As a remote worker, a single programmer or an author, you can still work in a coffee house. But only because you don't have to communicate with other patrons.
People who do business hang out with their colleagues in offices. In a certain way, offices are the coffee houses of today.
Ships are too expensive nowadays for a single person to own or manage them. So companies own them and all the specialists who would meet in a coffee house meet in meeting rooms and conference calls.
To bring coffee houses back, you need some information with the need to be exchanged very locally. I doubt that it is possible after the introduction of the internet, at least for trading information.
I think part of it is that corporations hadn't really been invented yet. So for any venture too expensive for one person, you needed to gather backers... and they had to gather somewhere.
Maybe we should think of this as the slime mold stage of capitalism, before real permanent multi-cellular entities got going.
People who do business hang out with their colleagues in offices. In a certain way, offices are the coffee houses of today.
Ships are too expensive nowadays for a single person to own or manage them. So companies own them and all the specialists who would meet in a coffee house meet in meeting rooms and conference calls.
To bring coffee houses back, you need some information with the need to be exchanged very locally. I doubt that it is possible after the introduction of the internet, at least for trading information.