Who burned down the Shoreditch cereal café?
my dear, what if this actually is how an algorithm feels from inside
warning: online to an extent that was previously only dreamed of
I.
“I’ve had to face the uncomfortable reality that I didn’t fully understand the cultural dynamics at play, and yeah, it’s no longer lost on me that I’m a white guy who opened a kebab shop in Hackney.
I now understand how gentrification and cultural appropriation can displace, erase, or commodify the very people and traditions that shaped a place - and I’m sorry to have contributed to that dynamic”
So will conclude the final cutting monologue of my one-man autobiographical stage show ‘Stefan Kelly vs The People Who Look Exactly Like Him’.
I haven’t actually written that script yet, so for now they are just the real words of the founder of Donny’s Kebabs, in an instagram apology from last month.
Donny launched his doner (get it?) kebab shop near London Fields over the summer, to a mini-social media storm. In his launch vid, the self-described ‘doner-obsessed DJ’ announces his grand opening, with a storefront that has all the hallmarks of places aspirational young people go and spend £20 on ok food. From experience, I know this place is about two minutes away from somewhere you can get the classic version for less than half the price. Donny got in trouble for being cringe/gentrifying/appropriating.
Now, ridiculous person may in fact be ridiculous. Not really my point.
First, how has my life turned out in a way where I know this at all?
It started when the rebranded ‘Donny’s Sandwiches’ hit my fyp in one of those Top 3 Sandwiches in East London type influencer vids. Top comment called him out as being the DJ that tried to gentrify kebabs then had to change his shop. I followed the trail to a podcast clip of two other young new-age Londoners mocking it which I assume was part of the furore that caused the apology. But the top comment on that clip was about something else. The top commenter there said that what was even funnier about this, was that this was the same location where London’s first cereal cafe got burned down in an anti-gentrification protest 10 years ago. Comment thread continued into some ironies and parallels being pointed out.
Quick pause to say the loud part out loud. The people posting and commenting criticism of Donny for being a gentrifier are not exactly the George Wilson to his Jay Gatsby. Revealed preference tells you exactly what level of flat white-ification they want to be surrounded by (double entendre may vary by individual case, if not by much).
The question is why does this go too far for them, when half of the restaurants on the ‘approved’ top 10 of London Fields engages in even more complex performative austerity? You know the vibe: exposed concrete purposely cracked, staff in ‘normal person’ clothes, menu handwritten on the wall, cocktails ‘only’ £12 on Wednesday nights. Lights are always down low, perhaps so you don’t notice your fellow diners aren’t the people that lived in Hackney thirty years ago.
I don’t really have an issue with this. It’s a free world, buy the expensive olives. But I am curious about the strategy.
Nothing confuses me more than the East London bar that packs out for taking their pint price down from £7 to £5 for two hours, when (1) these are people that won’t be saving more than £10 in a night and if they are then I bet their dealer doesn’t have a similar offer on, and (2) (again, revealed preferences) these are people that don’t seem to practically care about money at all. Don’t believe me? Take a survey of what undergrad degrees they got, and what they think of finance bros.
The strategy persists because being rich isn’t cool, and while one can accept being a gentrifier, it’s not conducive to a positive self-identity to think that way every day.
If I had a kebab for every time I’ve met someone who smokes rolled cigarettes because it’s cheaper, and forces their charity shop outfit into conversation, before ending up in a place that turns out to be their family’s second house which also happens to have an actual original painting of a very famous 20th century painter on the wall, I’d have two kebabs. Which is not a lot, but it’s enough to give you acid reflux.
Again, free world. Whatever makes you happy.
But why does this person hate Donny and his kebab shop?
Obvious first answer is that they make the nature of the game too obvious. It’s too surface level. And yes, I agree. But I propose the feeling that gives them isn’t anger or hatred. It gives them joy.
Baudrillard said the true success of the first Disneyland was that it was so overtly fake and imaginary, that it allowed Californians to believe that the world outside its entrance gates is real. And people loved going to Disneyland.
But I think the real genius of Disneyland is that while it’s fantasy, if you squint it still looks a quaint American town. You walk past the storefronts while strolling down ‘Main Street, USA’.
According to the Slate Star Codex school of outgroups, your enemy has to have a lot in common with you to actually feel different in a way that’s meaningful. Thus the American simulacrum is upheld by Disneyland, and not, say, lapland.
And thus the cultural outgroup to Hackney is Clapham, rather than a rural village in Armenia, or Pyongyang. These places are 99% the same, but it’s the 1% that makes identity actually function.
So maybe Donny creating his own hyperreal genre of gentrification is exactly what one needs to maintain the simulation.
Or perhaps it makes more sense to phrase this through the language of projection.
If a friend’s ever given you a detailed critique of someone else you both know, dressing down their faults and insecurities, and you think “hmm is it not weird they haven’t noticed that this is all true for them too”, you should know it is not weird. It is by design.
Bad feeling exists, but doesn’t fit with my self story, must be coming from you.
Similarly, if someone ever tries to assure you to don’t have to worry about something, when you are clearly not that worried, you can bet they are internally on the absolute edge, even/especially if they might not admit that to themselves.
This gives way to a peculiarly meta type of social critique. Another thing that went TikTok viral was this sketch parody of those ‘What’s the best bagel in Hackney?’ type street interviews, in which the interviewee has a breakdown over his performative identity. Fine. But then like a month later I see that same comedian getting interviewed on a podcast about that sketch, and the host goes ‘but seriously what are you favourites’ and he starts actually answering in the same way the person he’s making fun of would, and doesn’t seem to realise what’s just happened.
And with that maybe the puzzle of Donny being critiqued by Donnies of a different font is nearing completion. However, we seem to still be in the intro, so there must have been a final piece of my investigation worth talking about.
II.
When I heard Donny’s was built in the same spot where the cereal café was burned down in protest, I was all-in for some crunchy narrative. I remember the Cereal Killer café making the news around the time Instagram and Soundcloud rap became a thing. I guess that was when hipster became a term people seriously used again.
But I had never heard it burned down. I didn’t even know about the violent anti-gentrification protests from 10 years ago. I Googled it.
And there it is on the BBC and Evening Standard. September 2015.
Alan Keery, who runs the Cereal Killer cafe with his twin brother Gary, told the Evening Standard “There were children there - they were terrified.
The staff were absolutely terrified. It was an angry mob throwing paint at the windows. They had torches and pigs’ heads. They’d brought cereal and they were throwing it at the shop.”
He added: “We’re being targeted as the poster boys of gentrification and that’s not our fault. I think it’s an absolute joke, a bunch of people attacking us. We’re a small business. There’s other big chain places around Shoreditch – me and my brother started a business out of absolutely nothing and we’re trying to grow it.”
Image of cereal being thrown at the windows being sort of funny aside, I’m confused.
I thought it was burned down as part of some massive symbolic violent rage? This is a few windows broken in a small demonstration that lasted a couple hours.
I went back to the comment section where this was referenced and heavily upvoted. Do they all know it’s not true? I doubt it. But how does that happen?
Another thing. This went down on Brick Lane in Shoreditch. That is not where Donny’s is. That’s another falsehood. There is no ghost of Captain Crunch haunting the dj-mixed doner.
I went back further, to the podcast clip of the people slagging Donny off. They reference the backlash it’s been getting for gentrification and cultural appropriation. And throw it out there as something they generally agree with.
So I went searching for the real backlash, and found … nothing. Only stuff taking about the backlash.
And so I went back again, all the way to Donny’s apology, where he says:
I now understand how gentrification and cultural appropriation can displace, erase, or commodify the very people and traditions that shaped a place - and I’m sorry to have contributed to that dynamic.
And now I read it and don’t understand who he’s talking to. He was barely under any pressure. The amount of media talking about the fake-backlash didn’t even extend past a handful.
But once he did apologise, it became a much bigger story. Perhaps because now it had conflict and resolution, or perhaps now because something had technically happened.
So now when you search for Donny’s Kebabs you only find the apology. The fact that everything preceding it happened is taken as a given, but it didn’t.
But the media wins, ads get viewed, and identity gets maintained.
Makes me think of Baudrillard’s ‘The Gulf War Did Not Take Place’.
Baudrillard’s claimed the war existed more as media spectacle than as lived reality. It was not a traditional war i.e. no real confrontation between equal forces, minimal ground combat, and a total mediation through screens and narratives. The media’s coverage created the illusion of conflict while erasing real suffering and complexity. What “happened” was the image of war, not war itself.
I’m losing track over whether Donny is Iraq in this metaphor or not, but it’s certainty some kind of illustration that stories matter far more than events.
And it’s that process that burned down the cereal café.
My question is what the end point of that process is going to be.
III.
What happened to the Maya people? Their civilisation, why did it fall?
If you’re a complete idiot, like I am, you maybe thought it was something like: The Spanish Conquistadores arrived in 1600ish, encountered this vast, complex network of advanced societies with beautiful architecture and thriving trades, and over time took it down with guns, germs and steel.
Sort of true.
It was vast. At its peak, the Maya reaching an estimated 3-10 million people, with urban densities in major cities exceeding 1,000 people per square kilometre.
It was advanced. Their calendar system was sophisticated, they could track dates over millennia. They correctly calculated the solar year at 365.2420 days and their astronomical observations allowed them to perfectly predict solar eclipses.
It was beautifully engineered. Major cities contained thousands of structures, and were connected to each other by raised limestone causeways up to 100 kilometres long. Water management systems featured reservoirs holding enough water to sustain the population through nine-month dry seasons.
It had thriving industry and trade. The population was fed by intensive agriculture, within which they cultivated over 100 plant species. Jade from the Motagua Valley, cacao from Pacific coastal regions, marine shells, and quetzal feathers moved across networks spanning 1,000+ kilometres. Major cities controlled trade routes worth considerable wealth in tribute and tariffs.
I was vaguely correct about all of that with none of the detail.
What I was wrong about was the Spanish part.
Not that they didn’t come and kill Mayans and claim the region, they did. But they didn’t encounter any of the stuff mentioned above. Because the Maya achieved all of that between 250-900 AD.
And by the time the Conquistadores disembarked in 1520, the golden era of the Maya had been over for over 500 years. The people they found weren’t living in advanced cities. They were in small groups living relatively simple lives on the northern coast of the Yucatan Peninsula.
In 1695, as the final stronghold of the Maya, Tayasal, forced Spanish monk Andres de Avendano to flea following a failed conversion attempt on the king, he stumbled across some ruins on his scramble back to safety. His written account described climbing an enormous pyramid and finding “buildings in the form of a convent with small cloisters and many living rooms all roofed over and arched like a wagon and whitened inside with plaster.”
But it wasn’t until the 19th century when rumours of a lost city in that region turned into targeted exploration. In 1848, the ruins were found to be the city of Tikal.
Tikal was the largest and most powerful Maya city for much of the Classic Period. At its peak, the city centre held 65,000 people with another 30,000 in the outskirts, part of an empire containing half a million people.
The city’s limestone temples towered to 64 metres, nearly as high as the Brooklyn Bridge towers, the view from which would show houses and streets stretching in every direction, with people toiling in fields beyond.
But the Spanish only encountered its ruins, by accident.
If the Europeans didn’t take down Tikal and banish the remaining Maya back to the small coastal villages, who did? Who got there first?
Turns out, no one did. They were the cause of all of their own problems.
There are some strong theories as to what happened. Again, if you aren’t as dumb as me you probably knew this already.
Firstly, classic malthusian trap. Agriculture leads to population growth, population growth leads to higher demand for agriculture, exponentially increasing agriculture leads to soil being overused and ruined. Deforestation to make space for houses and roads doesn’t help. Tikal becomes too big to sustain itself.
Secondly, constant city-state warfare leads to instability, violence and chaos, which also doesn’t help alongside the first point. What’s strange is that this style of warfare is part of what maintained their civilisation for so long. ‘Flower Wars’ were ritualised battles where city-states would send small armies to capture elites for sacrifice, demonstrate power, and renew a general sense of order in the aftermath. But when everyone’s resources dropped, wars over what’s left get fiercer, and barely anything gets left behind. Tikal’s friends declare themselves independent kingdoms. Quite Game of Thrones.
This is all to say that collapse wasn’t the result of the system rotting, it was the endpoint of its success, it was never going to develop in any other way. This is a system simply allowed to follow its own logic.
Archaeologist Betty Meggers combines anthropology, ecology and physics to generate her thermodynamic theory of cultural evolution to explain the end limits on cultural development. She argued that a society’s complexity is constrained by the energy available from its environment. In other words, environmental productivity sets an upper limit on how complex social organisation can become.
When the fires burn out, both literally (drought and historically low radiation from the sun) and figuratively (food supply, trade routes, and political organisation), culture cannot be maintained.
That’s when the second law of thermodynamics rears its head.
And it’s this process that burned down the Maya civilisation.
IV.
The bloggers of the previous generation all had their way of talking about the bad thing.
TLP had his version of narcissism. Lou Keep had his version of nihilism. Hotel Concierge had his version of fetishisation.
These are all intimately related, if not basically the same broad concept. Society heading in a direction where a focus on image and identity creates an inability to connect, a lack of values, and a cultural race to the bottom where the deeper you live in the simulation, the greater your chance of loneliness and anxiety.
That’s the trend, with technology and media acting as the catalyst that’s speeding things way up.
This is bad. Yes, even the podcasters with nonsense views on gentrification. I feel bad for them. The only thing in Hackney more profitable than a small plates restaurant is a private therapy clinic.
My question is: what happens in the long run? Seriously, what’s the most likely outcome?
If Moloch represents the inevitability of competitive selection pressure, given a long enough time horizon, all behaviour becomes bound to that process. Your answer would be that eventually Moloch destroys all value, then all life.
Less dramatically, Tim Dillon puts it like this:
Nothing will ever be funnier.
America will come apart in the funniest way. All of these people, these grifters, everybody circling the wagons, the Caitlyn Jenners, the Donald Trumps, it’ll be funny until you’ll die laughing.
Literally you’ll die but you will be laughing. Because we’re a crazy country full of crazy people and everybody’s just trying to suck the last few dollars out of this bloated pig corpus corpse of an empire before the end.
And I’m no different, watch my special and subscribe to my podcast. What, am I going to go preach on a fucking mountain? No, we got to make a little money here.
But make no mistake, if your attitude is that the population’s going to get smarter, healthier and more adept at problem solving, YOU’RE ON FUCKING CRACK.
Does that go on forever? That wouldn’t be a rare thing to believe. In fact, culture finds a way to incentivise that too. And I don’t have a grand thesis there beyond the fact that that seems like a bad thing to me.
Both Mark Fisher and David Foster-Wallace got mega cool points for pointing out that the system only leads to bad stuff, paralysis, detachment and neutralisation. And I’ll brace for some backlash by noting that this belief didn’t work out great for either of them in the long-run.
Which is why I would like to at least consider some other possibility.
Back to Betty Meggers’ theory. Complex cultures can only continue when sufficient energy is provided by the environment. If a society accelerates to a point where it can no longer sustain itself, it could implode rather quickly. The Maya took themselves down in the way a rival civilisation never would have been able to.
So what’s the energy source that this culture depends on? You might be tempted to say identity maintenance, but that’s the process that needs fuelling.
The source is stories. Like the doner-obsessed DJ. Or the burned-down cereal café. Or the appeal of cocktails that are still disgracefully expensive if you get 2 for 1.
These are what the keep the show going. We just need a new episode every now and then.
There’s a classic Yudkowsky post called How An Algorithm Feels From Inside.
He makes the useful observation that most debates tend to around where a set of information means that X can be said to be of category A. For example, is Pluto a planet, is Israel committing genocide, is an expensive kebab shop gentrification, is it also cultural appropriation.
Yud’s point is these are not debates of facts, as categories are created within one’s own consciousness. Pluto is the same set of properties whether I call it a planet or not. The sense of unresolvedness is the mind’s algorithmic leftovers, not a property of the world.
He ends by saying this:
Before you can question your intuitions, you have to realize that what your mind’s eye is looking at is an intuition—some cognitive algorithm, as seen from the inside—rather than a direct perception of the Way Things Really Are.
People cling to their intuitions, I think, not so much because they believe their cognitive algorithms are perfectly reliable, but because they can’t see their intuitions as the way their cognitive algorithms happen to look from the inside.
And so everything you try to say about how the native cognitive algorithm goes astray, ends up being contrasted to their direct perception of the Way Things Really Are—and discarded as obviously wrong.
As a reader, he implies to you that your goal is to take the information you have and build an accurate world model, and his point is that you thinking that the external world is equal to The Way Things Really Are is a distraction to this.
And this is where his model of people is limited. Because that isn’t the goal. The goal is to convert the various measurable pieces of information into intuitively categorised Thing. And if that makes your version of reality different to what’s really going on it doesn’t actually matter to you.
Yudkosky’s perspective already got him into a fight that was huge news for the underemployed this year, with Sam Kriss.
My most recent essay here, ‘The law that can be named is not the true law,’ has now been read by more than 50,000 people. Unfortunately, some of these new readers seem to have been upset by some of the things I said.
..
The last section of the essay described the trial of Laurentius Clung, a sixteenth-century theologian who thought God sends absolutely everyone to Hell, and who is the only person known to have hated absolutely everything. Apparently, I combined fiction and nonfiction without clearly signposting the transition. Which means that some of the things I said were lies.
According to these people, I am cynically misleading people. I have poisoned the well of truth.
The mob even included Eliezer Yudkowsky, the founder and high priest of the sect.
Yudkowsky couldn’t get on board with Kriss using fiction to make a point about reality, vaguely ironic for the author of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, but I do believe he means it.
My point is more that stories are the natural output of what an algorithm produces from the inside, and you can disagree with that as a philosophy if you want but it doesn’t make it less true.
That cereal café in Shoreditch never burned down, but I’m being 100% serious when I say it may as well have. Harry Potter may have never happened, but once we’ve all seen it and have been affected by it in some way, it may as well have. The backlash to Donny was real, whether it actually happened or not.
What I will totally accept is that the end point of that algorithm pursuing its goal is bleak. Hence, the post.
Stories fuel the identity, the narcissism, the nihilism, the simulation, the depression, the anxiety. That is a basic equation to the complexity of the culture. What would it take for that to change?
The Hegelian model of change is (1) thesis, ends up in conflict with (2) antithesis, resulting in a new (3) synthesis.
Erik Hoel wrote about this last year. He suggests:
The thesis: the rise of the mob through social media, creating a collective consciousness that judges, cancels, and surveils individuals.
The antithesis: the emergence of sovereign individuals—figures like Musk, Swift, Rogan, Trump, or anonymous users—who resist or are immune to the mob.
The synthesis: the eventual domestication of the group mind—finding a way for humans and the collective online consciousness to coexist without tyranny or dependence, marking the “end of online history.”
Sounds good, but I need heavy convincing. As would Tim Dillon.
There’s another Baudrillard book about this. It’s called Fatal Strategies.
In it, you find Baudrillard rejecting Hegelian dialectics. In the 20th century and later, contradictions don’t resolve through synthesis or historical progress. So instead of negation producing some higher meaning of how things should be, he argues for excess as a route to implosion. And from there we kind of just see what gets built in the rubble.
An example, which I genuinely can’t remember if he said this or if I thought of it, but this is true of war. Great wars haven’t stopped because of the hippies placing daisies down the barrels of assault rifles. The wars stopped because we got way too good at killing each other. War cannot really happen because the second anyone makes a move, we’ll all go simultaneous when the air becomes uranious. Thus, peace in the West.
Makes me think of the Maya. A system simply allowed to follow its own logic until it can no longer feed itself. Is that how all cultures get moved on from? They get pushed to an extreme and then run out of energy?
Cancelling stops when people start to get cancelled for doing everything all the time? When new kebab shops start posting their apologies before their doors have even opened? Narcissism stops when access to status goods becomes unlimited?
I guess that I’m saying that … I hope so.
René Girard was obsessed with martyrs as catalysts for change and I kind of get why. Human systems create victims that are the fuel to keep the system going, but every now and then, the innocence of the victim is revealed. Their suffering no longer legitimises the community’s unity through violence; showing that society’s peace has always been founded on collective murder.
Is Donny a martyr? The words ‘doner-obsessed dj’ are enough to make one face the absurdity of the culture they’re participating in, and add into the mix the layers of complex lies that built the story and you end up with a sense that surely something has got to give and this can’t go on forever.
Baudrillard’s point is that it won’t. It’ll snap and implode. And to say it’s our job to make that happen as our best way out would be a vaguely Landian notion.
Only then can we beat the bad thing.
Which sounds awesome in theory, but lord am I having a hard time buying it. Where Land looks at technology as the force that makes the snap happen societally and governmentally, I look at the effects it’s had culturally and wonder if it’s the thing that prevents it.
I mean, shouldn’t Trump have been so absurd that he broke politics and made us start again with how we think about electing leaders? Conversely, wasn’t Kamala’s campaign was so bad and suffered such an embarrassing loss that it should have snapped Democrats out of it? Shouldn’t every right-wing victory worldwide, and soon here in the UK, break Bluesky out of the simulated world they live in?
Shouldn’t Duchamp’s fountain have broken pretentious, meaningless art? Shouldn’t irony have gone out of style the second brands started doing it on Twitter? I even used to think TikTok was social media’s endpoint, but now Sora is taking us ad astra.
The Maya ruined their own fields and depleted their forces too much, so the energy runs out, but technology and media offer us no viable parallel. The stories get produced forever. Donny didn’t even get taken down by the pressure of the system. He just had to rebrand the shop and he’s living his new story already.
It is very difficult to see how an algorithm could ever take itself down when it can never question itself from the inside.
V.
Hard to know what to make of all this if I’m honest.
I went to Donny’s this morning. In its new sandwich reincarnation. I was hoping if I stood outside it and caught whatever vibe was going, then the insight of it all would reveal itself to me. Didn’t end up happening. Just got more questions.
For example, one that keeps pushing to the front when I think about it again: he did it on purpose, didn’t he?
Nothing else would make sense. I don’t know if I have a great theory of mind, and maybe he doesn’t either, but even still how could one openly claim to be a DJ with a passion for kebabs without expecting people to hate it?
And why such a dramatic apology? He had some hate comments, sure, but I couldn’t find enough to match the mental anguish he seemed to speaking from. Did he overreact to the overreaction too on purpose, too? Some kind of meta-outrage-bait?
Perhaps one should just judge the guy’s results rather than his methods. He gained a tonne of social media attention. I know about Donny’s. So do you now. If I went all the way back to the start of his story in Section I, I only know about him because his new spot got on some influencer’s video. He’s played me well, in a sense.
Maybe he’s trying to save us. Maybe he’s trying to force the fatal strategy to its conclusion. Maybe he’s already worked out that won’t happen, so he’s just using the system to his advantage.
Maybe he took inspiration from the cereal café myth. Maybe he knew stories were the only way to survive once an algorithm gets complex enough.
Maybe that will be the one thing left that gives us any hope of a way out.
Maybe the Maya civilisation never burned itself down.
another banger - watching the two linked TikToks one after the other gave me a deep sense of dread as even the aware critique collapses into just another identity marker
Wild how people are worried about AI creating fake narratives, when we've been doing it for hundreds of years.