Flames, blood and tears torment the landscape of what a political revolution looks like. We imagine the bloody executions by guillotine in the French Revolution, or the peasant revolts in Imperial China, which saw wooden palaces ashened to a mound of rubble, but never stop to wonder: where did they all begin? For France, it was the networks of coffeehouses (cafés) that enabled free-flowing information about the monarchy and its edicts to incite feelings of anger and fervour against injustice. While there is less direct evidence in China that any one teahouse contributed to a rebellion (unlike the ‘Café du Caveau’), Chiang Kai Shek was certainly worried of the potential for political strife when he “ordered all teahouses to purchase portraits of Sun Yat-sen and other Nationalist Party leaders and to prepare space for a lectern, blackboard, a party flag, and national flag.” (The Teahouse: Small Business, Everyday Culture, and Public Politics in Chengdu, 1900-1950, pg pp.224-247)

Imagine if a random stranger approached you one day at a coffeehouse, asking if you were a part of the Jacobin Club, and if you were ready to “make terror of the order of the day”.

There is no doubt that enduring through a political upheaval is a daunting experience, especially if you swore to abstain from doing or having any political action or thought. One day you’re sleeping in bed after a hard day’s work, and the next the whole street harbours death, disorder and decay. You wished that people hadn’t felt compelled to murder other people to bring change. You thought that it was selfish to upend all of society to bring about a certain political end. But at the end of the day, you were hungry when the revolution happened, and you were sickened by the thought that you could not guarantee your children’s survival, or even your own. So when it did happen, even if you weren’t one of the instigators, you were glad. You wanted there to be blood and iron. 

Whilst discussing revolts and revolutions in cafés made sense in 18th-century France, you may wonder why this matters today.

Tensions are clearly rising between nation-states, rural and urban demographics, employers and employees, governments and corporations, the automated and the automaton, academia and laymen, institutions and anti-institutionalists, and so on. As we all cross our fingers, hoping that we still have jobs in the future, some of us confine our worries of anxiety and despair only to the online space.

The reality is that coffeehouses or teahouses (in the form of cafes) now cater towards the more aesthetic and apolitical parts of our society. We end up spending a few hours drinking and taking photos of our favourite matchas or lattes, talking about what courses we’re taking, how difficult that one lecturer is or hearing about some juicy relationship drama. NOT THAT I DON’T DO ALL OF THE ABOVE. However, the social standard is now that even mentioning politics in a public space invites hushes and shushes. It’s seen as opening ourselves up to vitriolic attacks from strangers about our political ideology, our opinions about government, and perhaps even life in general. 

If we confine all political talk to online or private spaces, we risk losing control of the discourse and our ability to effect real and meaningful change. There are three main reasons I believe this

Firstly, I think all online spaces are economically incentivised to algorithmically induce higher levels of engagement via likes, dislikes and commenting. This means that the news stories or opinions that get seen and internalised are the most inflammatory, politically partisan opinions and are generally quite cursed. More often than not, when you see a highly liked political opinion, it is without nuance and dehumanises one side of the political aisle. In so many cases, it is nothing but a snapshot of a user’s outburst of rage emanating from the screen, and it removes the ability to have good and reasonable arguments.

Following that, it's also true that most online spaces are subject to the discretion of the moderation team. When one particular political ideology holds the most power, the users who subscribe to such a political ideology are the ones who are far more likely to continue using that online space. After all, who would want to continue reading endless amounts of posts and comments that attack your personal beliefs in an unproductive manner? And leading to our last point, what happens to those users who want an online space to discuss their politics but can't access the current ones?

As we have traversed deeper into the Information Age, we have realised that instead of people now having more information about the world, people now have far less. The fragmentation of online spaces into X, BlueSky, Reddit, Parker, and TruthSocial has led to communities that share near-zero overlap in their political demographics. Facts appear different from site to site. The most influential voices change from site to site. What gets amplified into your front feed is different site to site. The reality is that, for a large majority of the political userbase, people believe in different truths, all leading to the same conclusion. Anyone who is not on my side is evil. Ask someone who is liberal about their opinions on Michael Bloomberg and someone conservative about their views on Elon Musk, and you'll see that it doesn't matter how much of the working class they've exploited. It just matters that they're on your side.

The more we stigmatise politics, the more we isolate it to the online spaces where the wealthy and the powerful have absolute power. Compare that to your local neighbourhood coffeehouse/teahouse, where the workers have to worry about stocktake, making coffee/tea, dealing with customer complaints, cleaning, providing change, and issuing receipts. Who has time to judge a random person's political opinion? Another plus is that I've never had my coffeehouse/teahouse selectively push certain political content based on the type of tea I drink. 

So long as you are enjoying a nice Earl Grey tea, who cares about your politics?