Dan Fost at the San Francisco Chronicle has this sign-of-the-times piece about the rise of the coffee house as a central locus for entrepreneurial workers. San Francisco, of course, is the epicenter of this trend, which has rippled throughout the country and the economy.
The cute term applied to the new breed of workers, who are equipped with laptops and cellphones and capable of working from anywhere but prefer the ambience and hubub of Starbucks and independent coffee houses, is bedouin, the name of nomadic Arabs. But the impact of this burgeoning bunch of self-starting, business-building workers is far from small and sweet.
New businesses are popping up that spark employment and innovation in coffee houses across the country, providing a weird capitalist twist on communism. Author Daniel Pink even quotes Marx to characterize the coffee house economy:
Pink calls it “Karl Marx’s revenge, where individuals own the means of production. And they can take the means of production and hop from coffee shop to coffee shop.”
Om Malik, who has built a web empire out of his own part-time blogging, often in coffee shops, even uses the language and symbols of communism at Web Worker Daily, a publication devoted to the tech-oriented bedouins.
“There is nothing more free than being a Web worker,” Malik says. “There is no boss. You work for yourself. This is the new Wild West. The individual is more important. That’s the American way. It’s about doing things your own way. Web workers represent that…It’s the future, my friend.”
Cynthia Brumfield at 12:43 PM|Comments(0)
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