The age of average
alexmurrell.co.uk
alexmurrell.co.uk
The point is, people like certain things aesthetically. It used to be that artists and designers were still trying to figure out what looks good, and trying all the things. But now we've tried so many things and we've gotten better at zeroing in the precise aesthetics viewers and consumers want. We've converged.
Sure, you can design electric toothbrush branding that "stands out", but it's probably going to result in less sales. Because most people don't want to express their unique personality via their electric toothbrush, they just want a nice slim white object that blends into their sink area.
The great mistake that this article makes is thinking that people need to be constantly expressing themselves in some unique way that nobody's ever done before. But the world has almost 8 billion people, few things are as unique as you think.
Can't we just enjoy having nice things? Even if those things have converged aesthetically? They've converged because we think they're nice. Things don't need to be different just for the sake of being different. Because different can also be worse.
Another essay that I can't find anymore called it "expedience." As in, we all converge on the same products not because they are the best, but because they are "good enough"
(I'm speaking mainly about things like aerodynamics here, not necessarily EV-vs-ICE etc.)
What's driving this? That's what the article is about. Is it actually pull from customers, or is it push from the manufacturers? Is it: people all actually demand boring white soapbar shaped cars -> companies make boring white soapbar shaped cars? Or is it the other way around: Companies are economically incentivized to offer only a small number of colors and styles -> customer really doesn't have a choice -> customer buys what's available -> companies think that's what they really want because of their purchase choice.
Same with the AirBNB look. Do people really like it, which translates into more rentals copying the look? Or are the landlords just uncreative, all copying each other, and that's all that ends up on the market? Or is something else driving it?
Reminds me a lot of the orange Chevys Cruzing around.
Some luxury or performance oriented car brands such as Porsche and Tesla do allow color orders from a wider palette, sometimes to the extent of even doing custom paint blending to match a customer sample. But those customers are willing to wait longer and pay more. They don't need basic transportation to get to work tomorrow.
Porsche is the leader in paint color choice, no doubt about that, with 14 basic colors plus custom options. And to your point, consumers are willing to wait for the Porsche factory to build their car, rather than driving one off the lot that day.
Actual Porsche prices out the door look like about $100,000 (even though MSRP for the cheapest models are a lot less). Please correct me if Porsche is significantly cheaper than Aston Martin vantage ($150k)… to me anything between $100k-200k seems like the same market segment but maybe I’m just poor.
So even if my favorite color was an easy option when choosing a car, I'd probably go monochrome as long as that's what the majority of other cars are doing, almost entirely for property crime reasons.
On writing this out, I have absolutely 0 idea how factually-based this is, but it is at least a thing some middle-class Americans tell their kids.
Because they are on average driven by people who rate higher risk for other reasons, not because color is part of the model.
Otherwise, a popular hack would be to get insurance first, and then paint a car red/yellow if that’s what you wanted.
Isn't this just fashion?
I've heard it argued that times of popular optimism and plenty tend to favour bright colours, extravagant design and conspicuous consumption. Think Calvin Klein underpants deliberately on show above low slung waistbands, analogous to frilly lace ruffs and cuffs in earlier ages.
Times of austerity tend to be associated with muted shades, and perhaps virtue signalling rather than wealth signalling.
Since the 2008 banking crises I think we've been firmly in the the dull, serious phase.
Natural wood is durable but not hard and cold like metal or glass, nor will it break down and end up permeating your cell membranes like plastic. Exposed beams make ceilings more interesting visually but also dampen echoes and make a space feel less sterile and prison-like.
Humans have been living in shelters made from wood and stone since the beginning. It wouldn't surprise me if affinity toward these materials shows up somewhere in our DNA.
Not sure about the Nespresso machines.
The "AirBnB look" IME is usually engineered wood (aka bits of wood + liberal amounts of adhesive) floor, or even vinyl (tile if they're fancy), not natural wood. Natural wood scratches too easily and is more expensive to deal with generally. So for a rental? Nah. But yeah in actually older places sometimes it's natural wood liberally coated with basically-plastic clear coat. ;)
A lot of the exposed beams are also not "real" structural beams. Often they're plastic too! Stuff like this. Lower maintenance, doncha know. https://www.architecturaldepot.com/BM.html
Empty palatial interiors staged to appear on magazine covers, but not necessarily lived in by actual humans. Sometimes, I wonder if the the AD places are empty investment homes / porn shoot locations.
For previous generations the same effect would've been before hotel rooms had TVs; there would have been a stark difference between hotel rooms that did and didn't have TVs for boomers (and maybe GenX?)
So I think there's some level of marketers adapting to at least what they think works in the market rather than simple volume discounts on white paint.
This also applies to things like computers: A cursory search on ebay shows that a silver iMac generally sells for more than an equivalent yellow iMac, for example. For someone who trades in their old equipment when buying new, this is a big deal.
Dealers aren't speccing them yellow because they don't sell as well as other colors. If people were lining up for yellow Porsches, dealers would absolutely be ordering more yellow Porsches.
Odd colors may be priced differently at the top of the market for used cars (I don't know), but that's just not true for the typical car used buyer.
People will travel for used cars. New car buyers want to pick a car. A few new car buyers do spec out custom orders and wait, but it's very rare. In general, that's atleast how half the crazy colors come into the market.
The problem is that no unusual colors are made in almost all car models.
There are a very small handful of models that have a few particular colors beyond the basic black/white/red/silver/dark blue options, but otherwise manufacturers have decided that because fewer people want yellow (or bright blue, or pink, or orange, or magenta), no one gets those colors. Ever.
Getting creative, if you're not a specialist in the field, would yield horrible results 95% of the time. Which is okay if you're doing it as a hobby, of course. But as a customer, I really don't want to be subjected to this.
And Airbnbs where landlords have actually hired a competent interior designer usually have "Luxe" brand and are clearly targeted towards people in a completely different tax bracket.
It's certainly not millennials that are renting out these airbnbs, but I'm sure are heck we're mostly the ones staying in them.
they do have to, though. updated standards to fuel efficiency and crash safety.
there are only so many ways to make that happen -- an aerodynamic, fuel efficient bumper that also meets safety requirements -- and still be cheap enough for the average person.
Blue and red are common favorite colors, so it's not surprising you get a little of those. Brown and tan used to be very common up until the late 80's or so; I'm not sure why that went away but that's the only one that seems surprisingly absent.
If someone likes a car in general, almost anyone will accept either black or white or grey, even if you would like red (rare).
If you like a car, and all they have is red, while you dislike red (very common), you don't buy it.
Dealerships have been around for 100 years and make millions of dollars for their owners. They're not operated by stupid people.
It's both. Most people don't want a gray car as their first choice, but it's probably more people's second choice than a real color. So red cars sit on the lot for 15.3 days, blue ones for 14.2, and gray for 11.6. Obviously (in MBA terms) the dealer, should order more gray cars. So they sell more gray cars, and the feedback loop means it's now hard to find a blue or red car because, if you ask a dealer, "nobody" buys them. So now the manufacturer just stops making those colors, which makes their life easier, and the cycle is complete.
I begrudgingly have a gray truck and my wife has a silver SUV, because those were basically the only options available, many brands now you can't get a decent color selection if you special order them.
Interesting to see worldwide research (PDF) https://www.axalta.com/content/dam/New%20Axalta%20Corporate%...
The “soul” of something that is inanimate is the qualities that make it memorable or stick it in our mind with some manner of tactility. Not literal tactility but the nature of how you can visualize something so clearly it’s almost like you can touch it in your mind.
I’m getting a bit spacey here but let’s get concrete: Jeremy Clarkson often posited that a car tended lacked soul if it was refined and well put together. Often, he felt like older Italian cars, with all of their questionable design decisions were very soulful, because they reflect the fact that people, fallible human beings built it. It was a product of them, as much as a piece of art is purely a product of its artist. It’s why a Van Gogh has soul but a Van Gogh replica does not.
The effort to make things perfect and completely refined with no strange decisions removes the humanity from them. Renders them soulless.
People tend to think of cars as an old technology but cars are under intense regulatory (and commercial, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insurance_Institute_for_Highwa...) pressure on issues like safety, emissions, noise, and fuel economy. A narrowbody airliner today can be based on a 1967 design with almost-state-of-the-art engines and nowhere-near-state-of-the-art avionics and control systems but there is no room on our roads for a new car based on a 1967 design.
With all of the requirements acting on cars it is little wonder that looks go by the wayside.
Poor quality can give a car a kind of personality, but that's not the soul of it. The same car could be reliable and have the same soul. The main difference is whether it is developed to a specific vision, or if checking boxes and aggregated by committee.
I'm saying it can also be driven by something else. There are probably only a few major players in the automotive aerodynamic software design space. Unlike the days when the design was driven by an artist with a block of clay, I suspect modern designs are often based on the same computer driven models with the same underlying physics. The software is probably a more refined and optimized approach, but this results in a convergence in looks and a lack of that idiosyncratic "soul"
I’ve only worked in body panel stamping in automotive assembly as a controls engineer, so I may be taking a bit out of school here.
Sure these vehicles make sense in a cost vs aerodynamics for a base set of functionality. But taking a step back, not everyone want the same base functionalities, nor have the same need or desire of cost vs aerodynamics.
At an extreme some people want a golf cart that have some trunk capacity and is road legal. At another extreme some want a practical but "fun" to drive car. Others want a mid-sized car that can somewhat fit two mountain bikes without being too much a trouble to use as a daily commuting car.
These could all have optimized, wildly different designs, but it's more cost effective to cut off the minority cases and aim for an average that somewhat pays lip services to each specific case. And the more the cost effective average option is prioritized, the costlier it becomes to have a custom design for a niche use case, creating a vicious circle.
To take another industry, we're seeing that in laptop computers: Macbooks nail the average with perfection, and that also means there's no way to get a big screen low power laptop from Apple, for instance. In comparison smaller makers have more niche models, Lenovo or Asus have wild models that are probably commercially possible because they don't try to catter to everyone with a single laptop line in the first place.
Cars keep growing bigger, for no sensible reason. That demand was created by aggressive marketing (encouraging Americans to attach their egos to their cars) and fearmongering (people feeling the need to get larger cars to protect themselves from other, ever larger cars).
Alternative designs that cater to a fraction (25%) of the population will not have the full benefit of economies of scale, so emd up having higher prices and forced to position as up-market/luxury products - which imposes another set of constraints that also impose sameness (see optional packages for luxury SUVs.)
It's really hard for "quirky" products to succeed in the world we made as those products will be strangled by the free hand of the market.
1. Bare brick, white walls prominently exposed reclaimed wood
But maximizing profit and the tradeoffs that result from that are definitely not equivalent to most appealing to the general population.
If everyone is under the same feedback, like the London wobbly bridge [2], it is more like reacting to external force, for a lack of better term
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31615200
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Bridge%2C_London#Re...
Here is the trap. We think they are nice because globalisation works on a more profound level. The "visible" level of globalisation are the consumer products. What's also transmitted are certain intellectual ideas and schools of thought, certain aesthetics and forms of art. For example, the attempts to explain the economy on an individual behavioural and psychological basis are pretty much a post-WW2 Western thing and now it has pervaded the world. Every non-English self-help book reads like a similar US book. In a way, these ideas transform the local cultures and now everybody thinks like the West and wants the same things as the West.
Are Japan and South Korea part of "the West"? Looking around my home I see a lot of stuff designed in those countries.
We are all becoming widgets, that is to say, mere participants in bureaucracies, cogs in mechanized processes. Compare the existential dread people experienced in the 1800s when the factory mode of production reduced people to skinner pigeons, how it alienated labor. Now, we've completed submitted to this alienation, in fact, even celebrate it. For example, think some Tesla promotional with a robotized factory floor and a single worker with some doodad pressing buttons. A truly dystopian sight, yet, there we are, using it as advertisement.
The outdoor gear (hiking, camping, cycling) that I use today is an order of magnitude better than the stuff I used in the 1970s. And even though the brands vary (to some degree) worldwide, the designs, features, and materials have pretty much converged everywhere. Goretex (or something like it) is better than PU-coated nylon. Angle-cut wrists with velcro closures just do work better than loose or elastic wrists. Internal frame backpacks are lighter, more comfortable and in just about every way superior to the old external frame designs. A tent that weighs 2/3 or even 1/2 of a tent from 1980 is a better tent for everything except car camping, and contemporary tents are much better at dealing with wind loads.
I could go on for a long time. How do we differentiate improvements like this, spread across the globe to the point of uniformity, from your "submission to the machine" ?
we can't prove it's the gear, and it is likely not to be the dominant factor, but vastly more people do in fact participate in this sor of activity today than they did 50 years, so i would argue that actually, gear did play a role in "stopping people from enjoying hiking". Not "all people", but some people.
however, i feel that you're overly focused on the details of my examples. i could have picked dozens of hundreds of examples of where the things we have available today (where notable convergence in design has occured) are just better. i don't feel that you've answered my question about you would differentiate the two processes, and instead have tried to use the "outdoor gear" example as a way to simply come up with a reiteration of your initial claim.
but convergence can also just be ... convergence. People can actually agree that there's a better/best way to do something independent of other motivations.
So to answer your question, we typically call the latter in cultural studies capitalism.
Your implied explanation is rather bleak, as it seems that capitalism is independent of consumer wants or needs in this perspective.
Real estate developers have converged on beige toned car oriented soulless tracts. Some people think they like that suburban style. Others loathe it and choose to live in walkable, vibrant urban areas.
I could go on for days, other than having the common taste that our five basic needs are met, there is tremendous diversity in what we actually prefer.
Averages are artificial concepts that fail in reality.
I think the word "fashion" seems to fit this, too.
- you can rely on existing/known design methodology and tools which takes less time and is cheaper to deliver results in
- it is the safe choice. The times were some manager would admit they have no idea about design and let designers do their job is a thing of the past. So they instead tell designers to do what $marketleader is doing. They use bootstrap? So do we now!
- this homogeneity has advantages as people know how certain buttons/controls look, but that middle-ground usability will not translate well to every application, because not every application is meant for that kind of middle ground usage. That is why industrial tools used 24/7 have different designs than a tool meant for people to be used once a year. The latter needs to priorize being self-explainatory above everything else, the former needs to priorize other things like productivity, covering special use cases, durability, reliability etc. If you used the UX principle of the latter on the former you end up with something that looks okay or simple to use, but is actively torture to use 24/7.
So me pet peeve with this kind of design is that some designers think it is the right hammer to squash every problem with (with the incentives laid out above), and that leads to suffering for users.
There is a reason why you and me are currently writing on this platform, and part of it is it's non-comforming design that isn't sleek or anything, but it serves the purpose better than any typical design would — because this site is not meant to be just that.
Its real life satire at this point.
Its an age of wonder not average, but with that comes the fact that its harder to build a better mouse trap. Popular things can have design input from millions (and billions if you count something like a Facebook feed).
Whether this impending mono-culture is "better" or "worse" is really just a matter of values. Engineers, who evaluate things on how well they perform, might see the convergence as a good thing - the proliferation of winning designs. Designers and artists who see creation as having its own intrinsic value and variety being the spice of life will lament the trend.
>> Things don't need to be different just for the sake of being different. Because different can also be worse.
Different is worse for the majority and that's a good thing, because it can then be really, really good for a small subset. If we repeat this everyone can get something really good, and have things they really dislike. This is the world I want to live in, emphasis on the living part.
I imagine life where on each step I have to deal with something I have never seen. That would be really tiring. I have my own venues to be creative, living in a world where everything is expression of someone else "creativity" would take all energy from me because I would have to work out too many thing every day.
These designs are not people's preferred designs, just those that everyone least dislikes.
https://petapixel.com/2013/05/28/what-averaged-face-photogra...
But they haven't converged aesthetically any more than preferences have been absolutely overwritten, overridden, and overprinted by whatever is most easy to produce today. Your comment somewhat assumes that where we are is the ultimate endpoint of some long process, when in reality fads come and go. Tastes change. What is out there now is no more inevitable than bell bottoms might have seemed in the 1970s.
Sure, maybe its just nostalgia, but there were plenty of trends and aesthetics from my younger years that are just nowhere to be found. Why? Because when people renovate, they go with the aesthetic de jure, what's available and what the social pressures are. Hardly anyone is going to renovate a 1980s basement and put in...1980s carpet. Can't be sourced, and people think it looks ugly.
> They've converged because we think they're nice. Things don't need to be different just for the sake of being different. Because different can also be worse.
No, things have converged because lots of people with no taste[1] just ho-hummed along with the zeitgest. The zeitgeist just so happens to be a bland sameness and characterless, charmless, antiseptically clean and dead grayness that we see on all the HGTV shows and AirBnBs. Different is frigging great if you ask me. At least, different than that. Give me the inside of a 1985 McDonalds instead of this, TBH! What makes something pretty and cool and interesting is skill, thoughtfulness and some sense of composition, color, and togetherness. Today it's a thoughtless cheap imitation made at scale.
[1] Taste is subjective, always will be.
And were people in the 1980s using furniture from the 1940s when they renovated? If not, embrace the fact that things change and will always change. I bet the 1980s aesthetics are going to get a revival at some point.
Living in a European city for a few years got me thinking about what the sources of changes are. Everything, and I mean everything requires maintenance, or it will crumble into dust. That maintenance is like a running cost. For (what we consider today to be) high-value jewels of the past, we pay this cost, because we like having these amazing things--like cathedrals and churches and minarets and bridges and monuments and works of art. This maintenance is literally fighting the forces of entropy. Fall behind, and it will crumble and disappear. When it crumbles or is old or broken, or even destroyed--e.g. after WWII--will you rebuild what was there, as it was, or do something new because it strikes your fancy?
In Europe, they draw the line very differently than in North America. Much of the old is maintained, rebuilt, preserved. Because it is considered wealth in itself. Because people fight these forces of entropy, honor their past, and heck, maybe even like things? As an American, I see we do not do this. We seem to hate things. We hate buildings and bridges and doorknobs and pipes[1]; partly because most stuff is built like cheap crap--no matter the era--so of course it falls down and needs to be rebuilt. And it is, the cheapest way possible, usually. Today it seems to be being rebuilt all in a particular way. I dunno, I just think America's total disregard for the past is infecting the rest of the world.
[1] Not above-ground power lines, poles, and endless ugly nests of wires, though. Obviously. Those friggin power lines are going to be the absolute last thing that anybody tears down.
And it's easy to explain why: the more similar people are the more predictable and thus more controllable they become. Anyone in a position of power would love it if every word spoken was agreed upon and acted out as if their imagination was manifest. If every element of a given state was mechanistic rather than organic. Of course businesses are little states in their own way.
An interesting [unsourced] aside: I remember some comedian talking about their comeup, and that once they had what they wanted they became depressed. Telling the same jokes to different crowds and getting the same laughs over and over again. Peering into how easily people can be won, manipulated... I think it was Birbiglia. Be careful what you wish for, I guess.
You probably meant to write "du jour" :)
This is key, yet it highlights an important aspect largely missing from these critiques of popular aesthetics: Any style popular enough to become hegemonic will itself contain examples spanning a wide range of quality and taste. There are beautiful expressions of the AirBnB interior, the NHTSA-approved car, even the five-over-one low-rise, just as there is also a sea of mediocre variations on them.
A style alone does not make a designed object or space high-taste or low-taste, good or bad; it is the values of good design and craftsmanship that make it thus.
Think about it with Marvel or Star Wars movies. There are some really good ones, and some really boring ones, and although you can definitely say "Thor Ragnarok" was better than "Iron Man: Age of Ultron", that doesn't change the fact that when you zoom out, it seems all we're getting is superhero and Star Wars movies, and maybe it would be nice to watch something else now and again.
We want more than just good craftsmanship. We need people of mediocre skill to be making things that are weird and interesting.
The urban streetscapes of older cities are dominated by very similar buildings, but often the differentiation is not just a result of the architecture but of the tenants. You have multiple buildings, multiple landlords, and multiple tenants, and the combinatoric permutations of all of them produce interesting variation on just a single city block.
These days, the modern five over one probably takes an entire block or at least half of one, and the relevant landlords or HOAs basically all but forbid tenant individuality. For example, I have a balcony, but I’m not allowed to hang clothes, or flags, or art, or anything, and so the only thing that is actually out there is some basic outdoor furniture. Businesses with storefronts in these buildings also have similar restrictions, because today’s corporate landlords are used to sterile, manicured environments like malls.
This is more of an elaboration; people don’t see architectural renders when they walk down the street, they see the combination of building and tenant.
The most obvious manifestation of this is storefront areas; in old shopping districts in New York you’ll see a variety of awning shapes and colors, whereas in newer developments if you are even allowed to have one they must match every other one on the building.
You buy what you can afford. Whether that be a shotgun shack with second-hand traipings or a McMansion with IKEA furniture.
AirBNB's are optimizing for cheap, easy to clean and maintain, but still providing the minimum expected features. If you want variety, go to actual B&Bs.
The big mistake the artists in the first part did was to average all input, instead of cluster analyzing the input to discover more than one average type. On average, most people like nature, so nature is what you're going to get. A better test would be to have an art museum with diverse art, and then see which paintings attract the most interest, or even better, which patterns emerge when tracing many individuals throughout the museum.
I actually find the paintings fairly diverse, both in their individual content, and when compared to each other. But a person who has a mind to average everything will, of course, find a lot of similarity between them.
The problem is, there is "almost everybody can afford this", and there is "completely bespoke". We have eliminated the middle ground.
People still reupholster old furniture. I think the real problem is that many goods these days are either so cheap it's cheaper to replacement them entirely, or not built to last, so they never get to a rebuild stage.
We'll have to produce less and less if we do not keep replacing existing stuff with new (hopefully superior) stuff.
And this is a big deal, too. We've made huge strides in cars and appliances. Outside of specialty needs furniture and carpentry hasn't changed much over the years.
> there will be fewer and fewer "other people".
This is going to take a long time (when measured over the typical human lifespan), and won't be very noticeable outside of child-oriented institutions. Major changes in industries and other events that prompt large numbers of people to move will still be more noticeable.
I try that with my couch and I am rewarded with the sound of particle board splintering.
what would be such a middle ground?
The bespoke stuff is expensive, since there's literally only 1 customer. Think mega yachts.
The 'almost everybody can afford this' is because it's sold to everybody, and thus economies of scale _allows_ it to be affordable.
The old 'middle ground', to me, is a pre-industrial idea that locally sourced craftsman and materials can be used to serve just the local region. It no longer exists because it _can_ no longer exist (except as a sort of cottage industry, or artisanal industry which is hugely inefficient and thus barely anyone buys such things).
In the US North Carolina, Illinois, New York, Michigan, Massachusetts, all had furniture industries. I don't know if that was better, but it was definitely different, much more diverse, less affordable, but higher quality. Clothes worked pretty similarly.
e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Furniture_Company
Within a brief time, the company employed 32 people and manufactured tables, chairs, and a bedroom set. The solid-oak bedroom set sold for nine dollars and included a bed, dresser, and washstand.
Shut down in 1993
The thing about clothes is they were made to last because of the high price of labor for their making. Once automation really took off following WW2 they became a lot cheaper, and so were treated cheaper. And also weren't repaired nearly as often.
The phrase "lowest common denominator" applies here.
It most stuck out to me when the article talked about car colors - most cars are black or white because car makers mostly make black or white. Buying a car with a splash of color is hard. Red is your best chance. Followed by butt-ugly blues.
You cannot meaningfully choose according to your taste because choice is restricted. (Related, try to buy furniture that isn't a fucking cheap imitation of mid-century modern)
And that happened because offerening the most bland and inoffensive looks will be bought by the vast majority of people who don't care about taste, or don't have any. (How would you develop taste if all the choices are the same)
It's bland things for bland lives reinforcing more bland choices in product design. Mixing all colors gets a dull grey, and that's where we're landing.
I will only buy white cars now because of this. I'm tired of dodging inattentive drivers that are sleepdriving through their commute or whatever they are doing besides driving.
I read once that grey cars have the highest possibility of accidents for this exact reason.
And since then have only driven white cars.
Not because we think modern buildings are nicer, but purely for a matter of cost.
I suspect the same is the case (even if to a lesser extent) in electric toothbrushes and other items of our daily life.
Anecdotally, my home town replaced a three way intersection with a nice roundabout and then put up a little art piece in the center of it. People complained to the heavens about a minor expenditure on an art installation when the money could have gone to, who knows, resurfacing a half block of sidewalk? Not everything needs to be so drab and utilitarian, yet despite the supposed massive output of the economy we've built, we must scrimp and pay bottom dollar for every last thing.
I can't agree with that. They're a fascinating curiosity, but they're also awfully gaudy (no pun intended). The ornamentation is extremely excessive by the standards of any common style since. Not because of cost, but just because of taste.
Nonetheless, it was one of the last art movements with a true vision, and most importantly staying with the theme of the article, divorced from concerns of practically and unit economics. It's unlikely we ever see something similar arise.
There is a key difference going from "convergence" to "conformity": circular reasoning.
People who need to sell the thing they invent, tell themselves that "convergence" is the best way there. Customers like familiar traits. So they design for intentional convergence, and that is the essence of conformity.
99.99999% of keyboards are the same physical layout. This layout is a standard that conforms to the general shape of an 1800s typewriter. There is no functional need to continue this. There was no natural convergence toward this shape: it's so bad it often injures the user! The only driver is the value of familiarity to the act of selling a keyboard.
With the advent of cheap 3D printers, we have seen a surge in hobby keyboard design. These people care so much about getting a better keyboard shape that they are willing to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars to get there. What they want they cannot buy; this was especially the case 5-10 years ago. The very existence of this group proves that traditional keyboards are the result of conformity, not convergence.
The problem is that it's also a good thing to try create new designs. I have a keyboard that you would hate to use. That's how I feel about the traditional design you prefer. We can both be served by the market, but only if designers have enough confidence to do so.
You wouldn't even care about this if you had originally learned to type on my keyboard. If that was the ubiquitous thing you started with, then we wouldn't even be having this conversation. Had the progression of keyboard design been free to explore other options, it might have naturally converged on something more ergonomic; which would serve both the need for familiarity and the desire for ergonomics.
We are already seeing ergonomic keyboard designs converge to 3 shapes: Dactyl-like extreme ergonomics that place keys as close as possible to the resting fingertip; flat compromises like ergodox that can use a PCB; and grid layouts like planck that optimize the difficulty of conceptual memory layouts when using many layers. All three place keys in columns, so they are pretty easy to switch between. The only real mystery left is the thumb.
Most of the discomfort involved in switching from the typewriter layout stems from how obscure and unwieldy it is relative to anything else. Like a Who from Whoville, we look at the elegant hammer - as a replacement for the familiar Whabam - with distaste.
That's a claim worth making, but it needs more evidence. It just isn't self-evident that this is true.
Where I think you get it wrong is to assume that everyone has your level of interest or applies the same logic as you to every item in their lives. Hell, I'm sure you don't. So if you are happy eating from suboptimal mass-produced forks which are just SO much worse than these $500 custom-made ergonomical marvels that the average man just simply doesn't know about... welcome to the peasant club.
If any "better versions" were actually a real part of the market 20 years ago, then you could buy a laptop with one today. You can't. In a $140 billion market, there is not a single laptop manufacturer producing laptops with an ergonomic or ortholinear layout. That can only be the result of conformity.
> The fact you could buy such a keyboard demonstrates that conformity or convergence or whatever you want to call it did not inhibit you from getting what you want.
Not 4 years ago, but it certainly did 10-20 years ago. They simply didn't exist back then.
And it's not a binary, either: just because there is one company mass-producing one does not mean the problem is resolved. We are talking about one of the most commonly produced objects in the world. Practically every single computer (bigger than a hand) that has ever been made has a traditional typewriter-style keyboard!
And the fact I (and many others) an willing to pay >$300 for one is clear evidence that the market for ergonomic keyboards is incredibly diluted. If I could buy a poor quality one for $30, I would do it in a heartbeat. The average traditional typewriter-style costs well under $1 to produce. Starting that kind of production scale would take a huge investment.
The fact that no one has tried once in the last 30 years to mass produce a cheap non-typewriter keyboard design is proof that conformity, and not convergence is the deciding factor.
Why don't they expect the best one? Seems like the 99.99999% of users are fooled by monkeys and bananas on ceiling experiment. I can not name that amount of people just idiots but if your upper-home row consist a word "typewriter" I consider your choice as definitely not wise.
Best is multi-dimensional, so please tell me 'best what'.
Is 'best' affordable?
Is 'best' compatible with what I learned without invested more time in learning something new?
Is 'best' something that's going to live far beyond it's usefulness based on it's cost?
Is 'best' something you can't hand to someone else and have them use it?
Yes. Exactly as what we are having, no extra keys or extra something, we are talking about different placing of same keys so I surprised to see this question.
> Is 'best' compatible with what I learned without invested more time in learning something new?
Well, why (in ideal world) the kbd supplier has to consider the needs of not wise people? If you really have learned Qwerty you will not even noticed a different paint on the keys.
> Is 'best' something that's going to live far beyond it's usefulness based on it's cost?
It is best in the sense that the best side of knife for cutting bread is the sharp one but it is one of the worst ones for holding the knife.
> Is 'best' something you can't hand to someone else and have them use it?
Any idea may be shared among minds.
Most people have spent their entire lives only seeing a few small deviations from the traditional typewriter shape.
That's what they had, so they developed themselves alongside it. It was hard work, and they don't want to do it again.
Not having to do the work of creating new muscle memory is a quality many people highly value.
Unfortunately for the rest of us, the assumption has been that there aren't enough people interested in trying something new to have a viable market. It would be a risky business venture: at the very least, difficult to raise venture capital. That is a self-filling prophecy: circular reasoning that demands conformity.
And for the record, keyboards have massive size difference, in all dimensions. Keyboards actually have a way bigger variance then you'd find in phones.
Some are just a few mm high, others go as high as 5cm. There are 60% keyboards. Ergonomic keyboards. Keyboards that're basically just a small nipple with which you're doing input by gesture.
the keys and actuation themselves are another topic with Rubberdome on cheap and trashy keyboards, mechanical with springs and other techniques, even some optical - though they're pretty gimmicky.
There are stylized key caps off all kinds, including some really cringe material like ahego keys from a few years ago. And actually quite pretty one's with mountains, clouds and areas stylized under resin [1]
Some are so small you can only use them with your thumbs
[1] random example https://www.etsy.com/de/listing/1289117693/mountain-creeks-s...
If you want an example of what I'm talking about, look here: https://www.reddit.com/r/ergomechkeyboards/
Keyboards don't inherently need to have the keys laid out like a typewriter. Most people are only willing to use a keyboard that is, because that is what they already developed their muscle memory for. That's the motivation behind the conformity I'm talking about.
A natural convergence would start with many competing options, and gradually boil down to what's popular; but keyboard shapes have only recently seen meaningful diversity be available at all.
Nonetheless, there isn't a single layout. You got ANSI and ISO as the big branching standards with adjustments to bindings and added keys for various extra letters/modifiers depending on the localization.
And yes, i brought up the phone example to illustrate how they're only superficially the same. Your argument maps exactly onto phones after all, as they all have similar looks, input pattern etc.
They didn't converge: that was my whole point. They never diverged (significantly) from the original typewriter. All of the letter keys are in the same relative position.
Where to place function and return was a new question (the typewriter didn't have those), so naturally that aspect actually had variance until converging on a few standards.
Take one look at a dactyl, and you can see what I mean.
For instance, Canadian keyboards have a different layout from American ones, and keyboards that support other languages have different keys as well
If you want examples, take a look at the subreddit for ergonomic keyboards: https://www.reddit.com/r/ergomechkeyboards/
This is a problem I see everywhere... People have no idea that mass production leads to order of magnitude reduction in costs or more.
In most products you buy today there is a 4X price range between low to high end products. When suddenly you're talking about 10-100X price range people go with why they can buy.
You'd think HNers would have a better idea on manufacturing costs.
> People who need to sell the thing they invent, tell themselves that "convergence" is the best way there. Customers like familiar traits. So they design for intentional convergence, and that is the essence of conformity.
This is completely tautological. You're just saying "it's not convergence, it's conformity" and your only argument is "because I say it is".
Convergence really seems to happen solely due to economics, particularly mass production combined with marketing to drive demand for those uniform items.
Also calling an airline a market is kind of iffy in many ways. It's highly regulated to keep planes from falling out of the sky. I'm sure there are many airlines that would give you a lot more space if they got rid of the crews that ensured all the bolts weren't about to fall out of the plane.
First class tickets are irrelevant, also terrible but that’s a lengthyrabbit hole.
The airline industry is loathed. No one likes them. The users are not happier but the market has pretty much converged on a business model.
Of course, some people think they are nice. And yeah, maybe in a choice discrimination/maxDiff study, I would choose some of these converged styles over other styles, but not necessarily among all potential options.
Then, because manufacturing capacity is limited (whether we are manufacturing cars/spaces/aesthetics/ideas), the choice set that is actually available narrows.
Call it the tyranny of data science.
But just because aesthetics have "converged" doesn't mean that everyone finds them pleasing. There's quite a lot of those converged aesthetics that I find unpleasant.
Surely, there's still room for variety.
It's a cost-savings measure. It also is, I think, a large reason why the modern world tends to lack aesthetic excellence.
Expensive to build or change things have - houses or cars - but art or more commodity products have fractured.
The people/media one is the author's biggest blind spot here: there is still a dominant mainstream that people are chasing, but it's audience is smaller than before. I think this is why they chase the same thing more aggressively. So your "bestsellers" look alike, but more people are reading random shit that would never crack that list in the past either. Selling to a niche is precisely the opposite of what gets you in the bestseller list, but the niches I like have SO MUCH STUFF available now. The non-mainstream has fractured, making the remaining mainstream look more similar to chase a narrower segment. The most watched TV shows now have a far lower percentage of the country watching, and also have more variety in what the cast as a whole looks like, whether that's hairstyle or tattoos or piercings or whatnot.
EDIT: here's an experiment to try to demonstrate. Tell me how many of those lookalike movie and book poster/cover images you've watched. And how many you'd watch more of.
Movies: I've seen 0 of those (I'm not a horror fan anyway, but I've seen a couple in the last five years, Hereditary and The Invisible Man, and they didn't look like those posters).
Self-help books: I've read 0.
I haven't been reading any Danielle Steele, John Grisham, Kathryn Stockett, or Stieg Larsson in the last 15 years either... but Grisham was much more common in my circle, and I read some, in the 90s. I had less fewer options! I read over 30 books last year, and none of them popped up in this article...
So, while mainstream creations may be homogenizing, independent creators are finding a larger audience than ever before. I see that as a good thing.
I have long argued that we humans are obsessed with data when we shouldn't be. Intuition, taste, and artistry create the variety that gives everything character, and we systematically and violently beat it out through endless focus-group testing and lowest-common-denominator sterilization.
I’d generally agree with you here but there are exceptions. The company ‘Liquid Death’ is yet another company selling water, but due to their branding and viral marketing have made drinking water seem ‘cool’.
In one of my marketing classes I learned of 16 different archetypes brands mostly fall into. Usually all brands in a category use similar archetypes. You look at Liquid Death using an atypical archetype for the water category and see a unique clever choice. The author of this piece would probably decry that they use similar branding techniques to every other rebellious archetype brand.
It’s challenging but rewarding to buck category archetypes. I wouldn’t be surprised if there is a niche for an aggressively branded toothbrush with an attitude problem.
Cars looking all the same isn't really a new thing. The illusion of variety in the 1980s-2000s era was just old cars not yet being phased out by regulation changes. Modern cars have far better function at everything than older cars while only an extremely small price on aesthetics was paid in exchange.
... and for good reason. Or perhaps I'm weird in wanting at least my entertainment to be varied, instead of 1280 indistinguishable netflix series?
While convergence sounds like a good thing for an electric toothbrush, it's a terrible concept for art and culture, and even for consumer goods I'm afraid it's going to stifle innovation.
I'd like to riff on this.
People's attention is limited. People's capacity for novel stuff is limited. And things are bound to be commoditized.
But that's not necessarily a bad thing. Firefox is a tool that just works for me. It doesn't crash and delete my tabs when it visits a random web site. Sure, that's predictable.
But that frees up my attention to go elsewhere. To do /brand new/ stuff, not just mess around with web browsers.
If every airbnb looks the same, perhaps that's just because people get out of the airbnb to do the stuff they actually want to do?
Stability enables movement.
I almost retched reading that. All the examples in the article are of the most bland, disposable junk imaginable. I think the common interpretation of Plato's ideals is one of an aspirational, idealized world, beyond our grasp. Seeing such perfection realized in mass produced crap is baffling to me.
But this is the essence of article, that the average has bad tastes when it comes to art.
Salvador Dali has way less exposure than some random Instagram influencer and Bach has way less exposure than some random hip hop "legend" from Brooklyn, NY. Some random people from Tik Tok have more exposure than Friedrich Nietzsche.
I think you got it wrong. We shouldn't express different and we needn't to as ordinary people.
But as creatives, as creators originality it's what should define us.
I realize this may be just my personal taste, but I doubt that. Feedback would be welcome.
You can see the kitchen here: https://youtu.be/K0fcPiUjh64
In the same sense, I felt like Macintosh System 7 was a complete and optimal solution to the computer "desktop" paradigm. There was never any compelling need to substantially change it (and indeed even the absolute latest Mac or Windows is nearly the same, though far less refined and concise IMO). I'm not sure when/if we'll see a drastic difference in the personal computer OS GUI that takes hold.
Interiors, exteriors, etc… great. I’m glad there are building codes that make buildings safe, and that ugly poorly made furniture is kind of hard to find.
Convergence is a great word for this phenomenon. I’m glad humans tend to converge around good ideas; it’s gotten us far.
This article is ultimately a ramble with no strong purpose. Just like most internet articles. “Convergence.”
I'm neutral about five over one apartment buildings.
I emphatically reject that it's natural or desirable for everyone to aspire to look like Kim Kardashian or have Instagram Face. Ugh.
Indeed, but this also opens up an opportunity for things to be different because they can be different.
According to your argument, we should all buy the same shirt size, medium. Because that's the size that isn't too big or too small for the most people.
But people are different, and in a human-centered world, our products would be as unique and varied as we are, which is much more varied than you give us credit for.
> They've converged because we think they're nice.
There is no we when it comes to preference. I, and you, and everyone couldn't possibly care less about whether our toothbrush is a color or shape that pleases someone else. It's my toothbrush. The last thing in the world I want is it being used by any other human.
The idea of aggregate human desire does not exist in humans. We each only have our own personal desires, shared by no one. When I walk into Baskin-Robbins, I do not care what flavors of ice cream other people like.
Where aggregate demand exists is in corporations making products. Because they are trying to amortize their design and manufacturing costs across an ever larger number of consumers, they create the notion of average human preference as a target for their designs. But it's important to always remember that average preference is an invention of mass manufacturing.
It's soul-crushing to discredit your own desires simply because it's not cost effective for a company to cater to them.
The clear evidence against your argument is that products across the entire spectrum of human artifice used to be much more varied. I'm fairly certain Homo sapiens has not measurably evolved in the past hundred years or so. We are the same people we used to be, with the same passions and pecadillos.
What has changed is the economic and organizational structure of the groups creating the stuff we use. When you got your shirt for a local tailor who only made stuff for your city, it naturally sold shirts that made sense for your climate. The "average" it was targeting was a much smaller aggregate based on people whose lives are measurably more similar to yours.
But now that everything comes from a handful of transnational mega-corporations, shipping containers means any product can come from anywhere, and mobility means that everyone is from nowhere, products are trying to please all possible humans.
And the result is an alienating wash of forgettable products that tell us at every moment that we use them, "The people who made this only care 0.0000001% about you."
Wow wow wow, stop right there. Consumers? Maybe. But viewers and the audience for art in general... that's stretching it.
Artists haven't zeroed in the precise aesthetics of anything. Sure, if your goal is to maximize sales, go for bland genericity; but if your goal is art, artists will be forever seeking because art is an eternal search.
This is not the "end of art", Fukuyama style, and this article proves nothing of the sort.
But when you add indiscriminate averaging, well, what article describes happen. What, did they think they find one nation that hates the outdoors enough that after averaging it wouldn't come on top ?
They essentially made design by committee in 11 countries and were surprise when result was mediocre
And the complaint about cars for example, frankly most people use them as an appliance and most people are not in position to throw away some MPG or convenience just because they want the lines on outside to be different. Frankly article does that part really badly as the car interiors differ quite a bit and that is what you will be looking at when you're using it for most of the time.
And you usually need to pay both money and convenience for "pretty" in cars. If you need to fit a family and also want it off the ground more, it will be bulbous SUV no matter what designer does with it, and it will look similar if you pick color that's worst at showing the difference and outright remove some stylistic elements like rim choice
I think the amount of sameness have more to do with mediocre designers copying the good ones rather than some kind of convergence of mediocrity. I think perfectly fine designs that appeal to wider audience just need to shy away from things most people dislike, not try to design by commitee what average person does, or see what some designs got famous for then try to copy it coz that's the fashion now.
It's the same thing with everything else. What it comes down to is risk aversion.
"Convergence" is just "copycatting". Aside from functional convergence, aesthetic convergence is just fashions, fads and copycats. We will all look back on this "optimize everything by removing the soul" as sterile, unimaginative and uninspiring.
Certain looks get the most followers on Instagram. Movie posters are tested against focus groups. Market forces reward high end coffee shops that look a certain way. To me, the thread all of these have in common is optimization towards a certain goal.
And thus the sadness in our hearts is the feeling that aesthetics has been subsumed as yet another optimization problem.
Maybe it's globalism, maybe it's that deep down all humans are the same species and like the same things.
But a lot of these are millennial/zoomer aesthetics, generations who are now in their 30s/early 40s and coming of age/20s. The whole piece reads like a "millennials are killing uniqueness" spiel.
I feel like the author hasn't really covered the fact that things have been converging forever. It's like they're musing about the fact that so many Greek and Roman buildings have stone columns. Or that all 1950's soda bars all looked the same, no matter where you went. Or that all 1900s English factories all looked the same.
The point is that people have ALWAYS been converging on stuff, it's just now that we're more global and we have the Internet to connect us, of course we're seeing it happen regardless of proximity or borders.
They didn't take that description and give it to artists all around the world to paint. "Komar and Melamid then set about painting a piece that reflected the results."
So _they_ painted pictures that were essentially the same, reinforcing their own point. The rest of the article selects pictures reinforcing the same point.
As user nassimm pointed out, you only need to walk down the street and look around to see the differences. Travel a little and you'll see the differences everywhere.
People may want similar things, but the actualization of that is different everywhere.
> Before long, the designer had stumbled on the perfect research tool: AirBnB. From the comfort of her home the app gave her a window into thousands of others. She could travel the world, and view hundreds of rooms, without leaving her chair.
AirBnB the perfect research tool for interior inspiration? Well, it is if you wish to cherry pick for the specific topic of things looking the same.
And even that is fraught with problems, because in my neck of the woods (Germany) we generally do not buy houses/appartments furnished (and renting appartments furnished is also an exception and not the norm. Even kitchens are empty rooms without cabinets and appliances.).
Edit: Even though the AirB'n'B methodology is not perfect, I agree with some of the conclusions. Just like radio/tv has smoothed out local accents and dialects within a country, the internet produces global trends. This is not all bad.
However, when houses are put up for sale, they are typically "staged", where the seller will rent furnishings to make it look more homely.
Apartments are more hit and miss. The bigger complexes will often have a show apartment they keep furnished for toors, and may often used a furnished one for their pictures.
Obviously the way you furnish a house for show is not the same way you would to live in it. But it seems like a reasonable approximation of the 'average' sensabilities of the market.
The author seems to be experiencing a case of what's known as Baader–Meinhof phenomenon.
There may be such thing as the AirSpace look, but this may be driven by cost cutting more than actual style.
Exposed brick, exposed air ducts, reclaimed wood, brass plumbing pipe lamps with Edison bulbs...
All this is DIY stuff you do when you want to keep your expenses at the minimum while making the place look nice, and it accomplishes that very well, if donde right, I think.
But I bet most people would go with a $50K custom Italian kitchen instead of exposed shelves if they could afford it.
Many things can be crushed by efficiency. If every work and business has to solve some inefficiency (which seems to be true even in a communist-type system), in an optimal world you starve to death.
Still, there are many ways to use reclaimed and used stuff that won't look Instagrammy.
I'd argue, the element of cultural alignment to the universally accepted is predominant, regardless of the price.
(As often, the simple, DIY-style, apparently cheap, is actually more costly. As a fancy example, once VW/Audi sold the same platform twice, once as the more elaborate Audi 80, once as the more base-line, economic VW Passat. Both variants shared the same dashboard with minor variations: the Audi came with sleek control lights behind a smooth cover, whereas the Passat exhibited its economic appeal by a group of bare lamps in the cavities of a basic, moulded plastic base board. However, the Audi dashboard was considerably cheeper to produce, with just a printed sheet of plastic snapping onto the mounts, while the economic appeal of the Passat afforded lights of varying color and a complex moulding of the plastic inlays.)
The ubiquity of the 5-over-1 architecture in the US is very striking. The NY Times had an article recently called "America the Bland" [1] which challenged people to tell if apartments were in Nashville, Seattle or Denver. All I could think looking through it was "These look exactly like all the apartments near me in Boston and Cambridge.
1. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/20/realestate/housing-develo...
Also unless land is just atrociously expensive, the marginal cost of adding floors doesn't go down. In fact it really goes up at some point. I've still never actually worked out how sewage works in supertall buildings.
Its getting the fresh water up that should get exponentially more difficult as building height increases.
You need to maintain a continuous downward slope. You are very limited in how you can have bends in pipes or two pipes join each other. You need to make sure air can get in and out of every point of the pipes, otherwise differences in air pressure will make things get stuck inside.
With pressurized water it just gets pushed wherever you route the pipes and you don't need to worry about the exact route nearly as much. Yeah, you need pumps to get the appropriate pressure on higher floors, but it's still simpler than sewage.
Another advantage 5-over-1s have (which the NYT article also mentions) is that they are cheap and easy to build. Very tolerant to cheap building materials, lots of prefabricated parts, lots of contractors who are familiar with how to build them. And because there's more demand then supply and people mostly pay based on location there's little incentive to do something more expensive
that's a bit circular, no?
The dominant architectural style of them includes:
- Multiple boxes merged into each other at different heights and depths
- Multiple (2-3) siding materials used in a regular pattern, such as vinyl slats + brick, or smooth aluminum + brick + cement.
- Multiple colors used in a regular pattern, usually white + gray + bright-primary-color. Primary color is used in small rectangular splashes, usually below or beside alternate windows
The basic look is that of many shipping containers nestled into each other.
I don't disagree, but this is simply bad rhetoric. Don't start with an incorrect/misleading/confusing example, and then expect readers to stick with you for the more compelling stuff.
The difference is now the cultural bubble is global and of course it's completely irrelevant for survival.
Go look at art of different societies from as near as 150 years ago. Spanish, French, English, and American fashion, architecture, and style are wildly different compared to the sea of homeginity of today.
I am tired of hacker news for always having these shallow “smarter than you” sage comments that completely miss the point. It’s just like the article pointed out. At scale here everyone’s comment is “no you’re wrong because [some mundane detail observation that misses the point].” It’s like engineer cognitive scale Markov chain.
Nitpicking mundane (and unimportant) details is HN Commentary In a Nutshell. I totally expected these comments and did not come away disappointed. We make an art out of missing the forest for the trees here!
It sucks, too, because the article makes a great point with numerous examples, but all we have here are comments like "Well, ackshually, in paragraph 5 sentence 3, the author says 'all' when he meant 'most' so the entire article is clearly wrong!" which completely miss the point.
Precisely.
150 years ago, countries lived in their own cultural bubble because communication was much slower and mostly limited to local information. Or look at ancient societies which had their own homogenous culture compared to other cultures (eg: Ancient Greece vs Aztecs).
I think it's fair to say that today with globalization and the internet, we're really getting into what McLuhan denominated the global village. Instagram is a good example of this.
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/51961637
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/104973152110363...
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/jems.12469
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1049731520974764
https://revistaseletronicas.pucrs.br/ojs/index.php/revistafa...
http://manuscript.elsevier.com/S004727271500119X/pdf/S004727...
https://epub.ub.uni-muenchen.de/13268/1/286.pdf
https://www.academia.edu/30241852/La_m%C3%A9diocratie_fran%C...
I wouldn't lump Banksy full-in on pure anti-corporate, anti-consumerist culturejamming because of the insightful socio-political commentary performance/works rather than trying to sell zines about how capitalism is bad.
I’m originally from Tucson, and the aesthetic of the non-downtown area is quite unique. Adobe houses painted in desert tones, for example, are very different to east coast wooden houses.
It would be easy to parody this article by picking out photos of jungles from a distance. They all look the same! Or deserts. Or Mediterranean landscapes compared to Northern California. Snowy mountains - they’re all the same!
> However, it is important to remember that despite the prevalence of certain trends, there is still a great deal of diversity in the world. This diversity can be seen in regional variations of architecture, local customs and traditions, and the unique personalities and experiences of individuals.
> It's also worth considering the role of technology and social media in shaping our perception of the world. Platforms like Instagram and Pinterest tend to promote a curated, idealized version of reality, often featuring similar aesthetic styles. This can contribute to the feeling that everything looks the same, even if that's not the case in reality.
> To better appreciate the diversity that does exist, try to explore different cultures, visit local events, or engage in conversations with people from different backgrounds. By actively seeking out and appreciating the variety that exists in the world, you may find that your perception of "average" begins to change.
When I was younger, entertainment media felt magical. The complexity and depth of experiences I could get from even a second-rate story was immense. I remember staying up late at night to process the last movie I watched, or feeling that rich combination of sadness and inspiration from finishing a long book.
I barely consume media nowadays, because every book, movie, TV show, video game and song fails to give me an interesting or meaningful experience. They all feel like grey slop - and after a few minutes, I start to fantasize about vacuuming my apartment, because even that seems like an adventure in comparison.
The question is, why do I feel this way? Is it because the modern entertainment industry truly has become stale, or is it because I've lived long enough to see the simple patterns underlying most of our desires and fantasies?
Yes. And also, ironically because as you get older novelty is less important, so new stuff is boring regardless of whether is differ or same.
In every generation kids have loved the new generation of Star Wars, despite us adults knowing that the best one was the one we say when we were kids.
I felt this way too until I realized that what I was really experiencing was that my desire to explore outside of my comfort zone had lessened with age.
Have you jumped into silent films? Buster Keaton?
Have you explored European Atmospheric Cinema? Jean-Luc Godard?
Art House? Non-Kurosawa Japanese films? Pre-Bollywood Indian films?
In the past, when confronted with questions like that, I would reply with a statement akin to: "Yeah, but that's not what interests me!"
And the lesson I needed to learn about myself was contained within those— my own —words.
I seem to get some perverse kind of satisfaction from reinforcing my nihilistic view of the current state of things while doing absolutely nothing to challenge or improve that perception - and all the while I'm longing for some nostalgic idea of the past.
Oh, you're going to love Béla Tarr, maybe start there.
I genuinely believe true creativity taps into something beyond our conscious experience, and is a kind of strange combination between premonition and expression of the collective unconscious. I think our systems and machine centric world is delusional about the ability to statistically predict how to deliver what people actually want/need, and those systems are unable to replicate extremely important hidden benefits of human curation. We've created systems that seem to be able to meet our needs "automatically", but they don't actually meet our needs/they're too self referential and too reliant on explicit metrics. Those systems have taken over most of the more natural avenues for discovery and end up over-selecting for things that are the average of existing material, and have little creative authenticity. AI recommended and generated movies/art is the final boss of this trend.
That trap is a consequence of the dopaminergic treadmills most of us are stuck on courtesy of recommendation algorithms optimizing purely for attention.
Harold Lloyd Safety Last is a comedy silent film that I sat with 2000 other people to watch about a decade ago. There was an orchestra in the pit playing the music that was composed for the film. Talk about laughing until you cried. Magic evening.
Nitin Sawhney has written and performed new music for silent movies from India and Japan. Again performed to full concert halls producing quite a novel experience. A throw of the dice was quite something.
Philip Jeck and Gavin Bryars' The Sinking of the Titanic played with a small 1917 style dance band. Projected visuals cut from contemporary newsreel film of huge ocean liners and crowds playing against Jeck's turntable based improvisations. A magic and elegiac evening.
The common thread for me is performance I think.
I'm curious, have you tried watching shows like Russian Doll? Andor? The Last of Us? The Leftovers?
These are shows that deal with the very deepest of human themes -- growth overcoming trauma, political radicalization, paradoxical aspects of love, and finding meaning in life (respectively, for those four shows).
They're some of the most exciting and well-written pieces of art to come around in a long time. And then after each episode, you can easily spend a couple of hours reading story analysis and criticism, listening to podcast analysis and so forth. Because there is a lot to unpack -- the patterns there aren't simple at all.
I can't help but wonder if you're not finding things like these that are actually pushing the envelope. (Obviously we're not talking about things like the NBC reboot of Night Court.)
Most likely the latter. There's so much content being created nowadays thanks to advancements in pretty much everything, making it easier to for anyone to create content. Patterns eventually emerge since creating truly original and unqiue ideas is not compatible with the current rate of content creation.
I sit on the side of "It's because the modern entertainment industry has become stale."
The first time you try skydiving it is likely to be quite the exhilaration. If you grew up doing with your parents and have jumped hundreds of times it's not going to be the same thing. But if you realised that and "discovered" reading novels for pleasure at your age that might give you an incredible buzz, your first of that kind.
No story is going to match a loved family member opening a book at your bedside when you were a child and intoning "Once upon a time..." Yet we chase that feeling forever, which is fine. I know grown adults who still immerse themselves in a childhood artistic experience from a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. It seems it captured the imagination of vastly fewer who were adults in 1978 and that doesn't mean they were curmudgeonly.
Sure we can agree on the obvious conclusions that mass production is going to try for mass appeal and thus “saminess”.
But my house certainly isn’t white with wood tones. That’s because I’ve been putting in the work to select and restore beautiful furniture from decades past and gradually building towards a more unique aesthetic.
Let me tell you it is expensive in both time and money.
- Just selecting a non-neutral wall color is very difficult and pretty much locks you into certain furniture.
- If you want to commission the perfect dining room table it will cost you $5-20k easily depending on your tastes. Or it will cost weeks of labor to DIY (assuming you’ve already devolved the prereq skills). Mass produced pieces will be your only option.
- For architecture, you don’t really get a choice. Custom building a home is hugely expensive and you’ll need a huge amount of skill/stress capacity to GC it yourself or pay $$$ for someone with a reputation.
I guess I don’t get the point of articles like this. I don’t think they’re entirely wrong, but I’m also pretty sure it’s always been like this. You don’t just get beautiful and unique things for free. It’s just when we look back on history we’re usually blinded by survivorship bias of the beauty that has stood the test of time.
Look up some of Brent Hull’s content about historical architecture. You’ll see that even though he rags on modern buildings, he’ll describe how the different architectural forms were massively influenced by the industrial capabilities of the time.
It hasn't always been like that, if you put down the US-centric lens. Every shopping mall in a bigger city anywhere in the world now looks similar to a US shopping mall. Fast-food venues across the world resemble US venues, even if it's not a franchise under a US brand. It's a cultural hegemony that is exported through consumer products.
It used to be that every region had its own distinctive "malls" with mostly locally-made products, and now the whole world is stuck with Chinese-made products tuned primarily for the US taste.
Make shipping 100x the cost and this disappears.
The only reason the US 'won' here is after WWII we had relatively high pay and transported a lot of goods. As shipping got faster and cheaper it expanded beyond the US and took over the world.
One of my favourite coffee table books is Designed in the USSR: 1950–1989. Pretty much everything in the book could easily rival or even triumph over Western designers of the same era, but the vast majority of the industrial designs shown never made it beyond the prototype stage. They looked like nightmares for mass production and it was hard to perceive a meaningful demand for them even in a market economy. These were made by Design Bureaus staffed with people whose sole job is to design things. It would be unfair to compare their work with products that have stood through the tests of user demand over time.
1. The author's entire brand identity follows this format. ("Hi. I'm Alex Murrell. I'm the Strategy Director at Epoch. And I make the complex clear.")
2. This is not a new observation. Apart from the articles he linked to, this is an old conversation, especially among urbanists. Already in the early twentieth century, Frankfurt School critical theorists were worried about the commodification of cities, with buildings becoming as ephemeral as consumer goods. More recently, Paul Connerton described modern space as "space wiped clean."
3. I know the author works in marketing, but I find the conclusion that "bold brands and courageous companies have the chance to chart a different course. To be different, distinctive and disruptive" shockingly bland.
I know everyone in comments is griping about selection bias. Sure. There are local differences in commercial establishments, and you'd have to be deliberately dense to deny that. But I also think you have to be willfully blind to not see the convergence in international design trends, which are an obvious consequence of globalization. There are some obvious reasons for this, particularly when it comes to architecture. Lots of these firms are multinational, and homogeneity is an artifact of efficiency. This is not necessarily a bad thing: as someone in an HCOL city, I would happily take "bland" buildings if it meant affordable housing.
All of the pages contain a vague paragraph with the invitation to "drop us a line" for actual information.
I don't think a blog post has to have a brand new thesis-- that's setting the bar a little high, but it should at least have some unique insight.
Talking about the convergence of global brands in the digital space and how that affects the physical spaces we occupy would have been really interesting way of framing trends. Especially regarding how a brand can stand out in a homogeneous world that seems to favor the known. But what do I know?
This is a bit of a tangent, but I strongly suspect the design trend will swing toward hoarder chic. Almost 10 years ago now, I drove from Austin to San Antonio to buy an old stereo for $50. The owner's house was fascinating. He had two large rooms full of stereo equipment that he collected but had little interest in selling. Every item had a story: where got it, what a deal it was, what he traded for it. The stories evoked different times and places in his life. There was a whole biography there, in stereo(s).
Unless a café were really driven by the personality of its owner, it would be hard to reproduce that kind of thing in any meaningful way. But I think designers will at least try. We're obsessed with old things as indices of authenticity, and as the aesthetic pendulum swings, interior designers will differentiate themselves by making spaces marked by superfluity. This kind of thing already exists, of course--largely in bars filled with vintage stuff. In homes, something like it gets called "grandmillenial" or "grandma chic." But it'll ultimately be just as vapid as contemporary design language, because it'll be a simulacrum of something more authentic.
My sister-in-law is a successful interior designer, and her house is the epitome of AirSpace. It is as ephemeral as the Airbnb guest, changing every few months in the name of perennial "updates." It is the most heartless home I've ever been in.
On your last point, are the hideous 5-over-1s being built in your HCOL city affordable? Because the ones I'm seeing certainly aren't. Ugly, undistinguished, cheaply built, and still expensive!
For the mass culture part, skepticism of most of the comments here does feel cheap. It's not that you aren't allowed to think about the world without properly hacking your p-values and pinky promise double blind peer review by your bros.
I think there's some merit to the feeling we are living in times of neo-midcentury rampant social conformity and anxiety to fit in, or else. A big part of this, I think, is economic anxiety that one has to conform to biologically survive in an unstable world and not be left alone. Though from my experience one can still escape much of it by dissociating from the terminally online algorithmic mainstream. Numerically most (?) of people don't care about it that much. It's good not to care about mainstream acceptance for yourself and your stuff, which is of course harder to do if you are an advertising person.
Let's hope these will be kinds of problems we'll care about in 10-15 years.
We are fed with ocean of information, the same bundle of information, with historical speed. If you are looking for e.g. interior design ideas, SEO, instagram, twitter, or whatever search channel du jour, including LLM, dictates what you are going to read.
We are also living in the most globalized era, having access to products unmatched in our history, the same bunch of products. Don't remember which book I read from, our supermarkets have more product, but all supermarkets are having the same kind of products.
Our working culture is also getting more homogenized. All companies are sharing the same kind of corporate talks. Everyone is taking the same style of profile picture, smiling, beaming with positive energy, with a uniform background colour. Think for example, your company tells you the company is cutting cost, what do you think the action will be? Why is that?
Software engineering is about using latest hot tech, not so much about understanding problems.
"We are all different", he said. [1]
Paradox of Choice.
Lets say you have access to 100 items, you'd probably want more in your life. Having 101 items would likely give a great improvement to your life.
Now image you have access to 1,000,000 items. Having access to 1,000,001 items isn't probable to change your life in any particular fashion. In fact each additional item you have to track is a mental burden. More work for you to figure out if its actually worse or better. Now bounce up this item to 10s of millions. Yea, life actually might get worse in this scenario.
This chapter proves the premise with statistics about film grossing and the increasing unoriginality that influences movie plots. When I was a teenager or years 20 to 30, I went to the cinema up to a dozen times per year. Almost no matter what genre, there was always an interesting movie with a fresh plot or story background. But since 2010 I visited less and less, and (also pandemic-related) the last movie I watched in the cinema is from 2018. But also at home I got the feeling there were less interesting movies. I thought maybe I am getting old. But these statistics tell me, this is not a feeling, it’s a machinery of permanent repetition without being creative AT ALL. And why is that? Because people still watch these repetitions and seems to not get tired of them.
Yes, I watched the phenomenal 22-movies-Marvel-universe with a great finale. These are of course part of the repetition statistic, but it was a new idea at the time, and Marvel clearly went to the success lane with this movie-spanning story. But now? Story’s over, they still produce new mediocre (but still visually pleasing) action movies which do not have any hint of a new spanning plot, and people STILL go watching them and create giant revenues. If people just would boycott any one of these movies, the financial desaster (200+ million dollars of cost per movie!) would end this at once.
So … is it a problem of the society that they expand fashion also to creative things and seem to be happy with any different-but-same movie? I am tired of these movies, I am also tired of TV/streaming series with the same plots again and again. There is more film material produced than ever but for me there is much less to watch than say from 20 to five years ago.
There’s certainly more television than ever before, but I haven’t seen anything truly novel in a while.
Back then, all films were the same action movie plus some comedies, basically. They all ended well. There are good and bad characters, no nuance and good ones win. The structure was also the same and formulaic.
You could go to indie theater and see something else once in a while, but that was it. I have seen more novel things (at least novel for a movie). Not all of them were well executed, but the writers at least tried a new idea here and there. Twin sisters that switch families every year for example. It was not too good, but was not too bad and mainly it was something different.
You want to watch someone building a robot? Or building a sailboat from scratch? Smelting iron in a furnace they built themselves out of clay? Blacksmithing? Welding? Reviewing PC-98 Visual Novels? Taking apart LED lights? Picking locks? Shooting antique firearms? Using a tatoo-removing laser on themselves? Restoring classic cars? Fitting powerful rally car engines into classic cars?
We've got all of those, completely free and available on demand.
Back when there were only 4 TV channels, content had to have much wider appeal - requiring both mainstream topics, and keeping things simple enough to be accessible to almost anyone.
One of the weirdest to me is twitch, before twitch/justin.tv existed did you think a platform for live streaming by anyone on the planet would be used largely for watching strangers play video games?
When a new medium is presented, especially one with lots of access, people try lots of new things on it, some succeed and some fail. People pick up on trends and fads and tend to follow them, so those things become the thing you're more apt to see if you pick at random. Those trends evolve over time. If you're looking around you can find the 'different' thing that will become the new trend, and many more things that will die off.
I manage maybe 30-35 new movies per year (and usually pick up a few more from that year by about two years out from its end) and I'd say a solid 80% don't suck, and about half are pretty damn good. Usually there are another ten or so that I know about and wanted to watch but never get to, and there are surely a bunch more good ones that I miss entirely. 2021 was a bit of an exception because Covid fucked with productions quite a bit and made the movie scene that year kinda weird (though there were several really good small-cast-small-crew films released that year!) but otherwise, consistently, there are roughly mid-tens of good movies released every year, not even counting local indie scene stuff.
Now, assessing it this way does require 1) looking at more than just what's heavily advertised, and 2) having pretty broad taste in genres and being willing to meet a movie where it is, and at least having the capacity to enjoy what it's trying to do assuming it pulls it off reasonably well—me, I'd say Beyond the Black Rainbow and Guardians of the Galaxy and One Cut of the Dead and Logan Lucky are all good movies, so... I'm capable of enjoying most genres and both "high" and "low" art, so the set of films that I might like is pretty large, which helps a lot.
The rest of the article isn't much better in my opinion: it cites only anecdotal evidence, and it says nothing about the past state of affairs despite the title of the article being about "the age of" something.
Also, homogeneity is great when properly deployed. Imagine going to a city and not having to think about how the street numbering system works, or how to navigate the metro, or how to find an ATM because of a human-centered design aesthetic that is built around routines of daily life, instead of the 9-5 commute.
Like I said, there's options when you look outside AirBnB. There is diversity in design if you look outside the haunts of the bourgeois classes.
And look, some people want to struggle reading metro maps. I am not one of them. I, for one, am glad that Harry Beck designed the tube map that would become so influential all over the world. Praise be to Harry Beck! https://youtu.be/cTLCfl01zuE?t=201
I used to spend a lot of time in Seattle, which makes heavy use of numbered streets. Compared to cities with alphabetic street names, I found it harder to navigate. It's too easy to mix up a "51st Ave N" with "51st Ave NW" or a Street for an Avenue. Humans are just better at reading and remembering names.
These days all navigation is electronic. The verbosity of text names acts as a kind of redundant check on the information stream. Numbers are more of a hindrance than a help.
The author then identifies a commonality between these trends, that they are all “average”. I don’t quite see that commonality, it seems a little strained. To be frank, the stronger commonality shared by all these styles is “the author despises it”. But there sort of is something there, “average” does kinda capture something they have in common, so I’ll buy it for the sake of discussion.
So, the author has discovered the current overall aesthetic of the age. Maybe from the inside it feels like it will consume the world and nothing will change, but from the outside it’s just the current overall aesthetic of the age, there were others before it and there will be others after it. You could write a very similar article about the Victorian period, maybe titled “The Age of Ornate”, filled with complaints that every field seems to be obsessed with adding a million curlicues and embellishments to whatever they’re making. The Victorian era (in architecture, fashion, etc., basically all the same categories mentioned in the article) lasted for 70-odd years or so, I bet it felt similarly never-ending and all-consuming to some people living through it back then.
Nowadays I can't shake off this weird feeling of sameness emanating from every design. I can hardly distinguish brands any more, I can't tell cultures apart and that's a shame because there's never been an era with such abundance of products and expression mediums as the current one
I think the issue is you haven't actually found the sound you enjoy. If you just let pop radio take you on your way you're going to get lowest common denominator sound. And streaming has made this effect much worse. Now music radio is only for people who can't be assed to choose their own music, so it's even more lowest common denominator than before.
I feel like a time prisoner /fugitive constantly trying to break out of this window-loop.
The subtext seems to be that American society looks like it does, and _that's bad_. This is a more nuanced point that deserves to be examined as it applies to different aspects of our aesthetic culture. I hate Marvel movies and what they've done to mainstream cinema, but I don't particularly care if a certain type of woman wants to emulate Kim Kardashian. I think the notion that you _should_ care about this trend in the appearances of a certain type of women, especially when juxtaposed against cheugy Airbnb decor, is not a good perspective to hold onto. No one is making you decorate your house like an Airbnb, dude.
The author concludes that the current state of our aesthetic culture is a market opportunity to "reintroduce" variation. This is a flawed notion. If you succeed in changing a piece of our aesthetic culture, then you will have successfully spurred the mass-adoption of your personal brand of blandness. You may have gotten rich in the process, but you will be a failure in your stated goal.
Counterculture exists for a reason
However, I think that this current generation is fundamentally different because of a different balance between culture and counterculture driven by demographic changes.
The 50s through to the 90s were all time periods when the population was predominantly youthful, and far more likely to belong to belong to counterculture movements. Because there was a lot of them, they made up a significant market, and so advertisers would pick up counterculture movements.
But in modern times, there are a lot of baby boomers who are pretty old. Their tastes are far less likely to change at this point, there are a lot of them, and they have a lot of money.
Give it 10 years, and hopefully we will start to see some more variety. Variety is the spice of life as they say...
The Most Wanted Music is a milquetoast 90's pop ballad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jId-qaEwuvI&ab_channel=DaveS...
The Most Unwanted Music is nothing short of an avant-garde masterpiece: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDh4o0rOvr0&ab_channel=DaveS...
Granted, the art and architecture that have managed to survive for 2000 years is more unique, but that's just survivorship bias.
Always was like that and I'll tell you why to the core.
We often speak about how our behaviours are shaped so we could initially survive the saber-toothed tiger - or wild animals. But it's a huge misconception when it comes to the human race. We, human, never feared much the saber-toothed tiger simply because our brain is especially good for planning. So we always planned and hunted the saber-tooth tiger. We dont really fear wild animals that much, there is no need for confirming that simple fact.
So the question is: what does human trully fear? What, would easily kill you? Like really really easily?
We fear being rejected by the group because nothing kills you faster than being rejected by the group. Once you're rejected by the group there is two outcome 1) you're dead already because the group proceeded to beat you to death or 2) you are banned - and now, not only will you face the saber-toothed tiger alone but you will meet other groups that will get socially stronger hunting you.
Get rejected by the group and just like that, you're chance of survival has drop to zero. Or close to it. In the snap of a finger.
And that's what shape our behaviours the most. People fear nothing - nothing - like being rejected. They will lie to not be. They will deny truth, they will mate with anything as long as it's socially strong.
It's not like "we are social", no, it's you die if the group doesnt accept you. Still true today.
If you want to see exciting cars you have to pay for it. If you want to see fun skylines you have to go to unique places (I am spoiled by Chicago). If you want a cool place to stay at you really shouldn’t do Airbnb . Unfortunately using services that are cheap or don’t have must history then everything looks the same.
Wither Tartaria? https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/whither-tartaria
> Imagine a postapocalyptic world. Beside the ruined buildings of our own civilization - St. Peter’s Basilica, the Taj Mahal, those really great Art Deco skyscrapers - dwell savages in mud huts. The savages see the buildings every day, but they never compose legends about how they were built by the gods in a lost golden age. No, they say they themselves could totally build things just as good or better. They just choose to build mud huts instead, because they’re more stylish.
Colors: Where did they go? An investigation.
https://www.vox.com/culture/22840526/colors-movies-tv-gray-d... > Why do so many TV shows and movies look like they were filmed in a gray wasteland?
Every profit-motive champion raved about the variety produced by means of competition. Instead, the fear of failure from truly distinguishing oneself has driven competitive differences to the edge where it remains superficial and unimportant. Alpine white or cream white paint? Straight tube or spherical Edison bulbs? Nietzche or Camus on the toilet bookshelf?
In fairness, we can say that this incentive has normalized a lower bound of acceptable design in terms of function. Yes, it's bland, but it works.
But now what? The incentive needs to be transcended. The only way to do that actually is to be rich and/or crazy enough to deny the potential of economic failure. But who can afford to do that?
This hasn't changed. The Sistine chapel wasn't painted according to the whims of the peasantry.
I find it intentional on the authors part that they didn't include "capital" in any of their observations. All houses in the suburbs look the same because its... cheaper to do it that way. There's less risk involved. People don't do anything interesting to their property because of "property value". Why would I want to make my space /interesting/ when this is obviously just an investment I'm going to sell and then live in my /real/ home. (Which I won't make interesting because => go back to square 1)
Its expensive to do interesting things. The majority of businesses are not 1B profitable - they need a place to do business all the same. So an efficient box it is!
The Art example at the beginning is funny to me. People, largely, don't have a lot of ideas about what they 'want' out of any given topic they don't have a ton of interest in. I'd be willing to bet the people they asked haven't given a lot of thought into the art they preferred until they were asked. You have to actively look around to discover new things, you can't expect newness to be fed to you. Emphasis on the Discovery part.
Its all a bit, "Drawing conclusions about the world from zoomed out observations instead of actually looking into the forces that shape our world".
The most unwanted song, for example, features all the thing people dislike in music (according to their surveys): opera singers rapping about cowboys, bagpipes, uncomfortably slow tempos, and choirs of children singing ad jingles among other things.
Hahaha, this is beautifully terrible. Thanks for linking it.
I feel like the author has learned the exact wrong lesson. AirBnBs all look the same for a reason! It's the Brooklyn look! There's a reason all the AirBnBs copied their style from one of the most expensive housing markets in the world. That style was high status, and AirBnBs copied it, and eventually it became ubiquitous because people aspire to that. It's not an accident where it originated from. Convergence isn't an opportunity to diverge, it emerges from underlying driving factors. Yes, you can choose to buck that trend, but the underlying reason for the trend emerging is going to be something you have to fight against, it's going to be a disadvantage, not an advantage.
Unusual, eccentric or otherwise interesting opinions aren't going to show up in a market researcher's poll. What were they expecting?
No, it means you just have to work harder to find music with actual creativity behind it.
[1] https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/majority-ameri...
edit: I'm not millennial, I'm a Gen-X. And this categories also contributes to this sameness and conformity.
Avacado green or burnt orange kitchen tiles, furniture, thick brown window drapes, and so on. Side burns. It must have felt like everyone/everywhere looked the same.
Later it became ridiculed and despised.
It's a great article, but to me, the article does not illustrate a "trend". Rather it illustrates what has been occurring, well, for 150 years. Essentially, the commodification of everything (truly everything, there is no end in sight). This is modernity playing out, on the same track, in the same direction as it has since the 1800s.
This is why, imho, modernity was already fully understood by the 70s. This was the last generation who had still somewhat of a living memory of life outside consumer culture, of living outside the framework where daily experience is mediated by things circulating in a global market. Ellul, Baudrillard, Debord, McLuhan, Mumford, Lasch, ... all were describing "blanding" processes (to use the terminology of the article).
Sorry to continue on and hijacking this, it truly is absolutely fascinating. The effect must be even worse in the new upcoming countries. They have much less has a physical anchor than the west has.
To your point though, note also that current pop-phychology/philosophy is no longer a mash-up of Marx and Freud, which it certainly still was post WW2. I think this would help explain why we're living in "a-historical" times, as both very deeply cared about grounding thought into historical time (generally western history, nonetheless, something we no longer do).
I appreciate the original poster's conclusion though – average is an opportunity for distinction. The takeaway seems to embrace uniqueness instead of trying to make your product look like everyone else's.
Why argue with that one pretty girl and give in into her needs, if there's more than 10,000 other girls who look literally identical, have the same gymed up bodies, have the same personalities, same preferences and fall for the same jokes?
To me, devaluing other people like this is abhorrent, but for him it's no problem.
Also, rejecting love and affection is the dumbest thing a person will ever do (not to speak to GPs example specifically of course, i don't know the situation).
I think this is just the consequence of making things at scale. Society as a whole benefits: most people have more and better stuff relative to their wealth level than people in the past. But craftsmanship disappears or becomes substantially more expensive, and with it the diversity and range of design fades away.
To use Loos's example, the original mass manufactured table was sturdy and practical. Its simple design meant that it would not to the fickle changes in fashion. This was the positive promise of mass manufacturing.
There's no natural law that scaling up production should imply that things are of lower quality. Yet, that's where we are.
If I were to really grasp at straws to defend the other position, maybe the contemporary aesthetic has become overly minimalist and utilitarian, as opposed to being style oriented. Restaurants are now cement cubes, all new apartment complexes look like hotels with a white|beige|gray palette and are also cubic, modern cars are all white and bulbous-looking, skyscrapers are either cubic or (ironically) overly whimsical in architecture to the point where they appear to have no obvious function. Perhaps if standard designs and architecture were less boring, people wouldn't care so much about homogeneity.
I could live in THX-1138 world as long as I get to drive a Lola T70 through the BART tunnels.
The AirBNB example is horrible. I've worked on ranking side of a very similar hotel aggregator app. Certain pics are boosted because users click on them more, the AirBNB hosts then see this and make their house more conforming to the top pictures. A few cycles of this and you've got complete homogeneity. Same with Instagram Models, Youtube thumbnails, Book covers etc.
I want to point out a key difference. It's not that people like a specific thing, it's more that a kafkaesque algorithm boosts specific traits. People realize this and start to mimic those traits.
The infrastructure arguments falls flat because creativity requires money which most buildings have scarcity of. So they mostly follow the cookie cutter model.
There's something insidious that is happening, so slow we are not recognizing it (centuries now). It is that man is fully submitting to the machine. We are adapting, not just in what we buy (cause we've been nothing but consumers), but in how we comport ourselves in our relations to others. We are internalizing the value system of the machine on a global scale.
>Nobody grows rich or poor anymore: both are too much of a burden. Who still wants to rule? Who obey? Both are too much of a burden. No herdsman and one herd.
Uniqueness, standing out from a "mediocre" herd, "acceptance" of "harsh realities," etc. are not just how some people decide to enjoy themselves, but also how they look down upon others.
1. So this explains why hipsters all look the same too.
2. If one desired to create different enough to look different, then they should stop looking at everyone and everything else to minimize bias. Forget the outside world and what they might think. It also reduces personal discontent and misery by avoiding comparisons with others. Perhaps the Amish have something by choosing purposefully plain almost uniforms as the antithesis of Instagram.
That said, it's hard to deny the other examples are spot on. I suspect they are cherry picked (surely you can find celebrities that do NOT look like those in the example), but I find these samey blandness everywhere. It's on the "Netflix look", it's on book covers, it's on how malls and supermarkets look, etc.
If you churn some water with a bit of soap in it, a lot of large bubbles will form on top. Just wait a few seconds, and those bubbles that are too large will divide into smaller ones, and those that are too small will be absorbed by the large. This happens naturally, without prompting, and it happens regardless of the original configuration of the bubbles.
We believe that we are exempt from something like this. That there is something special about the human brain that makes it possible for it to maintain some anomalous state indefinitely.
There is not. There is nothing special about our minds. Just like the bubbles, the system settles. The square edges are sanded off; the too small or the too large, absorbed.
When the energy flowing into the system changes, that is how you know that the configuration might change. Have a look:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-energy-use?tab...
This seems very similar to many news stories or scientific studies these days. Start off with a narrative. Highlight anything that supports your narrative. Ignore anything that contradicts it.
the more investment required, the safer people will play it
it seems to me that the examples picked:
- collectively commissioned art
- cars
- interior design
- building design
this is compounded by hypersocialisation and the share economy - if you buy a house to rent out, or to show online, you want it to be a safely designed house like those that are succeeding and are popular, and your particular quirks and tastes, if you have any contrarian ones at all, you'd rather suppress them for the sake of the business
And yes, globalization is yet another reason why. Even travelling to places is pretty boring now, it's just the same things. It takes a while for the reality to sink in, but our entire economy is now based on being bland. To the extent any country deviates from the USA it is deemed "undeveloped".
Edit: found it - https://old.reddit.com/r/Anticonsumption/comments/10njiwd/co...
There's also that "rule of threes" which almost every client likes.
Also, most of the new fonts are derivative. Amazon Ember looks like a bland mashup of Calibri and ITC Officina, like the latter of which a lot of other fonts look, and the former of which is bland as heck. Poppins looks like ITC Avant Garde Gothic. TheSansMono kind of looks like Consolas. There are a truckload of direct modifications of DejaVu Sans Mono/Bitstream Vera Sans Mono. Bitstream eVera Sans is a fugly bizarro version of Verdana/Tahoma.
Streaming video is even less differentiated. Every player looks more or less the same now and the content is largely fungible between platforms. It used to be that Netflix had superior selection and had the best player, but content has been balkanized and every platform looks and works roughly the same way. Almost every platform is now targeting the same type of content: low cost, easy to mass produce, and mass consumable. I will give youtube and twitch credit for being quite different -- at one time. Now, for whatever reasons, these services seem like they're on a steady march towards homogeneity too.
There are signs of the phenomenon the article describes everywhere and it seems to have happened across most artistic and business disciplines around the same time period. I would be very curious to know the ages of some of the posters in this thread since there are some interesting differences in opinion/experience. If you see it, you see it and feel it everywhere, but if you never saw what life was like before there's no way to make any kind of comparison. There were places and services and things objects that did not even attempt to cater to average expectations. That difference was real, in ways both tangible and abstract. This article won't resonate with posters in their 20's like it does for those in their 40's.
And things that are expensive to produce and must appeal to a wide-range of customer tastes tend to look fairly neutral.
And some things "look the same" because everyone's converging on a common (evolving) set of best practices, not average ones.
And those cities don't look the same.
You can see some examples of their interior designs here: https://silversquare.eu/en/coworking-locations/brussels
- All the ceilings have exposed "industrial" elements such as ventilation pipes, cables or unpainted metal.
- They are all very spacious with lots of exposed floor but no carpets (to make them easier to clean I assume)
- Modern, minimalist furniture
- The occasional plant here and there, but potted as to not introduce any dirt
- Non-distracting and almost bland color scheme. Notice how even the painting on the wall fades into the background.
How could this look different? Consider for example NeueHouse or Soho House from https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/top-coworking-spac...
They have more vibrant colors, more contrasts, less open space and more furniture overall. There are bookshelves and many unneeded but beautiful items like vases or small paintings. The ceilings have exposed wood and the floors are covered by carpets or are at least patterned.
My frustration is primarily because of lack of good movies coming out of Hollywood which has been churning out remakes after remakes or some decade long running sequels. I guess a question worth asking as we stand on the cusp of first quarter of the new millennium is, what are the lasting cultural artefacts that we are building? What is it that we can call truly as our own? Could be a music form, architectural style, painting form etc.,
[1] https://areomagazine.com/2023/01/18/the-great-reboot-in-memo...
... or maybe I'm just inventing things.
The reason why things were more varied in previous generations is the speed of communications. it took much longer for fashions to permeate through society, this mean that more local variations happened.
Now, fashions are almost always global, but they still change at the same rate. The difference being is that they change much more in unison across the globe.
It feel like we're stuck in a global, homogenized, test-group-approved fashion loop.
Of course cars are going to look mostly the same. If you change anything too much (e.g. cybertruck) you're just straying from a highly optimised design.
Look at bicycles. Before the invention of the safety bike there were lots of different designs. But the safety bike is such a good design you can't really get away with it.
Or phones. Everyone complains about glass rectangles and where are the sliders and flip phones? They don't exist anymore because the glass rectangle is such a good design.
(I've been observing this for at least the past 15 years or so. This feels more like the "post-history" of fashion.)
Edit: Regarding the speed of communications, mind that there were much read, trend-setting magazines, which came out periodically, every week or every month and that they had to make a point, relative to the previous issues. And, as a reader, you wouldn't have referred to a past issue from half a year ago. Moreover, past issues were hard to come upon, as they weren't sold anymore. Now compare this to websites, which keep lingering around (you wouldn't discard last month's posts) and platforms, where trends gradually gain momentum, until they eventually become ubiquitous. (At this point, a trend would have been "out" and "uncool", previously, but now this is when they are really enforced by algorithms.) I'd rather argue, for things like fashion, the speed of communications has decreased considerably and stability has increased, thanks to technology.
E.g., https://www.washingtonpost.com/home/2022/10/27/why-victorian...
The idea was the world went through a drastic change with WWII and the Victorian mansion started seeming like a ghostly remnant of the earlier age.
Antiques Roadshow had a similar podcast where they discussed the "brown is down" phenomenon.
Did the fast-changing fashions of the postwar era reflect something about normal trends, or was it a sort of equilibrating phenomenon, and now we've returned to some normal again, that we haven't seen in over 100 years?
I wonder if you were to travel pre-world-war era if you'd come to the same conclusion about the speed at which fashions change. Maybe but maybe not.
Coincidentally I was talking to my spouse last night about how if you look through architecture and design websites and magazines, the stuff you see is different from what we were referring to "real estate style" and here was referred to as "Airbnb" style. In architecture and design circles there's less uniformity and more color and contrast.
The problem with this I've found is that it's difficult to find something different, of the sort in architectural circles. So if you want some of this stuff you often have to have it custom made, or made by a single boutique manufacturer, which is expensive and difficult.
So some of this uniformity in style I think is international economies of scale, which creates supply constraints and a sort of monopsony of sorts. This might be reinforcing in turn.
I don't know why the English-speaking cultures are so quick into reducing it into "Victorian", but it was recognized as a time of quick change.
I'm living in a city where most of the buildings are 100+ years old. (The house I'm living in was built in 1904.) You can usually date a building from that era by about +/- 2 years of accuracy, just by the looks, regardless, whether it's art nouveau or a more conservative expression of style. However, as you approach WWII, things considerably slowed down. (Mostly for economic reasons.)
I think, this idea of a mostly stable era is a product of the shift in paradigms, you mentioned before, where we put anything that happened before in a paradigmatic box. (E.g., like it has just recently happened with brutalism, where a wide variety and evolution of concepts and oppositions was subsumed into the same thing.)
This has only been true for a few decades. It's a very new and foreign thing!
Who cares if movie posters and book titles are converging towards something that markets well? The parts that matter (the content, themes, style, etc) are probably very different among all those books/movies.
IMO Fashion like this exists just so that salesmen can convince consumers that they can buy The Current Thing and earn respect from their peers. Chasing the latest furniture, latest clothes, latest cars, etc.. It's all a shallow, costly signal of wealth that excludes the not-wealthy and distracts the wealthy from more fulfilling/productive pursuits.
If this trend means that fashion is dying, good riddance.
E.g., just compare major fashion trends in the 1970s (from mini to maxi, to bell-bottoms, to pants and tube socks & disco attire, to clogs and para jackets, to college look vs. punk) to the major fashion trends of the last decade (slim fit). This variation from season to season, while, of course, invented as a vehicle for marketing, actually provided a vehicle for repositioning in a varying landscape of tribal subcultures that was typical, then.
Places like Stanford and MIT slowly become more Harvard every year IMO, and it sucks for student life too. Driving forces may not be exactly the same, but I think there are cultural undertones pervasive across these changes and some of the more superficial ones. It reminded me of this article: https://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/2022/12/stanford-hates-fu...
Anecdotally, I think it affects science too. Grants become increasingly formulaic, and anything deviating even slightly intellectually only has a chance as a token "high risk" project. People are afraid of saying something wrong that also clashes with current scientific norms, so everything seems so damn homogenous despite the many questions we still have little answer for.
I think the "optimization" process that got us here is bad in part because it is optimizing for a single institution style that independently will do fine, and is thus a safe play for any decent university. However that is not the same as the set of institutions that would collectively do the best, not even close IMO. Homogenization can be efficient and should happen to some degree within an institution. But between institution diversity is already bad and continuing to die off year over year.
This is alarming to me and I think there is something to the aesthetics that go with it. People's behavior can absolutely be impacted by the broader cultural vibe that pervades. Signaling is important too - when you go to visit MIT and see the dingy af student center it is part of the model you build about what the school cares about. Selecting a specific type of student body is much easier when it goes both ways, because good luck assessing someone's motivations on a modern college app. When surface-level marketing becomes homogenous across the board it is going to have downstream impacts.
Because these work best (actually only work at all) in the middle lane of the masses of text/images/code that they ingest, and from which they generate their output.
They generate the most likely output to result from the given input. This necessarily homogenizes out any surprise or highly valuable information. We get the most average output
(which, to be fair to their creators, is an average of the above-average human inputs, since they are training on the output of skilled humans in each field, and e.g., that grammar of GPT-4 is noticeably better than almost all current journalists, even when it is hallucinating an answer)
But the lease prohibits this!" - Friedensreich Hundertwasser
Essentially, it's rational for firms to move towards "the middle" of the market. That could be the middle of a boardwalk if you are a hot dog stand or the middle of the political spectrum if you are a politician.
It's not necessarily because of testing but rather because being in the middle gives you access to the largest section of the market.
As a counter point, you could argue that a counterpoint is the expression "there are riches in the niches".
A Sister Souljah moment is a politician's calculated public repudiation of an extremist person, statement, group or position that is perceived to have some association with the politician's own party.
Despite soliciting the opinions of over 11,000 people, from 11 different countries, each of the paintings looked almost exactly the same.
I am literally amazed, all that effort. In my modest European country, there were kitsch painters offering their "art" by tens, for very cheap at resorts near seaside or at mountains resorts.
All were like in the article, mainly blue, with few humans in the background and some possible animals in the foreground. Blue lakes near the mountains, bluea sea, hut with huge blue sky.
All those kitsch artists never did a study.
Many years ago, the strategy of searching for “long tail” opportunities (and keywords) was touted as a way to find lucrative niche markets. I don’t hear much about that any more; although it is interesting that most recently Apple is introducing classical music as a new product for Apple Music.
Is the “long tail” resurfacing? Is this the defense against AI eating the market?
The iPhone design is great in many aspects, and it covers quite a few use cases, but not all of them, there should be space for alternatives, different form factors, different styles.
We often tend to blame individuality and selfishness, but at the collective level our herd behavior is quite a bit stronger than our individuality.
The implied heuristic behind herd behavior is that some individuals are taking the risk, and the group follows those who succeed. But when nobody is taking risk we're all losing.
e.g. Dropbox rebrand in 2017... remember that? Wild colours, weird fonts, blocky text, lots of white space..
Then, of course, everybody else shifts their rebrand the same direction and we end up with all the same new normal (e.g. Wise — https://wise.com/community/en/brand-new-look)
That's why the conclusion of the article doesn't work. You can't sell anything that's truly new or different. I think that the only way trends change is when so many people have tried that the herd has basically migrated to that new position accidentally inch-by-inch. It will trample all of the people leading the way and deny that they existed.
Is it because the bland cars and houses and advertisements from back in the day weren't nice enough to get preserved into the historical record? Maybe the people who owned those things weren't rich enough to take and keep pictures or videos of them, or weren't considered important enough to have aspects of their existence celebrated in media, media that were saved for posterity?
dimensions are agonisingly chosen to please
the needs of the wind tunnel, to adhere to
government safety regulations, to properly
accommodate the average American family’s
collective weight of 78,000 lbs., and to
allow for enough cargo space for all their
crap
I'm thinking they meant 780lbs (354kg) although even that seems a bit high.
But on the one area I can speak intelligently about, video games, this article is dead wrong. There has been an explosion of experimentation in terms of anything measurable: genres, art styles, etc. And from a product/ company point of view, this can be seen by the diversity of who is winning. The largest game in the world in terms of revenue AND number of users is Minecraft, which looks zero like the next best selling game.
This makes me think the whole article is wrong.
I think about this article a lot, he was dead on. He deleted his blog but it’s floating around in the internet archives (carles.buzz).
Apartments: wooden floors white walls straight roof light-shade chairs/sofas square tables pastel colors windows
Car brands - I can't even pick any similarity, except that they're all black and white, which the author literally made up (Toyota and BMW's brands are colorful).
Toothbrushes: white colorless buttons LEDs white brushes long has a brush
I really don't understand what the author is talking about.
I do agree we are not taking enough risks in art but instead trying to please everyone’s tastes
It seems to me that some winners emerge, which makes other competitors want to replicate the winner's formula. Over time all products end up the same. Trying to deviate from that sameness will either result in customers not being interested or everyone copying you. This may be bad for innovation.
It’s gotten to the point that I rarely use social media react buttons at all when I see friends sharing memes. I know they didn’t come up with it themselves and I grow tired of endless memes that cover nearly identical ground.
I enjoy making people laugh if I post something on Facebook but it will be something I experienced myself. Not some meme whose author I couldn’t credit if I tried.
I am actually developing a web app that highlights these differences. Each week a different country is highlighted and users can post content about that country.
We're dumb heard animals, apparently.
The problem with purely data driven design is that you get faster horses instead of cars.
We need a new generation of tastemakers to just start designing beautiful things.
Other point that worth to mention is that today, people are consuming same media, culture and having the same idols, regardless of their physical location.
(By the way, I am not even concerned with the observation being more truthy than false. It's just so blatantly written to drive home the conclusion that they missed their chance to add anything of interest to answer the question).
In the ancient Roman Empire, important buildings, fora, aqueducts, amphitheathers ... were remarkably similar across vast stretches of territory, even though there was no instant communication and no photography, only hand-drawn sketches on paper/papyrus.
How is that possibly surprising!? A sparsely populated coastline with abundant game? That's our evolutionary niche! Of course it's what we want!
It sounds like the author is speaking to a clique of their similar friends.
Cars are all the same, yet they aren’t - purposes, shapes and colors vary as to the creative and expressive customizations. Music has areas of “sameness” but also throngs of small and bright performances that are far from them.
It’s a bit tongue in cheek, but I do notice people seem prone to take the same photos over and over again. I feel like 1000 years from now they’ll be saying “wtf? why did they do that?”.
We could say the same thing about biological convergence in animals.
The average vertebrate animal…
Two eyes, two ears, one mouth, one brain, two sexes, five digits, moving around on appendages.
It converges because it works.
[0] https://www.popsci.com/story/animals/why-everything-becomes-...
It’s a very sad thing to witness, the death of uniqueness, distinct identity. Part of me hesitatingly attributes it to wokeness and cancel culture. People are more afraid now than ever of being cancelled. This makes it harder to be unique for fear of being offensive. With that comes a true regression to the mean.
Welcome to the age of average
It's not completely wrong but it's not super honest either.
The author cherry picks stuff that is popular in Western culture. Of course it looks similar... it's popular.