Habermas and his coffeehouses ⊗ The case for radical solar optimism

Habermas and his coffeehouses

The German philosopher Jürgen Habermas passed away last week, so his name was top of mind, and I always jump on thinking about cafés, coffeeshops, salons, and the like. Double that if “scenius” is mentioned. So I was drawn to this post by Jeff Jarvis, where he argues that Habermas’s famous theory of the coffeehouse as the birthplace of rational, civil public discourse was based on an idealisation that never matched reality. Habermas drew heavily on The Spectator and The Tatler, publications that were actively shaping the culture they claimed to describe. The actual coffeehouses were chaotic, smelly, full of rumours and sedition. Coffeehouses and publishers had a “frenemies” relationship, proprietors resented the expense of newspapers but depended on them for content, while publishers relied on coffeehouses for distribution and news-gathering. Posted house rules from 1674 prohibited swearing, quarrels, and wagering. Evidence that all three were common enough to require management. (Side note here to mention the very Eurocentric representation, such settings were found all around the world around coffee and tea, way before either drink made it to Europe.)

I preferred the more historical parts, but the piece’s central point is that the internet-as-degraded-public-sphere framing rests on a comparison to something that never existed. Jarvis draws on Nancy Fraser’s feminist critique, Habermas’s public sphere excluded women, the poor, and the marginalised, a limitation he himself came to acknowledge over the course of his career. He also brings in McGill’s Making Publics Project, which challenges the idea of a single public sphere altogether. Publics formed around books, theatres, ballads, and languages, creating what Benedict Anderson called “imagined communities,” not through rational coffeehouse deliberation but through shared cultural forms.

The coffeehouses-and-publishers tension maps onto today’s platform-media dynamics with uncomfortable precision: mutual dependence, mutual resentment, and a shared inability to control the discourse they generate. Regina Rini’s framing is useful here, she characterises the ongoing negotiation of online norms as a tension between those seeking “Marginal Protection” and “Status Quo Warriors,” which describes the coffeehouse dynamic just as well. Jarvis’s conclusion, leaning on James Carey, is that republics require “cacophonous conversation.” The coffeehouse was always messy, and reframing online discourse as genuine public formation—chaotic, imperfect, but real—is more honest than mourning a fall from Habermas’s impossible standard. But really, first and foremost, I just enjoyed a nice historical look at coffeehouses.

🤖 Note: I don’t know much about Habermas’ writing, but according to Claude; “Jarvis argues against a somewhat simplified version of Habermas, one that he himself partially outgrew. He acknowledged the exclusionary nature of the bourgeois public sphere and engaged with Fraser’s critique over the course of his career. His model was partly normative (what public discourse should aspire to), not purely descriptive.”

Nancy Fraser made a compelling feminist argument against Habermas’ presumption of a public sphere there: “We can no longer assume that the bourgeois conception of the public sphere was simply an unrealized utopian ideal; it was also a masculinist ideological notion that functioned to legitimate an emergent form of class rule. … In short, is the idea of the public sphere an instrument of domination or a utopian ideal?” […]

It’s not just that the old rules may not apply in new environments. It’s also that old rules were imposed by the powerful — white, male, and privileged — upon other sectors of society — among them in America, Black, Latino, LGBTQ+, disabled, immigrant, poor — who did not have seats at the table where standards were set for all. Now the formerly disenfranchised have an opportunity to seek new rules — and those who set the old rules resent their intrusion; when their old ways are criticized, they cry that they have been “canceled.” […]

Print had been around for two centuries by the time coffeehouses arrived, but newspapers were new and were too expensive to be bought by commoners. Coffeehouses changed that: “The coffeehouse was the place to read broadsides, pamphlets, and periodicals,” said Klein. “As a specifically discursive institution, the coffeehouse should be viewed in the context of the history of discourse and communicative practices in society.” […]

Cowan quoted English lawyer Roger North fretting that “not only sedition and treason, but atheism, heresy, and blasphemy are publicly taught in diverse of the celebrated coffee-houses.”

The case for radical solar optimism

When it comes to solar, I always have in mind Deb Chachra’s view on abundant energy and what we might be able to do with it. That comes from having read her thinking for years, including her excellent book How Infrastructure Works. In this piece it’s actually Azeem Azhar making the case for radical solar optimism but there’s a good deal of overlap between the two. Azhar’s core argument rests on Wright’s Law: every doubling of cumulative solar production has cut module prices by roughly a quarter, a pattern that has held for nearly five decades. Forecasters consistently underestimated this, the IEA’s projections were off by a factor of seven. The argument is a manufacturing learning curve, the same kind of dynamic that drove semiconductors. And like semiconductors, each cost threshold unlocks new markets that fund the next doubling.

The piece gets more interesting once it moves past grid electricity, which accounts for only a fraction of total energy use. Azhar walks through what each further cost reduction makes viable. Cheap green hydrogen undercuts fossil-derived hydrogen, which opens the door to green steel and synthetic fertiliser. Cheaper still, and desalination becomes affordable for agriculture, not just wealthy coastal cities. Direct air capture, currently prohibitively expensive, starts approaching workable costs. Synthetic jet fuel, chemically identical to kerosene but carbon-neutral, remains expensive but the gap narrows with each doubling, and carbon pricing closes it further. Even the remediation of PFAS “forever chemicals,” where the core obstacle is the sheer energy needed to break carbon-fluorine bonds, becomes tractable. Azhar also spends time on the bear cases—intermittency, land use, the fact that panels are now cheap but the rest of the system isn’t—and handles them seriously. The piece is long and detailed but the central argument is simple: cheap energy doesn’t just replace fossil fuels, it makes previously impossible things merely expensive, and previously expensive things cheap.

Caveat → I might have to make up some kind of personal scale I can use here, from Amish to techno-solutionist. Azhar is definitely quite a bit closer to the right side of that hypothetical scale than I am. And probably than most of you. So maybe dial back the article a bit as you read or as you reflect after the fact, and probably dial back another couple of notches when reading him on AI. Contrary to many, he’s not going crazy though, the basics are solid and directionally correct, just a tad over-enthusiastic, imho.

Further reading → The bit about “every material object is atoms in a configuration.” reminded me of the Wil McCarthy novel Bloom (good read) and its ladderdown tech. “A system of converting elements into other elements "Nuclear transmutation" further down the Periodic Table. As a result of using this system, the inhabitants of the Immunity have a plethora of high-numbered elements lying around. For example, they have so much gold they use it to weigh down their shoes and pave the streets.”

If that sounds familiar, it’s because you’ve lived it. This is the exact flywheel that built the computer industry over the past fifty years. In 1971, Intel’s first microprocessor had 2,300 transistors. Today’s chips hold 100 billion because a learning curve cut the cost per computation by a factor of 10 billion. That curve did not produce a single product. It produced an industry: mainframes gave way to PCs, PCs to smartphones, smartphones to cloud computing, cloud computing to AI. Each market was unimaginable at the price point of the previous one. Each one funded the next doubling. […]

Solar now generates 9.5% of global electricity, from 1% a decade ago. If the market were fixed, if electricity demand stayed where it is, there would be only three-and-a-bit doublings left before solar hit 100%. But the market is not fixed. Every time the price falls far enough, the ceiling moves and a use that was previously uneconomical becomes viable. […]

But the next generation of DAC is electrochemical: Verdox’s electroswing adsorption uses electrons directly to capture CO₂, with no thermal regeneration step and ocean-based approaches like Equatic use electrolysis to move seawater chemistry at scale. […]

By printing perovskite on top of the silicon, you essentially create a device that captures different parts of the solar spectrum in each layer – the perovskite absorbs higher-energy light while letting lower-energy light pass through to the silicon beneath. This opens up more of the spectrum for efficient conversion into electrical energy. This increased the theoretical efficiency limit to ~45%. […]

We use more than 30 million hectares of land to grow biofuels. That’s about the size of Poland; it powers just 4% of land transport. If we were to cover the same area in solar panels, we would meet the global electricity demand today. […]

Fossil fuel land use is cumulative and destructive; solar is permanent infrastructure that can improve the land it sits on.

Futures, Fictions & Fabulations

• This section is often the one I have most trouble filling in. I’m trying to keep it “meta” or practice-focus, i.e. about foresight (whatever you want to call it) and futures itself, not about signals, as well as some imagination, speculation focused stuff. This week I have only one and ran out of time looking for more so I’m using this “hole” to ask; do you find this link block useful? Why? Why not? Where could it go? Hit reply if you have thoughts!
• Possibilities literacy: empowering learners for an uncertain world. “Introduces Possibilities Literacy as a new meta-framework for engaging with the possible. Defines five dimensions: Perception, Crafting, Engagement, Stewardship, Mindsets. Shows how constraints, alternatives, and agency structure possibility-making.” (Via Weekly Wandering.)

Algorithms, Automations & Augmentations

• Proof. This is more tool than news, but even if you don’t end up using it, it’s a type of application/tool to pay attention to, it’s “an online document editor built for agents and humans to collaborate. Fast, free, and no login required.” To put it simply, you invite your favourite LLM as a collaborator and work on a document together. Very multiplayer à la Matt Webb.
• Pokémon Go players unknowingly trained delivery robots with 30 billion images. I’m surprised anyone is surprised. “In other words, all that time users spent wandering around playing Pokémon Go will now help determine how well a courier robot can deliver your take out. It’s a stark example of how crowdsourced data, seemingly collected for one purpose, can be quietly repurposed years later for something quite different.”
• Will AI make the workplace more human?. “Gensler’s Global Workplace Survey 2026 reveals how AI is making the physical workplace more essential — not less.”

Built, Biosphere & Breakthroughs

• Energy falling below $100 shows the world a way out. “Lithium-ion battery packs have slumped permanently beneath $100, with grid electricity from four-hour batteries costing $78 per megawatt-hour at the end of last year. The cost of lithium-iron-phosphate batteries used in cars has dropped below $100, to $81 per kilowatt-hour, making electric vehicles more affordable to buy.”
• This Paris tour reveals how Hidalgo made the city greener, more car-free. Lots of pictures and graphics about this fantastic transformation! “Visitors will discover that it’s a dramatically different place than a decade ago: lines of bikes and throngs of pedestrians where lanes were once jammed with cars, greenery encroaching on former pavement, summer swimming in the once-grimy Seine river — and a corresponding drop in air and water pollution.”
• The Scottish island that bought itself. “To this day, the trust is run by three entities: The Isle of Eigg Residents Association (representing island residents), the Highland Council (representing the local government), and the Scottish Wildlife Trust (which ensures long-term environmental stewardship of the island). Board members are appointed by their communities and serve staggered three-year terms, ensuring the island runs in the interest of all three stakeholders.”

Asides

• Extreme macro photos of insect wings by Chris Perani layer thousands of images. “The images reveal details we’d otherwise only be able to see clearly beneath a microscope, and a meticulous process illuminates undulating, scaled surfaces that resemble chromatic pixels, stained glass, or even beadwork.”
• Roots and the meaning of life. “They are so far out of sight for us, creatures of the upper world, that we don’t readily think of them. But as soon as we do, as soon as we plunge the mind into the cold dark humus to which the body will one day return, they become a spell against despair and a consecration of all that is alive.”
• Recommendations of 25 medieval manuscripts to explore online. “Almost every institution with a significant collection of medieval manuscripts digitizes many of their most significant works and makes them freely accessible online.”