The World’s Last Internet Cafes

August 5, 2023 5:33 AM

The World’s Last Internet Cafes.
posted by Fiasco da Gama (32 comments total)

I misread this as “the world’s last Internet cats” and thought “how can we possibly be running out?!”
posted by Servo5678 at 5:58 AM on August 5, 2023 [15 favorites]

This is a great article, and I love the photos. There was a time when these were lifesavers while traveling, but it's been a very long time since I've needed to use one.

Amos admits that most customers don’t come for the internet. “We still get some traffic because of our location, but that isn’t profitable,” he told Rest of World. “We make most of our revenue from the complementary services that we provide: If someone sees computers here, they will come to do printing or binding. That is how we make money.”

More than 20 years ago I worked for a little while at a copy shop that had rental computers up front basically as a loss leader, exactly like he describes. People who came in for the computers would end up using the more profitable real services as well.
posted by Dip Flash at 6:27 AM on August 5, 2023 [1 favorite]

but it's been a very long time since I've needed to use one

Yeah seems like "local SIM card" is now item #1 after passing through customs in most countries.
posted by Meatbomb at 6:35 AM on August 5, 2023 [6 favorites]

I still see the odd pc internet kiosk at airports and some hotels, little fragments hanging on for people that need to print a boarding pass or dropped their phone in the sea or something.

Though I suppose most every cafe is sort of an internet cafe these days, with the amount of people usually hanging out with a coffee and their own laptop or phone on the wifi.

(It is funny to me that we still call a smartphone a phone, when actually making phonecalls is quite possibly one of the least used functions on it. Bit like the '3d printed save icon' I guess)
posted by Absolutely No You-Know-What at 6:39 AM on August 5, 2023 [3 favorites]

Travelers and migrants logged on to reconnect with families and friends in distant time zones

Thanks for the trip down memory lane! I’ll be adding Internet cafes to how quickly connectivity progressed “long distance phone call fees even between neighboring area codes, sometimes within the same city, were expensive and calling even relatives was rare. You could get calling cards and make pay phone calls abroad through 800 numbers.* Then the internet arrived and you could pay for Skype minutes. Then you could call for free through your computer headset. Now we video call anywhere in the world without thinking about it.”
Internet cafes fit right where that asterisk is.

I still wonder, did people got along better or worse when all communication took months by mail?
posted by rubatan at 7:56 AM on August 5, 2023

Starting in early 2001, I spent 2 and a half years backpacking. I developed a theory that you could judge the development of a country by it's internet cafes...if there were a few, it was low development (not many people had a use for email or the internet and it was expensive), if there were a lot, it was middle development (people were starting to have emails, they used it to make skype calls etc but they couldn't afford a computer or internet access at home), and if there were none, it was highly developed (because everyone had a computer and internet at home).

When I moved to Barcelona in 2003, there were still a few internet cafes around, it seemed they were mostly used by African and Pakistani immigrants. People still smoked everywhere then and all the keyboards had cigarette burns on them.

When I opened a hostel in Antigua, Guatemala, in 2006 the internet on phones was still very basic, so we provided free internet in the hostel (on our computers - I don't remember Wi-Fi being a thing yet and nobody travelled with a laptop), but there were a couple of places on the plaza that were still acting as internet cafes.

There used to be a great one on the zocalo in Oaxaca that had these amazing juices that you could get, and it was great to check your email while looking over that lovely square.
posted by conifer at 8:15 AM on August 5, 2023 [11 favorites]

I misread this as “the world’s last Internet cats” and thought “how can we possibly be running out?!”

Putting them in scanners is a matter of digital preservation.
posted by zamboni at 8:55 AM on August 5, 2023 [24 favorites]

For a while I toyed with a business idea of locating an internet cafe next to a laundromat. Tourists could put their clothes in the washing machine, then log onto a computer to catch up on their email until their clothes were clean.
posted by Multicellular Exothermic at 9:09 AM on August 5, 2023 [3 favorites]

One opened near me in 2020 or so. I have no idea what its deal is: it looks dodgy af from the outside, and this is quite an effective repellent force field for me.
posted by scruss at 9:22 AM on August 5, 2023 [1 favorite]

I'm always blown away by the progression of technology. In the mid 70s my uncle took a trip to Africa and I remember getting a phone call from him that was both incredibly expensive and challenging to communicate with the delay. It then took a couple weeks after he got back to wait for the slides to get developed and we could see them.

Then around 2000 I was emailing tiny pictures from internet cafes in Thailand, when I could find them, back to the family at home,

Fast forward to a couple years back a friend of mine was in Malaysia at the Moto GP posting up pictures on FB and we were conversing as he was there, me on my couch in Seattle. I was able to ask him to pick me up a Rossi hat while he was still at the race.

I wonder how it compares to my grandparents experience riding horses to town as kids and progressing to watching a rocket carry people to the moon a few decades later.
posted by calamari kid at 9:52 AM on August 5, 2023 [10 favorites]

Austin TX had one of those early cyber-cafes, Discovery Incubator, taking over a location that had been a very sorry grocery store. It seemed to emphasize the "cafe" part, and was going for a hangout vibe—it was a dark room with psychedelic art, booths around the walls, and little tables scattered around the floor. I stopped in once and talked to one of the guys on staff. The place was served by an ISDN connection—friends, this means a whopping 64 Kbps—but he was excited that they were going to upgrade to a fractional T1 line—a T1 line being 1.5 Mbps.

There was also a plain-old coffee shop that I hung out at back then where the proprietor had been convinced by some proto net-impresario to run Internet cables to many of the seats. This was before wi-fi. Imagine schlepping your PowerBook 170 to a coffee shop along with whatever dongle you'd need to connect to the cabling there, and then navigating the process of changing your networking configuration. This was by no means an automated process (the Mac's OS didn't even come with Internet functionality bundled back then; you had to install separate software). It should be no surprise that there weren't many takers for this. Wi-fi changed things a lot.
posted by adamrice at 10:12 AM on August 5, 2023 [3 favorites]

I'm pretty sure you're talking about the old Mojo's. Not many laptops had ethernet jacks at the time, so we'd just use dongles attached to PCMCIA cards.
posted by phooky at 10:16 AM on August 5, 2023 [1 favorite]

we'd just use dongles attached to PCMCIA cards.
PCMCIA stands for "People Can't Memorise Computer Industry Acronyms"
posted by Multicellular Exothermic at 10:20 AM on August 5, 2023 [12 favorites]

I've seen several of these kinds of set ups in homeless shelters and day use centers in the U.S. The digital divide still exists.
posted by brookeb at 10:37 AM on August 5, 2023 [3 favorites]

Great post, thanks for sharing!

Where I live, public libraries are the place to go for internet access if you don't have cheap data or your own device. Is that not the case elsewhere?
posted by Gerald Bostock at 10:41 AM on August 5, 2023 [1 favorite]

phooky: "I'm pretty sure you're talking about the old Mojo's. Not many laptops had ethernet jacks at the time, so we'd just use dongles attached to PCMCIA cards."

For all I know, Mojo's had that too, but I'm talking about Flight Path, which still exists.
posted by adamrice at 10:51 AM on August 5, 2023 [1 favorite]

Way back in 2003 or so I moved across the country and couch surfed at a friend's place for a few weeks. I used the Internet cafe around the corner to search for and apply to jobs. And I actually got one!

I will never forget the day I checked my mail there and got the offer letter. Thanks, Online Coffee Company!
posted by keep_evolving at 11:00 AM on August 5, 2023 [5 favorites]

The photos brought back a whole load of sensations I had almost forgotten... the greasiness and stickyness of the keyboards from body oils and sweat; the slick smoothness of the plastic mouse worn out by countless palms; the whirring of aging case fans and grinding of soon-to-fail hard drives; the smell, of I'm not sure what, but that very 90s computer smell of hot metal, PVC, and cheap foam mouse pads.
posted by destrius at 11:14 AM on August 5, 2023 [3 favorites]

Here for comparison is the CoffeeNet San Fransisco (1997). "Pentium workstations with 24 bit color video, 17 inch monitors, multimedia stereo sound and 32MB of RAM, using the X Window System and our custom Graphical User Interface for ease of operation. These machines are connected to the internet via a 128KB frame relay"

When I visited in 1998, the idea of an internet cafe seemed at once new and almost obsolete. We all had laptops, and wifi was starting to happen.
posted by joeyh at 1:02 PM on August 5, 2023

There was an internet cafe in the Lower 9th Ward in New Orleans until a couple of years ago—I think it just never reopened after covid. You can see the old signage on Google Street View.

I went in there once around 2019 when I was passing by, out of curiosity. It was in the late afternoon and there were a lot of kids in there doing homework, playing games, etc. I just grabbed a soda and left, but it was quite busy. The sign mentions "VA benefits" so I'm guessing they also helped people do government business online.

I remember thinking it might be the last time I'll ever be in an internet cafe.
posted by smelendez at 1:27 PM on August 5, 2023 [1 favorite]

keep_evolving, was that in Seattle? There used to be an Online Coffee here but their logo used a weird font and I always read it as Ouliue.
posted by mpark at 1:47 PM on August 5, 2023 [2 favorites]

I used to SSH into my email server and use pine to read it in internet cafes in London in 2000-2002, which a couple of times resulted in the manager of the cafe tapping me on the shoulder and asking for help with a printer or whatever. It was a good way to get free internet time.
posted by deadwax at 4:19 PM on August 5, 2023 [2 favorites]

It is funny to me that we still call a smartphone a phone, when actually making phonecalls is quite possibly one of the least used functions on it.

Somewhere around 2008 or 2009 I was wavering about whether I wanted to get one of the new smartphone. I told a friend "I just don't think I'd have much use for a cell phone that can access the internet." His prescient response was "Yeah, but wouldn't it be handy to have a pocket computer that also makes phone calls?"
posted by Pater Aletheias at 10:48 PM on August 5, 2023 [3 favorites]

Where I live, public libraries are the place to go for internet access if you don't have cheap data or your own device. Is that not the case elsewhere?

Speaking as someone who, until late last year, still relied on wifi wherever I could get it, our town's library is 10 miles away from where I live, and keeps inconvenient hours. It closes in the afternoon most days, and some days it doesn't even open at all.

When out, I kept a mental list of fast food placed with wifi: McDonalds (still tends to have the best), Burger King, Wendy's, Taco Bell, Seasons of Japan and Chili's. I still prefer to eat at places with wifi, since I don't like to overburden my data plan.
posted by JHarris at 1:36 AM on August 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

Last time I went to an internet cafe was pre-smartphone for me in a small French town in 2012. Or rather the last time I remember logging on from one — we had one in Cambridge (UK) until 2016. I
miss its very old selection of comfy sofas and sci-fi books.
posted by lokta at 5:06 AM on August 6, 2023

I used to SSH into my email server and use pine to read it in internet cafes in London in 2000-2002

Yeah, I associate those Orange cafes very strongly with a grad school period involving multiple visits to the UK around that time.
posted by praemunire at 9:06 AM on August 6, 2023

I sent an email to a girl I was dating from the cyber cafe overlooking the plaza in Oaxaca mentioned above. By the time I hitchhiked to Palenque and found a cyber cafe to check for replies that email had started a series of cascading misunderstandings that ultimately led to the girl marrying me a few years later. Probably would not have happened if I had had a cellphone to see her reply and respond, instead of letting it simmer for 3 days.

Before we married I spent some time in London. The local cybercafe was a most wretched hive of scum and villainy. I’d spend 5 minutes checking email and an hour selling and buying black market goods and rumors. One could get unlimited minutes tri-band cellphones from the Russian speaking dudes, buy cocaine from the dude that worked at the Panamanian embassy, sell cloned credit card data to the Brazilians, get leads for all kinds of jobs. I got a laptop and pirated adobe software in exchange for designing an album cover for a hip hop band. Most of the dealing happening quietly with people sitting at their rented computer. Inside it felt like living in Neuromancer, outside it was just good old 20th century London.

Now most of the cyber cafes around me are center on cellphone and computer repair, kind of rent a computer while you wait deal, or late night LAN gaming. There is one nearby that sells beer in coffee mugs if you ask nicely.
posted by Dr. Curare at 3:36 PM on August 6, 2023 [9 favorites]

Dr. Curare, you sound like you've had Adventures.
posted by JHarris at 3:38 PM on August 6, 2023

I did have many adventures, but I was not brave or adventurous. Maybe in the retelling I come across as cool and hip and in control, but I was mostly lost, confused, and afraid. And using a lot of drugs.

I was lucky to make it to 30 alive and free.

Now I call it a win when I don’t leave the house for a week but to walk the dogs 3 blocks to the market. I get my domine from things like cultivating a difficult mushroom or breeding rare Arthropoda.

But I like to fantasize that at any moment I could pack a bindle and live a wandering life of villainy and adventure. Maybe when the kid moves out in a decade or so. But without cyber cafes I would not know where to find other maladjusted misfits to hang out with.
posted by Dr. Curare at 9:43 PM on August 6, 2023 [4 favorites]

These days, I find the closest widespread analogue to cyber cafes is, regrettably, McDonalds. It doesn't nearly have the same mystique, I acknowledge.
posted by JHarris at 7:46 AM on August 7, 2023

There was a Burger King in Times Square that actually rented computer access. I haven't been in that one in a few years, though; they probably don't anymore.
posted by praemunire at 8:33 AM on August 7, 2023 [1 favorite]

"... so we'd just use dongles attached to PCMCIA cards..."

Heh... so, "back-in-the-day", I once sat in coffee shops (Vancouver Canada), with my Motorola flip phone, attached to a PCMCIA card via a dongle, which was slotted into an Apple Newton 120 (130?)...

It could check email - I think there was an NNTP/Usenet reader - that was about it.

At the same time, you could watch your batteries drain in real time...
posted by rozcakj at 7:06 AM on August 8, 2023 [2 favorites]