Celebrating Human Connection Over a Moka Pot

We need more engagement in the world, not less.

We don’t want our moka pots to erupt like Old Faithful.

This morning I was part of a conversation about coffee and moka pots on Mastodon. One person, who happens to live in the UK, remarked that you don’t want your moka pot to bubble up like Old Faithful. Another person, from the US, expressed surprise that the first person knew about Old Faithful.

I don’t mean to be critical of my fellow American—far from it! I celebrate this kind of interaction. As much as we try to make ourselves aware of the wider world there are always gaps. It’s interesting to learn what others who live abroad know of the US. And I like to think the people I meet from other places find what I do and don’t know interesting too. It’s one of the things that identifies us as people out here in the æther.

I love that I can engage in this way with people whom I barely know. It is such fun and so eye-opening! It is what social media promised us and failed to deliver. Or perhaps more precisely: what it gave us then took away when it stopped nurturing human contact and started monetizing it.

We need more engagement in the world not less, which is why I love it here.