The audacity to have rules/ the beauty of what they enabled

Craig Mod, in an essay about restaurants and coffeeshops that have specific rules -- no talking, no books, no phones:

He also talks about the benefits of these rules:

I miss Imoya. I miss those rules. I look around me in cafés and small businesses today, and people eat alone with a phone propped up on the counter, watching YouTube or flicking through TikTok or Reels or watching TV. They tap-tap-tap Candy Crush style video games between bites. They hardly look at their food, let alone taste it. They are anywhere but “in” the place, anywhere but focused on the meal. The line behind them grows, and the turnaround for seats gets longer and longer the more addictive our phones become, and the more inward we all seem to turn.

I’ve visited dozens of jazz kissa all around Japan. When they opened in the 50s and 60s, records were prohibitively expensive, and American musicians touring Japan were rare. The only way to really listen to overseas jazz, was at their shops. There was an information arbitrage happening, a kind of translation between abroad and local, and the jazz kissa was the intermediary broker. So they had rules, too. No talking (you’re there to listen). They had little pads of paper on which you could request an album. (The music was so loud you couldn’t issue a request using your voice, anyway.) If you made a music request and went to the bathroom while it was playing, you were never allowed to make another request. Obviously, back then there was no Spotify, no Apple Music. The rules were modeled in alignment with their purpose, elevated their purpose, created a kind of superlative in-shop presence, tasting that burnt coffee, hearing Charlie Parker for the first time, having your mind blown. The matchbooks would sometimes have lines printed on them for you to take notes about what you heard that day (this was some deadly serious business, listening to jazz).

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Today, I often think about what could be arbitraged, what could be brokered, and how we could regain our attention from the black mirrors in our hands. I’ve come to feel that a café or restaurant banning phones themselves (never mind laptops; phones always strike me as the real vibe-killer (but of course, dingdongs rocking video calls in cafés will forever be the ultimate boss of sanity)) would provide some kind of utility to the world, would self-select for a certain kind of customer craving shared silence from the algorithms, from the news, from the din of endless horror and outrage.

I feel like there’s a hint of something in the shoe locker system at sentos, local bathhouses. Those wooden cabinets with big metal or wooden keys. They’re lovely to use. The keys are huge and satisfying. I could imagine the same kind of system being used for a café. You walk in, and put your phone in the locker, take the giant key, sit down, read a book, perhaps … write on paper?! No video calls allowed, no dopaminergic loops. Do something where you are in the moment, something far from the algorithm, far from an LLM tempting you to ask it to re-write or draw or perform the creative act for yourself.

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When I see someone scrolling away alone at a counter, I’m always reminded of Imoya. The first shop I ever visited with rules. Rules that didn’t make any initial sense to me (kinda frustrated me the first few times I visited), but then not only made sense, but became something I loved, adored — the audacity to have the rules, but then the beauty of what they enabled. The rules kept the seats turning over, the oil burbling, the vegetables frying, the student’s bellies full. They forced you to look, really look, at where you were and to study the beautiful work happening behind the spotless wooden counter. They enabled a restaurant to flourish, for the shop to generate profit on razor-thin margins, and two cranky — but ultimately quietly compassionate and passionate — lives to be filled with meaning.