Not ‘anti’, but ‘post’: negotiating the analogue/digital dialectic in a pay-per-minute cafe

Cafes have always been known as centres of urban social and cultural life. And yet in contemporary cities, permeated with digital technologies but providing little space for unmediated, face-to-face encounter, this promise of sociability often fails to match reality. To address this issue, some cafe owners enforce a strict ‘no-wifi’ policy and ban the use of gadgets, while others tap into consumer nostalgia for pre-digital leisure activities such as board games. Russian blogger and social activist Ivan Mitin went even further and opened a cafe that charges customers by the minute, provides them with free wifi, refreshments and access to kitchen facilities, and lets them use the space as they see fit. The first establishment of this kind, Ziferblat, founded in 2011 in Moscow, quickly developed into a global franchise with 18 branches, five of which are located in the UK, and inspired thousands of other entrepreneurs around the world. A digital native and precarious freelancer, Mitin envisioned his invention as a physical embodiment of the connectivity, participatory ethos and open-endedness of Web 2.0—or, as he put it, ‘a social media in real life’. At the same time, Ziferblat was meant to ‘bring people offline’ and link them together through spatial design, staff intermediation and cultural programming. Drawing on a multi-site ethnography of four Ziferblat branches located in Moscow, London and Manchester, I will discuss the conflicts, intersections and complementarities between the analogue and digital in pay-per-minute cafes, using this case study as an example of a post-digital approach to placemaking, which does not just favour the old over the new but merges their powers to re-invent both.