Black is the new coffee

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Wie gehts? Said the Portuguese waiter, cleaner, IT, coffee expert, accountant and social media manager to a group of Polish customers at a recently opened café, one of the novelties near a former prostitution epicentre locally known as Praça Sao Lázaro.

Indifferent to the inaccurate linguistic intuition, one of the girls in the all dressed in black group said: “We were here yesterday and had this really good, fruity coffee from Kenya…”

“Ethiopia!” Said the bearded local interferingly before taking the order and subsequently informing the coffee lovers about the Wi-Fi password without being asked for it.

“Combi1234” was also what a black dressed Japanese couple heard seconds after the Polish ordered, seconds before opening their laptops to do some work and  drink coffee at Combi Café in Porto.

Soft Power is a concept developed by Joseph Nye of Harvard University to describe the ability to shape the preferences of others through appeal and attraction; one of the currencies of Soft Power is culture, when a more powerful civilization promotes and imposes values in order to standardize civilizations throughout the world.

Drinking pricey coffee from Africa or South America in a minimalistic space is a mutual practice among young, modern citizens; like eating spread avocado on toasts, it is also a form of soft social colonialism as the massive peripheral extraction of coffee beans and avocado ends its economic scale journey in “cool” lookalike, standardized  “local” businesses in cities such as Budapest, Seattle or Lima.

These are temples for the peregrination of hip demiurges who are, at the same time, merchandise and  buyers who do not sabotage any trade and any traffic; they stimulate it, aggravate it and consume it without wandering about any city, defying instead the possibility of denying themselves as conscious mediums of the social and aesthetic plane on which they are placed.

(I was not all dressed in black, I did not order coffee, therefore, I was not told the Wi Fi password, I read something printed over tea)