Visiting your internet-free cafe won’t satiate my bottomless hunger for brainrot

If you are what you eat, then my flesh is actually Italian brainrot.

I’m web-ivorous, and I’m not proud of it. “I wish I could go somewhere phone free,” I whisper to myself as I reheat clips of Gianmarco Soresi’s Jimmy Fallon appearance in the microwave as a midnight snack. “I need to do a dopamine detox,” I lament to my friends as I consume three square meals a day of Spider-Man-meme approximations of the modern political landscape. “I should really quit my phone,” I groan while sweetening my morning coffee with AI-generated songs about how steamrollers work.

But take it from a gal who knows: if you’re listening to audiobooks like “How to Break Up with Your Phone” and reading wikiHow articles such as “How to Avoid Internet Addiction,” the Omniscient Algorithm will take you by the hand and gently lead you to a sparkling solution: the #Unplugged movement.

It’s chic. It’s mysterious. And it’s most apparent in the recent boom of Cambridge restaurants that limit technology use. But like the Walmart Pride Collection, there’s something sinister I can’t quite put my finger on about a corporation subsuming an individualistic pursuit into its brand appeal, so I visit Zuzu’s Petals and Faro Caféprepared to purchase social-media-logo latte art via Apple Pay only.

Zuzu’s Petals is a wine and dessert bar a mile east of campus whose website boasts their screen-free-ness before mentioning their wine or dessert. Before I enter, I notice their web address scrawled across the entrance window right above the door handle — a shockingly central piece of welcome decor given that I came to the restaurant explicitly to lose access to the web. Like a true child of the internet, I had taken my no-tech commitment to its sarcastic maximum: Phone left at home, I’m armed with a notebook, two hardcover books from Widener Library (“Life in Code” and “Amusing Ourselves to Death”), a film camera, an analog watch, and the directions scribbled on my arm with a pen. (Next time, I’ll need to bring an almanac, compass, and carrier pigeon. This whole #Unplugged thing is a work in progress.)

A shelf of vinyl records sits prominently behind the register (“no robot algorithm choosing our music,” their reservation site had promised me.). On the windowsill rests a stack of French dictionaries — and if you’re a native French speaker and show up on a Tuesday, you get a free glass of wine. The owners sometimes give out free wine coupons to people they see on buses, in parks, and even at other cafes who aren’t occupied by a screen.

I try not to question why I’ve willingly relinquished fingertip access to the whole sum of human knowledge in order to publicly display how self-aware I am of my addictions. I tell myself the $18 I’m paying for a raspberry dark chocolate mousse is for more than just the food, but with every tiny bite I take, I become less convinced of the experience I’m supposedly buying into. Though I see one person at a distant table poring over a book, the man sitting beside me has his phone resting casually on the table — a blatant and unaddressed affront to the impossible-to-miss “NO CELL PHONES ALLOWED” wall plaque. After an hour or two of being #OffTheGrid, during which I brainstorm the captions I would use if I could post about this on Instagram without being hypocritical, I start to wonder if there’s a difference between wanting to be unplugged and wanting to give off that aesthetic by simply attending a screen-free space.

At Faro, the #TouchGrass aesthetic is so aggressively cultivated that they have a shrine to Henry David Thoreau. A framed portrait presides over an elevated table, accompanied by a well-worn biography, a candlestickholder full of wax remnants, and a single sprig of flowers lain crosswise as though Thoreau was a family acquaintance who died approximately two years ago but no one had yet found the heart to replace the spread with Halloween decorations.

Faro is so certain of its aesthetic that it won’t stop telling me what it is. Before I even get a look at the interior, I’m met with a “we are LAPTOP-FREE” sign, joined on the wall by two printed memes — one about “burnout society” looking to coffee shops for co-working and the other with the ominous caption “laptops / laptops everywhere.” Once I order, I’m met with another plaque, this one letting me know that they’re “very much in love with Thoreau,” in case I missed the shrine. I’m told Faro is “post-productive,” seeking to counteract consumerism and “the cold hand of (infinite) economic growth.”

When I go to a cafe, I expect three things: a place to do my problem sets, an aesthetic clear enough that I can tell myself my payments are contributions to the vibe, and excellent people-watching. The first is explicitly banned, and given that purchasing a $6.50 matcha to counteract consumerism is consumerist, my second expectation is confounded. I choose one of the mismatched wooden chairs near Thoreau to drink my anti-capitalist tea and hope for the third.

If Zuzu’s is a hotspot of people more interested in the wine than the #Unplugged mission, Faro attracts only the most hardcore of the anti-internet web-ivores. One woman curls up near the window with a book. A few folks cluster around a game of chess. Someone at the center table paints with a watercolor travel kit. I may be starving for some good ol’ blue-screen time, but for a moment, I soak in the offline-ness of it all — my editor can’t even be mad that my article is late because being on-the-scene means I’m blissfully oblivious to her emails.

Faro’s patrons can be sorted into two archetypes: the chronically online Zillenial who unironically saves performative male contests videos to their “fashion inspo” album, and the old man who doesn’t realize his rallying “kids these days” cry applies to most of the 20-something men and women who are thrift-buying his pants and reading Jon Krakauer’s “Into the Wild” beside him in the cafe. If there are kids these days who are genuinely offline (which I increasingly believe is impossible), I’m certain you won’t find them in a coffee shop that’s “imagining regenerative futures” by hanging Confused Katori Yutaro memes to communicate social critique to their patrons.

But to the old man editing printed pages with a pen while basking in Faro patio’s supposed independence from the internet:

Yeah, dude, kids these days are totally living up to your high hopes for the next generation — we’re obviously not just embracing an anti-internet aesthetic because we’re so online we’ve followed trendiness to its pseudo-luddite extreme. Hanging plants, over-ear headphones, and paperbacks on the T are absolutely indicators that kids these days are maturing — it’s not at all that our lives are conducted so thoroughly online that the physical world is only useful as a place to play dress up. Kids these days are truly realizing they don’t need to be online — it would be silly if we saw the internet as the realest world we know, full of the essential nutrients we need to appease our hunger. Our brains haven’t rotted at all.

After I spend my day handwriting observations like a 1890s female journalist perpetually yearning for her big break, I march back to the comfort of my bed to copy my notes into a Google Doc while split-screening with YouTube shorts which are themselves split-screened between Conan Gray’s most recent podcast appearance and a poorly-played game of Subway Surfers. Phone back in my hand where it belongs, I discover a missed text reminder for my Zuzu’s Petals reservation. Wow, I missed a lot of things.

My adventures into screen-free space backfired: I’m more certain than ever that memes are at the top of my food pyramid, and I’m disillusioned from any notion that matcha and mousse might sufficiently correct my diet. After all, I’m still hungry.

— Associate Magazine Editor Kate J. Kaufman can be reached at kate.kaufman@thecrimson.com.