Something Different

---

The world in all its glory has been reduced, homologated and homogenized.

The industrial revolution standardized production. The digital revolution standardized experience. Together, they’ve created a world where almost everything: food, entertainment, personality, can and is reliably replicated, optimized and teleported anywhere to a 

Waffle House. 

The goal has been consistency, reliability, predictability. 

So, now there’s no more variety, no more difference. 

Stores don’t know how to sell variety except as a “variety pack” which has the opposite meaning. 

As everything has become more “perfect,” it also is more interchangeable. The edges have smoothed down. The irregularities, the things that don’t quite fit, look like errors, not possibilities. In a system built on efficiency, errors need to be deleted. 

What doesn’t fit becomes waste and yet that is often where the flavor still is. It’s in the variety. 

You can tell a man made-garden from a natural one or wilderness because the man-made version spaces everything out perfectly, eliminates chances of failure or stunted growth. It economizes where nature would allow the grand scheme of decay, failure, futility and death to play its part in the overall random program. 

With AI, the normalization pressure multiplies 100000000-fold and when the world is totally translated into datasets, into rows and columns, into patterns that can be predicted and reproduced, difference becomes impossible to hold. It’s not even part of our understanding, not because it disappears entirely, but because it becomes irrelevant. Noise. Waste.

In my academic work, I study how people encounter difference in highly structured spaces: cemeteries, rituals, systems designed to manage death through digitization. These are places where individuality is supposed to matter, where meaning is supposed to resist standardization. And yet, even there, systems creep in. Templates. Processes. Forms.

I was part of that movement when I pushed for the digitization of data in cemeteries and funeral homes. Organization, accessibility, relational and redundant efficiency. It made sense.

Then a friend reached out to me recently after losing someone close. They were overwhelmed and had no reference for what to do so they asked if I had a template, a project plan, a spreadsheet to help organize the funeral.

And in that moment, the only thought I had was: How can you have a template for death?

How do you pre-structure something that is, by nature, singular? That we don’t even understand? 

I see a version of that same moment play out every day at the café.

Most people, by far, don’t come in looking for something new. They come in looking for something familiar in the new. The repeat, only slightly forgettably different. The safe choice. The thing they already understand. Something they could get anywhere. 

I see it behind my counter. I hear it from friends who travel halfway across the world to Japan, to Thailand and still order a vanilla latte. Not because they don’t have options, but because familiarity travels and finds itself everywhere. It asks little of you.

We’ve spent decades standardizing experience. So when you hear about a “standout” café, you go out of your way to visit, expecting something different.

But when you get there, you already know the place. It’s the same as the last standout place you went and ordered a latte at, took and shared a selfie and a pic of the “latte art” and gave a Google review. You do your work in the digital cultural economy. 

But it’s the same menu. Same cups. Same pastries and same shop swag. Same latte art. Same (lack of) service choreography. Same machines. Same request for a tip. Same carefully curated clean and compartmentalized aesthetic that signals uniqueness while delivering sameness. Different city. Same experience.

Even my 90-year-old friend Bob, who struggles with dementia, notices it. He forgets names, places, details, but he’ll look around and say:

“This feels like the other place.”

We don’t just tolerate the familiar, we crave it and we don’t go looking for something different. 

We look at a menu and seek out what we know, parsing out and trashing anything that doesn’t make sense. 

We crave what others crave so we can be a part of that craving group. We want to belong to the same pattern, the data set, the project. It’s easier. Lower risk. No imagination required. No attention on me. No shame of uniqueness. You don’t have to decide who you are at that moment, you just select from the list.

It’s the same instinct I see every time someone defaults to a latte with syrup. I want the consistency of sugar, masking the flavor of bad coffee, for the successful delivery of my secret desire for caffeine. 

Cappucho came out of the gate pushing against that instinct.

In my twenties, I worked in second-wave cafés, places that still had personality before they were flattened out by the green goddess. Then I spent twenty years running a bike shop unlike any other bike shop anywhere and later moved into software. Completely different worlds, but both taught me how to build unique things over time and keep them alive inside systems that reward sameness rather than differentiation. My bike shop advertised the difference in its name:  “Motostrano” - strange motorcycle. 

The turning point came when I was traveling through Asia, especially Taiwan. I walked into a tiny coffee shop with hand made wooden stools for seating and almost tripped over the roaster. 

There it was, in the front window on the floor. Just part of the space. Smoke and coffee fumes filled the room and drifted out into the street. The owner and Director of Coffee sat on one of the stools, tinkering with it casually, like it was an extension of his body, displaying his craft which would make its way into my cup. No separation. No abstraction. 

Sipping on a pour over, you could sit right next to it and watch and smell it. You were part of the process itself. The roaster could look over at you, gauge the expression on your face and dial a nob on the coffee roaster for an alternate profile example. 

This coffee was fresh, honest and alive.

That moment stuck with me and I am building Cappucho as a response.

It’s a small, personal space at the edge of downtown, inside a shipping container next to a creek. Tech workers work. Dog walkers stroll. Amazon drivers drive. It’s intentionally a little off and not consistently perfect. Things change, daily. People come to grab coffee to go, but there’s an invitation to stay and when they do, the experience shifts to full service experience.

I roast on-site. I experiment. I serve things that don’t always fit the expected script. You want chocolate. I suggest flowers. I create my own themed roasts and I’m not part of any trend or movement. 

Each morning I look at a blank canvas and that’s what gets me out of a perfectly warm bed and on to a bright red Vespa that rockets me to work. 

Usually I can see it happen: a shift when someone decides to try something different and it’s like a firework went off. 

The moment after the “WOW” isn’t just about taste. It’s about recognition and their own accomplishment. Something new registering against a background of sameness.

It’s small. Easy to miss. But it’s there.

That’s the part I’m interested in: not really just serving coffee, but creating a space where difference is NOT filtered out, but included in the cup.