32 ms·

The age of average

• jschveibinz 4y ago
  This is a very good article and foundational with respect to our present and future culture. With generative AI, which is based on prior art, this effect will most likely be exacerbated. Average in —> average out. 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?
• loveparade 4y ago
  You know what's also the same? All the products in the same category on Amazon.
• nassimm 4y ago
  The "people all look the same" part is absolutely ridiculous. The overwhelming majority of people I pass by in the streets look nothing like these people (in fact, I can't even remember the last time I saw someone who looked like that in real life) 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.
  • angarg12 4y ago
    The same goes for interiors really. Instead of looking at AirBnB, which is biased, have a browse in any real estate website, where you can see picture of places regular people actually live in. Most of them aren't curated and well presented, instead an eclectic hodgepodge put together over the years, with very little in common with the AirSpace aesthetic.
• slindsey 4y ago
  Part of the problem within this article is the choice of pictures. The first section states, “In nearly every country all people really wanted was a landscape with a few figures around, animals in the foreground, mainly blue.” They then present 9 pictures that reinforce the concept that people all around the world expect the _same_ thing. But that's simply not true. 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.
  • helloplanets 4y ago
    Yep. This article is a good example of how to not do science. Not a single counterexample is provided from another decade. Not to even talk about actually trying to prove the same point for the 50's etc, with pictures. > 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.
    • sparsely 4y ago
      It's indeed unsurprising that if you look at the designs produced to match a specific context (AirBnB) you'll get a good amount of uniformity, as sellers converge on efficient solutions. If you looked in other contexts (high end apartments for sale in major city, cheap new builds in small towns, mass produced single family homes in another country) you might end up finding more differences.
      • Ekaros 4y ago
        I would probably look at listings of new apartments in various parts of the world to get picture what is common and what is not. And this should be matched to similar segments(low, mid and high income) in each location.
• pizzaknife 4y ago
  and in the 1700 and 1800s - peasant farmers all wore the same thing. whats with all the wigs and makeup in that same eras aristocracy? AND WHATS THE DEAL WITH AIRLINE PEANUTS AM I RIGHT?!
  • trgn 4y ago
    That's not true. In the 1700s and 1800s peasants across the world dressed differently. There was local conformity, certainly, but global diversity. 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.
• mekoka 4y ago
  So this is what we have to look forward to in the age of AI-aided copywriting?
  • nigamanth 4y ago
    Everyone will start to use AI, so simply, don't.
    • Hoasi 4y ago
      Being out of date will become your edge.
  • coldpie 4y ago
    Sadly, I think a real person actually spent time writing this drivel. Using an AI would've been a better use of everyone's time.
• davemp 4y ago
  This seems somewhat cherry picked, and lacking real insight. 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.
  • bluetomcat 4y ago
    > I don’t think they’re entirely wrong, but I’m also pretty sure it’s always been like this. 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.
    • pixl97 4y ago
      Because you all buy from the same factory. This is where everything in the world is heading to because of cheap shipping. 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.
• denton-scratch 4y ago
  > We like to think that we are individuals, but we are much more alike that we wish to admit. Unusual, eccentric or otherwise interesting opinions aren't going to show up in a market researcher's poll. What were they expecting?
• KaiserPro 4y ago
  Congratulations, you've found fashion. 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.
  • iakov 4y ago
    Do they really change though? The car example from the article feels stale, yet every single new car looks exactly like the cars on the picture. The stupid instagram face has been a thing since before covid. The movie posters go back to 2001, and I've seen a fair share of bleeding, crying, creepy eyes on the horror movie posters since then. It feel like we're stuck in a global, homogenized, test-group-approved fashion loop.
    • IshKebab 4y ago
      To a certain degree is isn't fashion; it's optimisation. 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.
  • masswerk 4y ago
    This is contrary to my experience: trends and fashion were short lived, trends lasting maybe half a year, and the fashion of the last season was definitely "out". Nowadays, there's a previously unknown stability and trends shift just minimally. Which enables this "everything looks the same" phenomenon as there is minimal variation over time and lots of room for aesthetics to spread and eventually engulf and embrace everything, there is. (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.
• duiker101 4y ago
  Related: Vemödalen https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ftDjebw8aA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ftDjebw8aA
• mrwnmonm 4y ago
  I came across an article a year ago, but I can't find it now. It shows the difference between ancient archtictures and modern ones. Like churches, masjids, temples, and houses. Then shows how modern buildings looks like a lego in the middle of nature. Does this description reminds anyone here with a similar article?
  • anthomtb 4y ago
    I'm sure there are 10 more articles that, shrunken and laid out in a grid, would look very similar to TFA.
• itissid 4y ago
  Cities like Paris, Constantinople, Rome, Jerusalem, New Delhi look nothing like each other.
• ak_111 4y ago
  See also: movie trailers and SaaS website design.
• rom16384 4y ago
  I think the author would enjoy the art project and book Exactitudes, https://exactitudes.com/collectie/ https://exactitudes.com/collectie/
• xbar 4y ago
  This response is completely different from all the others.
  • psychoslave 4y ago
    So good! Someone have to create a t-shirt brand with it and flood the market with it.
• staminade 4y ago
  Travel back 2000 years and I'd bet you'd find Romans complaining that every new villa looked the same and every new toga was in the same style. Every era has a dominant aesthetic in art, design, clothing and decor, but there's still likely a greater variety in the modern era than there has been at any point in history.
  • johnlocke8 4y ago
    What a bad take. I don't think any Romans were saying the new cathedral looks too much like the old one. Art and architecture then weren't commercialized the way they are now. People spent 600 years working on buildings they would never see complete. There were no global demonic companies rushing ugly, non-offensive (mass appeal), products out the door in literally every industry.
    • TheCoelacanth 4y ago
      They absolutely were. The Romans had cookie-cutter apartment buildings too. They had mass production of pottery, textiles and other decorations by slaves. Granted, the art and architecture that have managed to survive for 2000 years is more unique, but that's just survivorship bias.
• elzbardico 4y ago
  This is the consequence of our generation taking over. We, the millennials are probably the most a-historic generation, our taste and values are exceedingly the values of the petit bourgeoisie. All of our faux sophistication reflects our depressing self-centered culture, our lack of erudition and our rabid individualism.
  • GalenErso 4y ago
    I want to think that my growing collection of books about nuclear weapons, nuclear war, and nuclear strategy allows me to tick the quirky box among my fellow Millennials/Zillennials.
    • hoseja 4y ago
      *Zoomers
  • mromanuk 4y ago
    Sure. Also globalization, the internet, and cheaper flights have contributed significantly to this sameness and blandness. In the end, the same social forces are always at play: status-seeking, conformity, and many others. All of our aspirations and consumption are now globally defined. edit: I'm not millennial, I'm a Gen-X. And this categories also contributes to this sameness and conformity.
  • jsemrau 4y ago
    I am lately strangely obsessed with the decline of modern culture as seen in the MCU and Star Wars. This 'a-historic'-ness materializes itself in that the author's of She-Hulk have apparently never seen the 1970s struggle of the original Hulk, i.e., being an outcast on the run. Neither have they understood what made the original Star Wars trilogy work. Killing off the characters of Luke, Han, Lando, and Vader can only explained if the authors never understood the history of these characters. Surely, these are all works of fiction, yet they are still part of our shared cultural history.
  • yobbo 4y ago
    There was a fashion in the 70s that seemed to have permeated everything. 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.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• fwlr 4y ago
  The styles that the author reviews are real trends in their market (except the paintings, which seems like an intentional publicity stunt on the part of the artists rather than a genuine trend, and it harms the piece by being the introduction - gets everything off on the wrong foot), though not as all-consuming as they are made out to be. 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.
  • bluetomcat 4y ago
    The author really describes the effects of globalisation, spreading through consumer culture and online media quicker than before. Capitalism is in a phase where companies are developing "world products" to ever larger audiences. A "world car" would look very different from a 1970s Jaguar, built in Britain and sold there predominantly.
  • lvoudour 4y ago
    One can make parallels to other eras, sure, but the current convergence to an "average" is unprecedented in scale and speed. Various eras had a distinctive style that everything revolved around, but at least there was variety (cultural and corporate). 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
• protoman3000 4y ago
  My brother noticed this development as well and exploits it for brinkmanship and (imho abusive) rejection of any compromise in personal relationships. 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.
  • globular-toast 4y ago
    Are people entitled to be valued by others?
    • trgn 4y ago
      Certainly, it's called the golden rule. 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).
      • nomdep 4y ago
        I’m pretty sure most of these girls are doing the same with your brother. Not every relation should end in happily ever after
        • mrwnmonm 4y ago
          LOL. I love this comment, although I think you are responding to the wrong person.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
• dimal 4y ago
  This is sad, but it doesn’t seem all that new to me. As a kid in the 80s I remember seeing suburban subdivisions going up in all the farmland around where I lived. (I lived in one of the first subdivisions to go up.) Each new subdivision looked the same as the last. Each one used the same three or four house models repeated over and over. It was revolting. When you’d go to one strip mall, it would look pretty much the same as any other strip mall. And if you go back in time and look at say, city apartment buildings from 1900 and look at New York or San Francisco or Baltimore, they all look just about the same as each other. The only difference now is that this sameness truly global. This is the first time we’ve had a truly global society. It’s probably inevitable. But at least the current AirBnB style looks better to me than your average 1980s home style.
• SilverBirch 4y ago
  >When every supermarket aisle looks like a sea of sameness, when every category abides by the same conventions, when every industry has converged on its own singular style, bold brands and courageous companies have the chance to chart a different course. To be different, distinctive and disruptive. 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.
• a_c 4y ago
  I think what the article describes is true. 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] 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVygqjyS4CA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVygqjyS4CA
  • pixl97 4y ago
    >having access to products unmatched in our history, the same bunch of products 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.
• alexpotato 4y ago
  This article is implicitly also an example of Hotelling's Law [0] 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". 0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotelling%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotelling%27s_law
  • textread 4y ago
    One of the strategies a politician could use to move towards the middle is creating a Sister Souljah moment [0] 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. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sister_Souljah_moment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sister_Souljah_moment
• RedCondor 4y ago
  It's worth understanding how some people's idea of what is "great" (elite) is formed. Friedrich Nietzsche's endurance as a philosopher is a good index of the popularity of such ideas: >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. https://redsails.org/losurdo-und-telepolis/ https://redsails.org/losurdo-und-telepolis/
• ilyaskolgotkin 4y ago
  Article doesn't tell us anything new apart from a normal distribution in the widely globalised world.
• WoodenChair 4y ago
  And now all of our text will start to look the same too as we use the same LLMs to generate it.
• chasing 4y ago
  Yes, things cherry-picked to look the same look the same. 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.
• photochemsyn 4y ago
  It's easy to avoid these homogenizing trends, just dig through historical art works from different time periods and from different regions of the world.
• game_the0ry 4y ago
  I used to think that the convergence of similar branding (logos, colors, etc) was the product of corporations hiring the same marketing consultants, but the part about the instagram aesthetic blew my mind. Looking through my wife's feed, a lot of women post pics in similar clothes, in similar poses, in similar locations, doing similar activities. We're dumb heard animals, apparently.
  • pqb 4y ago
    Perhaps we try to do the same as others (wear the same clothes, pose the same way, buy the same things, etc.) so as not to be an alien too much?
    • game_the0ry 4y ago
      I can agree with that - fitting in is important. Totally makes sense.
• nathias 4y ago
  if you zag when the world zigs, you're getting zapped
• abdellah123 4y ago
  I completely agree. Same goes for websites, fashion ... and even the way people think. It's too sad
• zitterbewegung 4y ago
  This article can be described as the age of cherry picked samples. Most people really want silver cars (but since they want to comply with crash tests and most people want high efficiency cars you get the same designs). AirBnBs won’t sell if it doesn’t look like every modernist interior design and asking many people to output a work of art will basically look like if you take stable diffusion with some boring parameters… 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.
• tycho-newman 4y ago
  Ehh, pearl clutching over homogeneity in art and architecture is par for the course. What the writer needs to do is expand their horizons, and possibly, their vertices. There's tons of options out there if you take a minute to look outside of -/checks notes/- ... AirBnB? Really? Is AirBnB a good place to find a representative sample of interior design diversity? 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.
  • Mali- 4y ago
    I completely disagree. The article can be viewed as analysing the effects of globalisation, the growing homogeneity of spaces that starts at AirBnB and cafes and spreads. Something is lost if you visit a new country and the layout is exactly the same as where you live. If I visit Hong Kong and I see a London tube type rail map, I'm going to be disappointed. There is a tradeoff in not immediately knowing how to use the trains or immediately knowing how the postcode is layed out - but the gain is individuality. I lean towards keeping the individuality and not sucking out every drop of exploration into the unknown. Isn't that a big part of travelling?
    • andsoitis 4y ago
      The author showed some skylines from a distance and claimed all cities look the same. But that’s juts not true. Hong Kong and London look, feel, and work very differently from each other, even though the latter was a British colony.
      • tsunamifury 4y ago
        City of London and Hong Kong are very much the same. Historical London at large is not. But I think you’re missing the point on purpose here.
    • tycho-newman 4y ago
• pveierland 4y ago
  An interesting perspective on "user generated content all being the same" is the research "Time-lapse Mining from Internet Photos" where time-lapse videos are reconstructed from the variations in the pictures of the same scenery being extracted to show the actual changes made over time. Even if changes in content may seem minute, it still does communicate samples of the underlying information distribution and its changes over time. https://grail.cs.washington.edu/projects/timelapse/ https://grail.cs.washington.edu/projects/timelapse/
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• hiidrew 4y ago
  Another blogger notes similar trends and labels this 'refinement culture' - https://lindynewsletter.beehiiv.com/p/refinement-culture https://lindynewsletter.beehiiv.com/p/refinement-culture 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.
• francisofascii 4y ago
  The reminds me of what I think it is an established product marketing concept: people generally want something that is the "same", but with a new twist to make it slightly different.
• mberning 4y ago
  It's not surprising that things evolve to a "best fit". Airplanes and cars are a good example. Is the reason they all look similar due to a lack of imagination, or is it due to them all converging on a form that provides the best "bang for the buck"? It is surely the latter.
• JoeJonathan 4y ago
  Three things: 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.
  • littlelady 4y ago
    The author is the strategy director at the same type of shockingly bland company that would have this website: https://www.epochdesign.co.uk/ https://www.epochdesign.co.uk/ 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?
    • JoeJonathan 4y ago
      Fair point on a unique insight being sufficient for a blog post. I should also give the author credit for writing clearly and for his photo montages--problems with the approach aside, it's at least superficially effective. 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.
• qwertfisch 4y ago
  Most comments lean onto the unscientific results about fashion and design, which follows fashion. But the article also displays one categorie that should be independent of fashion and solely rely on creativity: media. 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.
  • zeroonetwothree 4y ago
    Film is much less creative. But look at television and you see a different story. We have far more creativity and variety than ever before.
    • omginternets 4y ago
      Is it? What do you have in mind? There’s certainly more television than ever before, but I haven’t seen anything truly novel in a while.
• stereolambda 4y ago
  So on the first example, I wouldn't be surprised if regular people everywhere had somewhat similar tastes and can't see why it would be a bad thing. Aesthetics diverge because of artistic cultures. If you're not a part of an "in" crowd, well, there's no reason why you'd be clued into what idiosyncratic things to like. Breaking out of isolated villages is actually a great thing of modernity, if you have any practical idea of premodern life. I prefer not to be locked into life of my rural grandparents, no matter how "authentic" it could be. 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.
• psychoslave 4y ago
  What can I say, criticism of mediocracy all look the same: https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/51961637 https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/51961637 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/10497315211036369 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/104973152110363... https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/jems.12469 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/jems.12469 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1049731520974764 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1049731520974764 https://revistaseletronicas.pucrs.br/ojs/index.php/revistafamecos/article/view/17236/11808 https://revistaseletronicas.pucrs.br/ojs/index.php/revistafa... http://manuscript.elsevier.com/S004727271500119X/pdf/S004727271500119X.pdf http://manuscript.elsevier.com/S004727271500119X/pdf/S004727... https://epub.ub.uni-muenchen.de/13268/1/286.pdf https://epub.ub.uni-muenchen.de/13268/1/286.pdf https://www.academia.edu/30241852/La_m%C3%A9diocratie_fran%C3%A7aise_d%C3%A9crypt%C3%A9e_par_A_Bentolila_J_Lacabanne https://www.academia.edu/30241852/La_m%C3%A9diocratie_fran%C...
  • k2enemy 4y ago
    The two I looked at were completely different. Or was the point that different fields are doing work with "mediocrity" in the title?
  • sacnoradhq 4y ago
    Even some elements of culturejamming approaches boring uniformity: Adbusters doesn't interest me because they're often a reaction to mass media and rarely present anything different or poetically-viral. 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.
  • nwienert 4y ago
    They also are comparing like with like and no surprise it looks similar. Big cities converge. 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!
• 1970-01-01 4y ago
  Images are cherry-picked to support the argument.
• didgetmaster 4y ago
  The article purports to be an investigation to find out what people like; but feels much more like they started off with a conclusion and then went looking for evidence to support that. 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.
• spankalee 4y ago
  This is silly. Every era's art, architecture, and fashion look similar. That's why you can even identify categories like Victorian houses, Mid-century Modern design, or expressionism. It's why you can throw a 70's party and people show up looking the part. And it's why truly great art stands out - it either creates the trend or bucks the trend.
• muyuu 4y ago
  there is a clear self-reinforcing loop between A what's offered and B what's picked that is based on both A and B looking for the trend and only slightly controlled by A and B looking not to be too generic and to be somewhat original 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 are all things that have become increasingly taxing investments, at least in terms of perception, and the bigger that impression is the safer people will play it and the more they will try to copy others and look at what's trendy 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
• the_af 4y ago
  My knee-jerk reaction to this article was pretty negative, but that's because the initial example (the paintings) is pretty bad. This experiment was made in the worst possible way: the same two artists rendering their interpretation of what different people say they want, and the paintings are unsurprisingly similar: the same bluish sky, the same tree to the right, the same mountain to the left. As an example, it's terrible and unscientific: it's pretty much a statement on these two painters, and not much else. It's impossible, for example, that every person interviewed wanted a tree to the right of the painting -- that's just what the artists themselves preferred. It's also questionable whether people actually want what they claim to want in an interview. 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.
• sakex 4y ago
  One example that is missing but would actually have been more obvious is the smartphone. They basically all look the same. 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.
  • zeroonetwothree 4y ago
    You could just as well ask why do keyboards all look the same? There is always convergence in user interfaces because consumers don’t want to relearn every time they buy a new device.
    • sakex 4y ago
      Sure, the overall shape doesn't give a lot of leeway for design. But other details like the home button (early iPhones), absence of jack sockets, disappearance of navigation buttons (like early Samsung Galaxys), etc. follow the same trajectory.
• fbn79 4y ago
  Architecture all looks the same because try to address the same requirements with the same technical limits. This is true now as 5000 years ago https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-3117455a884d3088101e1fdbb893e212-lq https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-3117455a884d3088101e1...
• drewcon 4y ago
  Isn’t this just…Darwinism? 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.
  • dragonwriter 4y ago
    Your vertebrate example is not convergence, it is non-divergence plus common origin. There are biological examples of convergence (e.g., everything is crab [0]), but that's not one of them. [0] https://www.popsci.com/story/animals/why-everything-becomes-crab-meme-carcinization/ https://www.popsci.com/story/animals/why-everything-becomes-...
• pelasaco 4y ago
  There possible many reasons for that. One of them (specially cars), cost is a real factor here. Normally some company develop a car framework and the other vendors, buy it and just tweak it for its own market. 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.
• m3kw9 4y ago
  A few of the examples is a bit unfair like houses look the same, but in reality they are same because the structure works and the building code are more easily adhered when they look like that, instead of say a parallelogram, and it’s more efficient to work with the current set of technologies + materials that are readily available. I do agree we are not taking enough risks in art but instead trying to please everyone’s tastes
  • Ekaros 4y ago
    I would say that if you were to take similar use buildings from same period of time they would look very close to each other. Ofc, there is always some trend setters or outliers, but in general they would look pretty close to each other or follow certain formula. It is just less apparent as we see mix of those periods very often.
• stephc_int13 4y ago
  The worst part of this trend, IMHO, is related to electronic devices, especially smartphones. 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.
• strken 4y ago
  I like this criticism. When we optimise for any metric we lose diversity, and the value of what we lost can be more than what we gained.
• quadcore 4y ago
  Distinctiveness has died 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.
• jonnycat 4y ago
  A tangent from the point of the post, but Komar & Melamid did a similar "experiment" with music to produce both the most wanted and most unwanted songs, and the results are amazing/hilarious. 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. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gPuH1yeZ08 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gPuH1yeZ08
  • FeteCommuniste 4y ago
    Wow. Not just an opera singer rapping, but an opera singer rapping over a drum-machine beat with what sounds like a tuba playing the bassline and discordant accordion, bagpipe, and harp riffs coming in and out. Hahaha, this is beautifully terrible. Thanks for linking it.
• uptownfunk 4y ago
  >> This article argues that from film to fashion and architecture to advertising, creative fields have become dominated and defined by convention and cliché. Distinctiveness has died. In every field we look at, we find that everything looks the same. 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
• crazygringo 4y ago
  What the article describes is correct, but I don't think the words "average" or "homogeneity" or "conformity" are the right terms, as they seem to carry negative connotations here. Rather, the right word is "convergence". 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.
  • hammock 4y ago
    One essayist calls this phenomenon “refinement culture”: https://medium.com/@lindynewsletter/refinement-culture-51d96726c642 https://medium.com/@lindynewsletter/refinement-culture-51d96... 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"
  • bumby 4y ago
    I've tried making this same point when it comes to auto designs (at least in the competitive, cost-sensitive ones). A lot of mid-sized cars look the same because the design constraints generally converge on the same handful of principles. They've converged not in the aesthetic sense as much as the engineering sense: because they work at a relatively low cost. (I'm speaking mainly about things like aerodynamics here, not necessarily EV-vs-ICE etc.)
    • ryandrake 4y ago
• TheRealPomax 4y ago
  Turns out if you go looking, you can find lots of things that look the same. Who knew. That's how subsets work.
• wellpast 4y ago
  There must be a name for this phenomenon where someone sits in their academic study, spends time smartly and refinedly analyzing some aspects of social behavior, and among myriad possible theories they select the one where mankind, in general, is stupid, philistine, average...
• _shadi 4y ago
  The age of A/B testing
• Last5Digits 4y ago
  I'm always wary of articles like this. The feeling of things becoming mediocre strongly resonates with me, but I am aware that there could be a great many different biases at play. 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?
  • epups 4y ago
    Yeah I agree. Part of growing up is recognising patterns everywhere, including art. I don't doubt the process of making everything more average is there, but it's hard to ascertain that when every observer is biased.
  • hgsgm 4y ago
    > 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.
    • schrijver 4y ago
      This why I find the geek-o-sphere so tiring dissecting things like why are the new Star Wars movies bad… I have no problem believing that… the old ones might have been better, but they were also formulaic and badly acted and the reason they seemed so profound and amazing at the time was seeing them as a kid! Those spending time watching and hating on kids movies might better seek out something that can actually challenge them.
• alkonaut 4y ago
  While it's a bit dull and boring, eventually when everyone sees what everyone else sees (as we do when we all have internet connected devices with cameras) then our styles and tastes will also be converging. Which will be the "winning" one will depend on context. In some cases it's going to be a boring convergence to an arbitrary or bland style, in others it's boing to be simply an adaptation of somethin that's objectively good. This isn't just about style, it's about everything. If something is objectively better (E.g. single faucet with hot/cold instead of the UK traditional double faucet) then the better one will take over. And that will happen once people realize there is an alternative to the status quo.
• nebulousthree 4y ago
  Who knew that the primary incentive being economic would lead to a convergence of human behaviours? 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.
  • shadowfoxx 4y ago
    Thank you, I was writing out something similar. 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".
• enono 4y ago
  Incredible article. I realized this on a subconscious level but feel very strange to see it so clearly articulated
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• ctrlp 4y ago
  Article neglected to add that all the online writing is the same.
• WorldPeas 4y ago
  I fear LLMS/Image generation will only make this worse. I imagine many people now type in "please list for me 10 ideas for a mint gum tagline" for a spark of inspiration, or will generate mocks of art using sketches fed into an image transformer. The thing they don't think about when doing this however, is that it's just operating on what it's been fed, while if people from another brand do the same, they'll also get a similar result. I guess we've outsourced inspiration and now have to deal with the consequences.
• AlbertCory 4y ago
  According to [1] 53% of Americans are fans of Taylor Swift. Does that mean we've "converged" on Taylor Swift as the optimal musician? 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-america-loves-taylor-swift-1234696362/ https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/majority-ameri...
• jppope 4y ago
  A better title: The tyranny of the majority.
• bobbyasdfasdf7 4y ago
  [dead]
• dsevil 4y ago
  All the websites look the same but it's mostly because all the frameworks are the same. I'm thinking mainly of Bootstrap and Zurb Foundation. They share a lot of the same principles such as the 12-column grid, general typographic dimensions, button styles, etc. Granted, a lot of that stuff is for good reasons. In point of actual fact, I've studied their final CSS products and they share quite many implementation details. 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.
• vishnugupta 4y ago
  I skimmed through the article and I could immediately correlate it with another article[1] that I could relate a lot with. 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-memoriam-mark-fisher/ https://areomagazine.com/2023/01/18/the-great-reboot-in-memo...
• ravenstine 4y ago
  Am I the only one who thinks that this phenomenon has pretty much always existed? The only difference today, as far as I can tell, is globalization. Things are simply less exotic now because homogeneity is becoming less localized. 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.
  • hindsightbias 4y ago
    Maybe some things need to be utilitarian to extremes. I could live in THX-1138 world as long as I get to drive a Lola T70 through the BART tunnels.
• kerowak 4y ago
  Ironically, this reads like any other repetitive blogpost running with a half-baked premise. To me, the author is mostly describing culture. Things look a certain way at a certain point in history because of the averaging effects of culture. Houses from the 1950's look like houses from the 1950's. Fashion from the 1970's looks like fashion from the 1970's. Coffee shops from 2020 look like coffee shops from 2020. 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
  • adverbly 4y ago
    Totally agree. 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...
• ggregoire 4y ago
  This made me think of https://www.reddit.com/r/battlestations https://www.reddit.com/r/battlestations.
• revel 4y ago
  Although they weren't mentioned, social media and streaming video are the most striking cases. There's one flavor of social media website and it sucks. It's the same infinite scrolling page of 30s attention grabbing headline/video/images posted by the same people on the same 5 or 6 websites made by the same set of engineers. There are minor variations, but they're better described as "positioning" than truly differentiated experiences. What makes instagram "better" (or worse) than tiktok or twitter? It's the same soup filling the contours of the same, slightly differently shaped bowl. 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.
• nazgulnarsil 4y ago
  I think everyone is overwhelmed, their attention slammed. So they want things that don't activate a lot of cns arousal.
• yowzadave 4y ago
  This effect will only be exacerbated by the ubiquitous use of AI, which by design is trained on everything humans have already produced, and will trend toward the average in the results it produces. Perhaps this is the key advantage that humans have: the ability to be different?
• eagleinparadise 4y ago
  This article is silly. Look at anything over the course of history. All buildings built in 1920 look the same. Everyone dressed the same. The author cherry picks stuff that is popular in Western culture. Of course it looks similar... it's popular.
• werds 4y ago
  ironically the author uses one of the most popular squarespace templates in the muted pink which is called out in the article
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• eutropia 4y ago
  This rhymes with a few other articles and blog posts: Wither Tartaria? https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/whither-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-digital-color-sludge 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?
• meghan_rain 4y ago
  Old man yelling at cloud on...a generic blog
• greenhearth 4y ago
  Is that Jesus in one of the paintings?
• burlesona 4y ago
  One thing that a lot of people don’t notice is that this is the result of mass manufacturing replacing craft. People want good products that are cheap, and mass manufacturing creates them. Things made in a factory at scale are always cheaper and can even be better quality than low-scale goods. But once companies have sunk the capital into the factory that can churn this stuff out, they want to keep making the same stuff, not retooling and redesigning the factory. So minor changes occur but the basic template becomes very rigid. Once you start looking for it the factory-goods stubbornness to change is everywhere. 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.
  • trgn 4y ago
    I agree to an extent. 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.
• 11235813213455 4y ago
  The age of surconsumerism*
• ajuc 4y ago
  TLDR convergent evolution is a thing.
• artursapek 4y ago
  It's called globalism, and it's depressing!
• Fauntleroy 4y ago
  Ironically, it's "another" one of "those" articles that populates the popular landscape.
• dghnn 4y ago
  I’m surprised that the author didn’t mention LLMs. Their power is not in their ability to write—-they are simply not at a literary level. However, they write average prose (which is often grammatical, as the deviations considered non-grammatical tend to cancel each other out) very well and very fast. You could say they are not MOC, but they are Paul Graham. And that’s scary, because even the Paul Graham level is good enough to mount a disinformation campaign, as the success of Y Combinator literally proves.
• hudsonhs 4y ago
  And here are 2 songs based on the same People's Choice concept: The Most Wanted Music is a milquetoast 90's pop ballad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jId-qaEwuvI&ab_channel=DaveSoldier%2CKomar%26Melamid-Topic 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=DaveSoldier%2CKomar%26Melamid-Topic https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDh4o0rOvr0&ab_channel=DaveS...
• TsukiZombina 4y ago
  Not in my country
• sacnoradhq 4y ago
  0. The vehicle similarity has a name: jellybean cars. 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.
• demaratus83 4y ago
  The author has discovered fashion.
• jstummbillig 4y ago
  What a strange article. Alternative title: "How to cherry pick your data to make any point"? (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).
• toss1 4y ago
  And now the convergence is going to be massively accelerated by LLMs and generative art/video and code tools. 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)
• unnamed76ri 4y ago
  One area not discussed: the jokes are all the same. 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.
• bhk 4y ago
  https://twitter.com/culturaltutor/status/1551976063483482115 https://twitter.com/culturaltutor/status/1551976063483482115
• carapace 4y ago
  > all people really wanted was a landscape with a few figures around, animals in the foreground, mainly blue. How is that possibly surprising!? A sparsely populated coastline with abundant game? That's our evolutionary niche! Of course it's what we want!
• prakhar897 4y ago
  Am I dumb or is this article pseudoscience? 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.
• jedberg 4y ago
  You see the same thing in companies that use A/B testing to drive all of their decisions. They land on a local maxima and then stick with it. Radical ideas get pushed out even if they could represent a new maxima. 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.
• einpoklum 4y ago
  > The Instagram pictures we post, the tweets we read, the TV we watch, the app icons we click, the skylines we see, the websites we visit and the illustrations which adorn them all look the same. It sounds like the author is speaking to a clique of their similar friends.
• larve 4y ago
  The good thing about living in today's world is that nothing is as easy as escaping the blandocracy. You don't want big franchise video games? There's a googol of indie video games on itch and steam and co. You want weird ass looking appartments. Guess what, they're on airbnb too. You want music? Books? Software? The weirdest communities? A text-mode orange website? They're all out there for you to use and discover.
• precompute 4y ago
  I can't find the link to it right now, but there's an article / post that says a lot of the blandness in our surroundings / houses is because we subconsciously try to balance it out with all the color we have available on our digital screens. Walls are bland white / gray because we have televisions, everything else is bland because the entire world is in our phones. 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/colour_theory_and_corporations/ https://old.reddit.com/r/Anticonsumption/comments/10njiwd/co...
• splitstud 4y ago
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• cbsmith 4y ago
  I'm amazed this entire article managed to avoid mentioning ChatGPT.
• DeathArrow 4y ago
  > “In nearly every country all people really wanted was a landscape with a few figures around, animals in the foreground, mainly blue.” 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.
  • ilaksh 4y ago
    Maybe they studied what paintings sold for them.
• mlhpdx 4y ago
  I’m clearly in a different world; I see wild diversity in aesthetics and function around me every day. Conformity and convergence? Yes, it’s there but all around it is the beautiful chaos of creativity and divergence.
  • trgn 4y ago
    Can you provide some specific examples from a typical day?
    • mlhpdx 4y ago
      I’m struggling to come up with a useful response here. I’ll focus on things driven by human “decisions” rather than natural phenomena. 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?”.
• ilaksh 4y ago
  Most people instinctively hate things that are truly new or different or generally stand out. It may be due to cognitive limitations or maybe just common instinct. 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.
• julianlam 4y ago
  The amusing point of all this average-ness is that every once in awhile a company does a wild rebrand that tries to set them apart from their competition. 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 https://wise.com/community/en/brand-new-look)
• inglor_cz 4y ago
  Interestingly, this may not be the first time when this has happened. 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.
• mfbx9da4 4y ago
  I remember a psychological experiment where they averaged faces artificially and the averaged faces consistently would be ranked the most beautiful.
• patientplatypus 4y ago
  [dead]
• fvdessen 4y ago
  The coworking space where I work took the exact opposite approach. For each new location they hire an artist and let him go wild on the decoration, they have an in-house team of architects to make it happen. It makes for interesting social dynamics since people with similar taste tend to gather at the same place, and the variety also encourage people to move location to see something different. But it has another more pragmatic benefit for the coworking company; the locations will not go out of style at the same time and so they don’t have to renovate all locations simultaneously. You can see some examples of their interior designs here: https://silversquare.eu/en/coworking-locations/brussels https://silversquare.eu/en/coworking-locations/brussels
  • anfelor 4y ago
    On the contrary, I think this is a great example for how similar co-working spaces look. Even though this company apparently tried hard to make them look different, the pictures are so similar: - 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-spaces 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.
• zorrolovsky 4y ago
  It's hard to disagree with the fact that brand identities are being stripped back of personality (aka all look the same). I wonder if there's a cause related to our social context: - It could be that this is the moment in history with the most visible amount of brands out there. It's inevitable that two designers land on a very similar solution without knowing about each other's work - It could be intentional: we live in the era of information noise. Brands are happy to strip back their personality and identity so that the message (their ads) can take the spotlight - Visuals are being dumbed down to increase usability: consumers are tired of making sense of strident brands, so they appreciate keeping it simple ... or maybe I'm just inventing things.
• JohnBooty 4y ago
  On why automobiles all look the same: 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 Look, I know we have an obesity problem. But the collective weight of the average family is not 78,000lbs! I'm thinking they meant 780lbs (354kg) although even that seems a bit high.
• KRAKRISMOTT 4y ago
  Wait till she learns about web development and Corporate Memphis.
• gampleman 4y ago
  This somehow seems to really fit in with the upcoming “creativity” of LLMs, which is also a relatively shallow remixing of existing content.
• agys 4y ago
  Exactitudes (1994—ongoing) comes to mind: https://exactitudes.com https://exactitudes.com
• eyphka 4y ago
  For much of this article, I know nothing. 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.
• karaterobot 4y ago
  All of those examples do look the same, as long as you ignore the ways in which they look different. If you do that, then it all makes pretty good sense as an argument. If you start pointing out how they aren't all the same, then the argument breaks down a little bit. Take your pick of approaches, depending on whether you are predisposed to agree or disagree with the thesis.
• hot_gril 4y ago
  No comment on the argument. All I did was scroll through the pictures. Was hoping to see the "corporate memphis" example or AAPL, GOOG, MSFT, and probably others all using the same branding colors.
• silexia 4y ago
  This is a result of over-regulation. Fear of being censured by creatives.
• go_discover 4y ago
  If you spend some time traveling the world you will see not everything is the same. From Tel Aviv to Mumbai to New Zealand. They're all different with different people, cultures, coffee shops, foods, languages, history, etc, etc. 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.
• zacharyvoase 4y ago
  Why do you think there was a golden age when there wasn't mediocrity, average-ness, simple and cheap and utilitarian designs? 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?
• OOPMan 4y ago
  This seems pretty cherry picked to me. It's not completely wrong but it's not super honest either.
• pdar4123 4y ago
  Just think how much worse it’s all going to get with the ubiquity of AI
• grose 4y ago
  Carles, of Hipster Runoff fame, wrote a series in 2015 (IIRC) about this aesthetic, which he calls contemporary conformism. https://tykoblog.wordpress.com/2016/09/02/the-contemporary-conformist-by-carles/ https://tykoblog.wordpress.com/2016/09/02/the-contemporary-c... 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).
• 7yundao 4y ago
  only the western main stream culture is converging cough cough
• Balooga 4y ago
  This is a great podcast that discusses the topic of body size as it relates to sizing of clothes, sizing equipment for the military (cockpits, etc.); https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/on-average/ https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/on-average/
• d1l 4y ago
  We've known about aspirational millennial online types for years, and have been mocking them for about as long. If it sells they'll keep making it. https://thekinspiracy.tumblr.com/ https://thekinspiracy.tumblr.com/
• mlsu 4y ago
  As it turns out, every part of humanity is subject to the law of physics. 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=chart https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-energy-use?tab...
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• jakkos 4y ago
  bookmark
• swah 4y ago
  I wonder if the next fad would be an "authentic" beat up style? Like lets buy this place and serve coffee without even replacing the 70s tiles and sinks?
• tomp 4y ago
  My impression of the article is, that things do not look the same. 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.
• Jesse-Millerr 4y ago
  [dead]
• beckingz 4y ago
  "The apartment-house tenant must have the freedom to lean out of his window and as far as his arms can reach transform the exterior of his dwelling space. And he must be allowed to take a long brush and as far as his arms can reach paint everything pink, so that from far away, from the street, everyone can see: there lives a man who distinguishes himself from his neighbours, the pent-up livestock! He must also be allowed to cut up the walls and make all kinds of changes, even if this disturbs the architectural harmony of a so-called masterwork, and he must be able to fill his room with mud or children's modelling clay. But the lease prohibits this!" - Friedensreich Hundertwasser
• sjkoelle 4y ago
  cntrl+f marvel
• sjkoelle 4y ago
  want to push back a little though https://www.oldhouseonline.com/house-tours/story-sears-houses/ https://www.oldhouseonline.com/house-tours/story-sears-house...
• anurag_baddam 4y ago
  One thing that's not captured in this discussion is that design trends change a lot even if they converge in a given time period. I remember at one point all of my friends had a colorful personal website full of interactive bootstrap components. Now, they all favor a minimal design with just links to their resume/socials.