Comment by jalfresi | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jalfresi | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Exactly. It is my understanding that minimalism is an effort to blend into the background, to become a blank slate, so that our own personalities, tastes etc can live in the foreground. It's an effort to not share the stage with you, the owner.

All those other examples the author shows are SCREAMING for attention. They demand the limelight. and like all things that scream for attention, soon they will get none.

And on top of that, items like that have to have SOME aesthetic, which means they become fashionable, which means they have a "shelf life" of acceptability. No one wants to be seen dead with one of those god-awful matrix phones, yet an iPhone 4 still looks relevant today...

Apply this logic to clothes. If we all wore the same minimalistic clothes, it would allow our individuality to shine through more because the clothes wouldn't "distract" from our personalities?

It's possible, I suppose, but there's something frankly terrifying about everyone looking the same. It's a staple of dystopian fiction, and I think one of the authors' points is that we get the same effect, albeit smaller, when everyone's devices look the same.

Actually, I spent a couple of years in precisely such an environment. While I can't say with certainty that there's causation to account for the most interesting and worthy people I knew in any school being those at the one which enforced a uniform policy, I certainly can say that it wasn't terrifying to see, or to participate in.

Such a policy existing in society at large, whether de facto or de jure, would of course be a different matter entirely. But I don't know that it is reasonable to argue that this is the case with devices, either. While there are certainly places to be found where uniformity of style in personal electronics is the norm, my experience suggests that they are actually quite rare, and hardly approaching any degree of prevalence that would make this a reasonable concern. Perhaps it would simply do the author good to get out more.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com