A bar without a bartender is an abomination

What is a bar? A bar is: you ask the bartender for a drink, they pour it for you, you drink it. Slightly more abstractly, a bar is: a place to commune with people, explicitly including your bartender. Without a bartender, you are drinking in a room. This can be a lot of fun, especially when you do it with other people! But it cannot, reasonably speaking, be a bar.

This is a basic semantic distinction. But it is a crucial one. Because: tasteless dweebs and the bloodless investors that back them keep trying to invent “bars” that are “tended” by “artificial intelligence.” (Or whatever.) This is a straightforward contraction in terms, as we’ve established. But it’s also an insidious attack on one of last remaining egalitarian cultural institutions in this country. A “bar” sans bartender is a political cudgel that undermines not only the value of vital labor (mixological, sociological, etc.) but also the foundational premise of centuries of drinking tradition. It is the epitome of the sort of tech-enabled, upwardly redistributive #disruption that renders America’s creative workers more precarious and our communities more alienated. It sucks!

I was recently pitched something called “Divebar,” a hotel bar in Miami.³ Except, no, not a bar: “Divebar invites guests to craft their drinks from a self-pour beverage wall inspired by RFID technology,” the press release cheerily explained. Not to put too fine a point on it here, but “a self-pour beverage wall” is not a bar. Which is fine. Calling it a bar, though, is not fine. Calling it “Divebar” is an abomination on par with calling a venture capital-backed vending machine for millennial email-jobbers “Bodega.” Look at this shit:

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