Early 2000s. Every myspace looks different. AIM profiles with colors, poems, quotes, and links. WinAmp skins, but also skins in desktops (WindowBlinds), wallpap

Early 2000s. Every myspace looks different. AIM profiles with colors, poems, quotes, and links. WinAmp skins, but also skins in desktops (WindowBlinds), wallpapers (DeviantArt), icons, ringtones, etc. To be cool, you'd make it yours. It all had a sort of gaudy messiness that never appealed to the artists and proto-hipsters, but they were the odd ones. And you could clearly tell what was business vs personal. Business was square and beige. Personal was colorful and round. It's all mixed together now. The moment when this flipped for me was the iPhone, because unlike Blackberry or Sidekick, this was a device that was meant for both work and play, and it pushed the design boundaries equally together. Facebook, Bootstrap, the death of RSS, the rise of streaming music services, etc. all happened around the same time. It felt fresh and modern! I remember. And it wasn't just surface-level design - the real change was in our personalities. Bring your whole self to work. Craft your personal brand. 10 more life hacks. Delete those facebook photos and that old blog. In 2020, hey now I even see your kitchen and your kids! There became no place to retreat to. Epitomized in any modern Apple ad. It elevated us, so we accepted it, but now deviate too far and mobs will attack you. Our age is an age of conformity. I'm reminded of a documentary called Helvetica from 2007. Has the world become less personalized? Even the word personalized doesn't quite capture what I wonder that was lost, because personalized would not be a word I'd have used then. What could cause this trend to reverse?