Meh. Complaining that coffee snobbery has got more accessible is like complaining that good cameras have got more accessible. Yes, there are some people whose expenditure outpaces their talent. But a lot of the original coffee snobs weren't people of great judgement either. And complaining about those kind of middlebrow coffee snobs in the same article where you talk about how you'd pick Dunkin over Starbucks is the height of hypocrisy. This guy comes off far worse than the people he's criticising.
Agreed, I think the average “coffee snob” really just wants people to enjoy coffee that doesn’t have to be 50% cream and sugar. Coffee doesn’t have to be that acrid tasting black water made from over-roasted, stale, coffee grounds that our parents often drank.
I don’t coffee but I took it as “you used to be able to go to small shop and pay more and get good coffee, but now everything is better across the board and Dunkin’s has decent coffee and many small shops are no better”.
Which happens all the time when the (hipster/prosumer/whatever) takes off.
Same thing with cameras - any standalone camera used to be better than a phone camera, but the phone cameras got better.
> I don’t coffee but I took it as “you used to be able to go to small shop and pay more and get good coffee, but now everything is better across the board and Dunkin’s has decent coffee and many small shops are no better”.
> Which happens all the time when the (hipster/prosumer/whatever) takes off.
> Same thing with cameras - any standalone camera used to be better than a phone camera, but the phone cameras got better.
I feel like that's only a reasonable complaint if the specialty shops have gotten worse. From talking to friends who do drink coffee, that doesn't seem to be the case. There are all sorts of innovations happening in coffee (particularly espresso) all the time that allow for more and more control over the extraction process.
To use your camera example: sure, phone cameras have gotten better - in fact, they're so good that many people find them sufficient to use instead of a standalone camera. But dedicated cameras continue to get better as well - albeit at a slower pace.
I can understand complaints by working photographers: there are so many pictures out there that it's much more difficult to make a living selling stock photography. But it just seems weird for an amateur to complain that the gap between phones and what the pros use is shrinking as long as both continue to improve.
If the theory is correct (that some coffee shops now are basically serving the same thing as McDonalds or whatever) then I could see the complaint.
When phone cameras were very bad, you were guaranteed to get a better camera with any standalone one; even a point-and-shoot Walmart special. No thought was really necessary beyond price. But now that phone cameras are better, you have to work at it to find a worthwhile standalone camera (and that camera is much more expensive, relatively).
Or another way of reading it is "it used to be easy to be a snob! Just pay more and you're guaranteed to get some good shit!" and now that 'trick' doesn't work.
I think there's a deeper thing here, which is the "desire for secret knowledge", almost a form of gnosticism or something. We want to "know a secret that isn't widely known" even if it doesn't actually really help us any.
> When phone cameras were very bad, you were guaranteed to get a better camera with any standalone one; even a point-and-shoot Walmart special. No thought was really necessary beyond price. But now that phone cameras are better, you have to work at it to find a worthwhile standalone camera (and that camera is much more expensive, relatively).
I don't think that this analogy stands up quite so well - if your camera has removable lenses, it'll be better than a phone. It will be expensive, although given the price of phones these days, the phone is actually probably more expensive than a beginner mirrorless. But analogies are known to be fragile when stretched.
> Or another way of reading it is "it used to be easy to be a snob! Just pay more and you're guaranteed to get some good shit!" and now that 'trick' doesn't work.
> I think there's a deeper thing here, which is the "desire for secret knowledge", almost a form of gnosticism or something. We want to "know a secret that isn't widely known" even if it doesn't actually really help us any.
This makes a lot of sense to me.
I mean, it's completely foreign to me - I only care about being or getting better than yesterday. I don't care at all about how good I have it in relation to other people. But I understand that that is very motivating to a lot - perhaps most - people.
