and striking up conversations with potential stalkers and psychopaths, the venue hosted a series of themed events during July. These included such nipple-hardening excitement as an ‘evening of meditative inquiry’ and the roller-coaster thrills of an ‘experimental jazz quartet’ whose ‘unique sound-scape’ (no mention of music, I note) is said to go to ‘far off places’ or ‘stay safe at home’. Dig it, daddio?

Why bother going to all that trouble to shield a coffee shop from Wi-Fi when pretty much the whole of London E1 and E2 postal codes have been successfully achieving exactly the same thing for the last few years through sheer apathy? Building an anti-signal mesh (aka. a Faraday cage) seems unnecessarily expensive when London’s indie coffee shops demonstrate that you can do it simply by not giving a fuck. Most of them don’t even open for breakfast until 8.30am, by which time I, along with just about everyone else who works in the City, have already been at work for at least an hour.

What gives me cause for concern is that far from cities needing a digital-downtime escape venue populated by bongo-thumping wankers, getting connected in public places is actually getting harder all over the country. Visiting my mum in Leeds during the Grand Départ of the Tour de France – pure coincidence, of course – I discovered that getting online as a free agent is as difficult back home as it is in London. Mater refuses to permit any kind of internet connection to be installed in the house and I was struggling to obtain a consistent 3G signal for a scheduled Skype call, so I headed off to the local pub. This pub has its own cafe, too, which must be a good sign. Pubs in the year 2014 have Wi-Fi, don’t they? At least, Trip Advisor said this one did.

Except it didn’t. It had strong Wi-Fi, sure, but only for kitchen staff, not for – pah! – customers. And not only was the 3G signal there worse than at the house, it proved impossible to obtain even creaky GPRS let alone Edge. I had to stand on a wall out the back simply in order to send a text to tell colleagues to go ahead with the conference call without me. Anyone would think I’d stepped into the ‘Slaughtered Lamb’. They should rename it the ‘Faraday Pub’.

So what do I invariably end up doing? Caught between offices, I move with the herd and head for an untrendy chain coffee shop. In fact, half my business over recent months was conducted from a variety of Costas, Starbucks and Neros, ranging from Glasgow to Canterbury. Naff, perhaps. Bland, of course. Connected, absolutely. I spent a toe-curling sum of money on drinks and snacks at these places, too, but that’ll be of no interest to indie coffee shops, I’m sure.

You can keep your Faraday Cafés and evenings of meditative inquiry. What I want is a Tesla Café. I want it so powerfully wired up that all the teaspoons end up pointing north, migrating birds flying overhead get disorientated and there is a risk of any spike in the mains supply causing a puncture in the fabric of time itself. The strength of the Wi-Fi signal would be indicated by a row of crackling Tesla coils. Every email sent or message posted by a customer would be accompanied by a gigantic flash of ball lightning screaming across the room.

If it also serves coffee in popcorn tubs and sells pastries that have been baked within living memory, I’d consider moving in permanently. ®