On coffee filters and filter bubbles

and a banner ad that was good, actually

Escape the Algorithm is a newsletter about taking control of our attention and finding a more human side of the internet. After you subscribe, you can make me feel supported by performing a tiny act of codependence: mail me a gift or a postcard, take me out for coffee in person, contribute a story to the newsletter, or become a paid subscriber. Learn more about becoming a ᵐⁱᶜʳᵒsupporter.

Each morning, I brew myself a cup of coffee using a Chemex, a coffee maker that I love for the bright flavor profile that it imparts, but even more than that for its ritualistic temperament. Turn on the kettle, fold open a conical filter, grind up some light-roasted beans from the neighborhood coffee shop, unleash a slow stream of 200° water. As the coffee slowly collects at the bottom of the beautiful glass hourglass silhouette, my mind often wanders to Gabriel Kahane’s haunting song Chemex, whose 2-minute, 23-second runtime lasts roughly as long as my brewing ritual.

O bleary predawn gothic: blue, black, and grey
Stumble sleepwalk to the kitchen
Only this single ritual could start the day
Head bowed at the altar of this brackish liquid

Chemex is the fifth song on the album Magnificent Bird, written during the final month of a year that Kahane spent entirely offline in an attempt to escape his filter bubble and connect with people at a deeper level. Four months later he was confronted with a global pandemic. “I had imagined that project as a more public-facing inquiry,” said Kahane, “but with quarantine, that year became much more of a monastic, inward-looking journey. It was not what I signed up for.”

In Chemex, the coffee filter becomes a foil to the frail filter of Kahane’s experiment in logging off, as the quiet mundanity of caffeine rites is instantly punctured all at once by current events, the wandering mind, political turmoil, the broken healthcare system, and climate catastrophe.

Gather materials: filter, kettle, and urn
Boil the water, begin to pour
Go fetch the paper from the front step and learn
That the country fears another Civil War

We attribute our anxieties to our machines, and entertain intrusive Walden-wanderlust fantasies of dissolving both simultaneously. Maybe if our dominant thumbs can retire from running long enough to feel the warm touch of brown-filled ceramic mugs, maybe. Maybe then we will be at ease.

Light starts to leak through the antique window
Your wife and daughter are still asleep in bed
At the bottom of your mug is a map of Ohio
At the bottom of your heart is a map of your dread

The antique window whose fashion has come back into vogue, the wife you met on Bumble, the politicians that continue to fail you, the borders that hold you in and shut you out. Weren’t these all predestined by some great force of technology or system of power, an executive in a room or a social script, a recommendation algorithm or mighty gatekeeper? Were you not beguiled by a barrage of beautiful rule-of-thirds-obeying images to buy that coffeemaking device in the first place?

I first discovered Gabriel Kahane’s music through complete algorithmic and nominative accident. Fifteen years ago I saw a vertical banner ad, the kind that used to hang absentmindedly alongside a blog post or web forum, touting his self-titled album. I only clicked because I went to high school with a different singer-songwriter — Gavriel Kahane — that I would have been shocked to learn had found enough success to fund a marketing budget. I discovered the one-letter difference almost instantly, but from the first listen — if I remember correctly, it would have been a 30-second iTunes preview of the raucous, strangely metered North Adams — I was completely transfixed, and fifteen years later I (along with the music nerd high school friends that I subsequently infected) count myself among those changed by Kahane’s music.

Under a weird blue smokeless sky you drink up
Soon will be time to make another cup

Dispose of your spent filters, if you must. But they will only be replaced with filters that you do not know, filters you’ve forgotten how to notice. Or perhaps, instead, pause long enough to thumb the levigated paper skin. Pay attention, honor the ceremony of it all. There is freedom there.

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Escape the Algorithm is a newsletter about taking control of our attention and finding a more human side of the internet. After you subscribe, you can make me feel supported by performing a tiny act of codependence: mail me a gift or a postcard, take me out for coffee in person, contribute a story to the newsletter, or become a paid subscriber. Learn more about becoming a ᵐⁱᶜʳᵒsupporter.

Header photo by romboide