There is nothing funny about free coffee

Yesterday, the venerable San Francisco Chronicle ran a story whose headline was “Bay Area tech giant reinstates free coffee for employees after mass layoffs.” Your reaction to that story interests me.

Mine was to question whether what I was reading was satire. How could this information be called “news”? If it has indeed happened in the world—which, let us grant that it has—this event is is so trivial, so uninteresting, so wildly, hilariously inconsequential. First of all because it’s coffee, the thing you buy outside if you care about coffee (and if you don’t, you spent pennies on making yourself). “On-site perks for Intel employees” I am told, “include things like “Massage chairs and onsite massage services. Transportation amenities like car wash services and access to bicycles. Fitness centers, sports fields and walking paths. Miscellaneous services like dry cleaning, ATMs or convenience stores.” Coffee is not important enough for US News to mention, because coffee is cheap, easy, and the multitude of businesses who provide it free to their employees, or don’t, would never dream of this being a thing that anyone else cares about.

Against the weightlessness of this information—which the San Francisco Chronicle has murdered trees, spilled ink, and burdened the planet with data center carbon emissions to make known—is the possibility that this mismatch in gravity and substance is precisely the point of writing the article. Are we experiencing cunning satire? A wicked parody of tech hype? Was this article produced by SFChronPitchBot? The Onion? Is humor once again legal?

After all, if you read it straight, it’s hard not to be disoriented by the reality you’re apparently inhabiting. You find yourself wondering if sentences like “Intel announced last week that it will reinstate free coffee and tea at its facilities, a move aimed at boosting employee morale following a series,” or “The company’s free fruit program, for example, remains discontinued” could possibly be being offered to you as if you care, and as if the author thinks you care. Does staff writer Aidin Vaziri think we care about the cost of coffee at Intel? How much could employees at Intel even care? Is it, perhaps, the ludicrousness of the idea that we might that is the real point of this story? Management of a troubled tech company giving free coffee to the employees it hasn’t laid off (yet), and calling this a morale boost, is some straight out of Michael Scott / Office Space nonsense.

The Chronicle is not generally a paper whose coverage of the tech industry has within it the sense that the tech industry is full of shit and is ridiculous. It’s a Hearst paper that covers tech the way you’d expect a company paper in a company town to cover the company. You would expect it to treat management PR like it isn’t gaslighting foolishness, because it understands itself to be aligned with management. Because it drinks the slop it serves up, it does not seem like a paper that would management PR like this with the intention that you read them, feel disoriented by the mind that would think and agree with these thoughts, and say to yourself “Haha! This is so fucking dumb.”

It turns out that the story is a straight-up copy-and-paste job from a week-old story in The Oregonian, which the Chronicle replicates in almost every particular. The main thing it added was the sentence “Intel declined to comment on the reinstatement of the perks to the Chronicle,” which, for obvious reasons, The Oregonian was incapable of producing. Vaziri also dug up some forgettable management pablum from a memo, but this is if-a-student-did-this-it-would-be-plagiarism levels of unoriginality.

Of course, the story has changed in a couple subtle ways. One of them is that the Chronicle describes Intel as “Bay Area tech giant,” which the Oregonian does not (perhaps because Intel does indeed have more employees in Oregon than in California, and, in that sense, is not really a “Bay Area” tech giant). The Oregonian also gives a clear sense that this coffee bullshit was offered as a sop to employees who were pretty mad about all of it, and that it was given back after a meeting in which employees had asked if it was coming back—and been told absolutely not—so in that sense, Oregonian staff writer Mike Rogoway is at least giving us a story: Intel took coffee away, employees were mad about it, and then “By Wednesday the company had reversed itself, committing to keep its employees caffeinated.”

Even this barest wrinkle of drama has been ironed out in The Chronicle version, perhaps not wishing to offend its readers with the suggestion that worker power exists. A result is that the quotes which end the piece are strangely decontextualized and contradict the main story: in The Oregonian, Christy Pambianchi is quoted as explaining why the coffee will never again flow freely before the company reverses itself, but The Chronicle puts him at the end, after the reversal, so the thing he is talking about has already been superseded and rendered obsolete by the endless overflowing tide of history.

The problem, I suppose, is imagining that such a thing as the author exists, or that this “news” was produced by an author for actual human beings. An author who was writing words and sentences with the intention of telling a story for human beings might, for example, have noticed that as changed the order of Mike Rogoway’s sentences to de-emphasize the existence of worker power and its ability to force a change in management decisions, that the story no longer was a story and no longer made much sense. But something other than that—something other than a writer writing sentences with the intention of conveying new to other human beings—was happening here, I think. The Chronicle wrote this story because other people had written this story, and with the nimble journalistic instincts of a chatgpt, it said “oh I will also write that.”

A day after the Oregonian story on Nov 7th, Business Insider reported on the Oregonian’s reporting, noting that “Representatives for Intel did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider,” but adding a bit more context on Intel’s current woes. No jokes, but the next day, you could see a glimmer of a wink in Tom’s Hardware’s Nov 8^th reporting on the reporting (“Fresh fruits remain out of reach in the breakroom, though.”). By Nov 9^th, it has become a “Brew-haha” for The Register and on the 11^th, CTech opens by noting that “The jokes about Intel’s decision to cut — and then reinstate — free coffee and tea at its offices aren’t expected to disappear anytime soon.” Today, Palki Sharma at First Post sarcastically referenced Intel’s “brilliant idea,” and noted that Intel’s “benevolence has become an internet joke.” Only the San Francisco Chronicle seems to be talking about the story as if it’s news, and not a meme. Perhaps the actually funny thing is that the Chronicle ran the story simply to strip the joke back out of it.

(At press time, Aidin Vaziri had declined to comment on whether or not he was doing satire.)