The age of average

https://www.alexmurrell.co.uk/articles/the-age-of-average

by kloch • 3 years ago

992 469 3 years ago

alexmurrell.co.uk

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• 3 years ago

You know what's also the same? All the products in the same category on Amazon.

nassimm• 3 years 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• 3 years 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• 3 years 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• 3 years 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.

sparsely2• 3 years 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.

Mizoguchi• 3 years ago

Agree.

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.

stereolambda2• 3 years ago

Economic convergence is actually one of the themes in the article. It's possible that much of aesthetic uniqueness stemmed/stems from being in an economically inefficient situation, where you don't know or don't have access to the solution that's "globally optimal" in some sense.

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.

hindsightbias2• 3 years ago

It's not the age of average, it's the age of utility.

masswerk6• 3 years ago

I don't agree on the cost cutting argument: preparing a wall of exposed brick is certainly more expensive than simply slapping another coat of paint onto it, industrial artefacts of the past have become sought after items and are selling at good prices, and what has once been available as barely designed, locally produced base-line products is now selling as designer items.

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.)

hoosieree2• 3 years ago

Eventually all the good wood will be "reclaimed" and you'll start to see synthetic replicas and "genuine reclaimed wood look" hollow plastic panels.

SamBam2• 3 years ago

I figured people were going to take issue with the opening anecdote about art, but that was simply the author trying to frame the story in an interesting way. The rest of the article was more compelling.

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...

sidewndr463• 3 years ago

5 over 1 is the result of regulations of various kinds converging resulting in economic pressures dictating that building format.

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.

Karrot_Kream3• 3 years ago

All housing waves produce cookie-cutter housing. Victorians all look like other Victorians, dingbats look like other dingbats, and brownstones look like other brownstones.

yt-sdb• 3 years ago

I figured people were going to take issue with the opening anecdote about art, but that was simply the author trying to frame the story in an interesting way. The rest of the article was more compelling.

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.

uhtred• 3 years ago

The article is still not wrong though, despite how you try to science it. Everywhere I look it's too much of the same shit: the instagram clone army of injected lips and fake eyelashes, the same craft ipa on every shelf, the same song released by someone with $$$ lil and x in their name, the same superhero movie with people being thrown through buildings, the same "our food is natural" burger chain.

pier253• 3 years ago

It's the same that has always happened. Human groups tend to become homogeneous because this helps survival.

The difference is now the cultural bubble is global and of course it's completely irrelevant for survival.

bmicraft2• 3 years ago

To add to that, the author completely ignores the fact that the differences from one person to the next might be much more significant than averaged differences inherited from their country's culture.

heywhatupboys• 3 years ago

Meh, you see the Danish flag in one of them. Danish people love their flag in art, celebrations, etc. So clearly it was desired by them.

pizzaknife• 3 years 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?!

trgn11• 3 years 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• 3 years ago

So this is what we have to look forward to in the age of AI-aided copywriting?

nigamanth• 3 years ago

Everyone will start to use AI, so simply, don't.

Hoasi• 3 years ago

Being out of date will become your edge.

coldpie• 3 years 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• 3 years 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.

bluetomcat4• 3 years 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.

pixl978• 3 years 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.

ssnistfajen4• 3 years ago

The whole article is basically expanding a Twitter meme which stems entirely from cherry picking.

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.

denton-scratch• 3 years 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• 3 years 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• 3 years 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• 3 years 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.

masswerk6• 3 years 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.

derbOac2• 3 years ago

There was a piece going around awhile ago about the haunted Victorian mansion that seems relevant to me.

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.

superb-owl• 3 years ago

Now, fashions are almost always global

This has only been true for a few decades. It's a very new and foreign thing!

SteveDR• 3 years ago

Agreed. Reading this I thought "all of these things are superficial, who cares?"

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.

masswerk6• 3 years ago

Fashion used to have an important social and cultural function as it provided signals and markers for group alignment in society. As these kept changing periodically, this also gave a chance for realignment and reconsideration. (Compare this to the increasingly-caught-in-the-bubble phenomenon that we experience nowadays.)

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.

caddemon• 3 years ago

It reminds me of things that are not superficial though, for example the homogenization of universities. Top schools all now mostly fall in line with "peer institutions", whereas you used to find schools that catered at least somewhat to different educational philosophies and personalities - which I think made for a richer academic discourse.

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.

duiker101• 3 years ago

Related: Vemödalen https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ftDjebw8aA

mrwnmonm2• 3 years 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?

anthomtb2• 3 years ago

I'm sure there are 10 more articles that, shrunken and laid out in a grid, would look very similar to TFA.

itissid• 3 years ago

Cities like Paris, Constantinople, Rome, Jerusalem, New Delhi look nothing like each other.

ak_111• 3 years ago

See also: movie trailers and SaaS website design.

rom16384• 3 years ago

I think the author would enjoy the art project and book Exactitudes, https://exactitudes.com/collectie/

xbar• 3 years ago

This response is completely different from all the others.

psychoslave2• 3 years ago

So good! Someone have to create a t-shirt brand with it and flood the market with it.

staminade• 3 years 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• 3 years 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.

TheCoelacanth2• 3 years 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• 3 years 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• 3 years 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• 3 years ago

*Zoomers

mromanuk• 3 years 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• 3 years 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• 3 years 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.

trgn11• 3 years ago

Very interesting. Millenials are also the most congenial generation, all social engagement is "nice". Our personalities (not just on twitter) are being homogenized as well. Conformity was a prime virtue of the bourgeoisie, it's odd that it's the only one we carried over (and not say, propriety or noblesse oblige).

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).

apozem• 3 years ago

That is quite a sweeping theory. Do you have any systemic, large-scale, non-anecdotal evidence to support it?

fwlr• 3 years 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.

bluetomcat4• 3 years 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• 3 years 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

ryandrake3• 3 years ago

Music is another example, which the article didn't go into, probably because it's not visual like his other examples. When I say [USA] '60s music, '70s music, '80s music and so on, you kind of know what I'm talking about. Sure, each decade had its outliers and variety, but you can probably immediately hear in your head the decade-stereotype sound I'm talking about. Each decade had that distinct fashion that the culture adopted and became known for. What is 2010's music? I have no idea. It's homogenized nothing. It's a shapeless average song, workshopped and focus-grouped to appeal to some nonexistent "Global ISO Standard Person." It's defining characteristic is its total absence of distinctiveness.

tsunamifury3• 3 years ago

The best way I can explain it is as if we now live in a society that invented time travel and we use it to live the exact same month over and over again. We make small tweaks each loop but nothing substantive. We are comfortable in the control of this space and are now afraid of living in the future that is beyond this time window. Anyone who tries has an extremely hard go of it because they are entirely alone beyond the window. The rest of the society goes back to the beginning of the month to live it again.

I feel like a time prisoner /fugitive constantly trying to break out of this window-loop.

protoman3000• 3 years 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• 3 years ago

Are people entitled to be valued by others?

trgn11• 3 years 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).

dimal• 3 years 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• 3 years 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_c2• 3 years 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

pixl978• 3 years 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• 3 years 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

textread• 3 years 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

RedCondor• 3 years 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/

ilyaskolgotkin• 3 years ago

Article doesn't tell us anything new apart from a normal distribution in the widely globalised world.

WoodenChair• 3 years ago

And now all of our text will start to look the same too as we use the same LLMs to generate it.

chasing• 3 years 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• 3 years 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_the0ry2• 3 years 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• 3 years 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_the0ry2• 3 years ago

I can agree with that - fitting in is important. Totally makes sense.

nathias• 3 years ago

if you zag when the world zigs, you're getting zapped

abdellah123• 3 years ago

I completely agree. Same goes for websites, fashion ... and even the way people think. It's too sad

zitterbewegung• 3 years 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-newman3• 3 years 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-• 3 years 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• 3 years 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.

tycho-newman3• 3 years ago

the growing homogeneity of spaces that starts at AirBnB and cafes and spreads

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

stickfigure• 3 years ago

Imagine going to a city and not having to think about how the street numbering system works

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.

bux93• 3 years ago

I don't know if AirBnB is representative, but I clicked on 5 random airbnb properties from the homepage, and they all had white walls! And most had some exposed wood! Admittedly, one also had some slate walls. And another had red tiled flooring. And one was a log cabin. But if you ignore all of the differences, they are strictly identical in every respect.

pveierland• 3 years 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/

hiidrew• 3 years ago

Another blogger notes similar trends and labels this '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• 3 years 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• 3 years 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.

JoeJonathan2• 3 years 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• 3 years 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/

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?

JoeJonathan2• 3 years 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.

megmogandog• 3 years ago

Sure, these types of critiques have been around since the Frankfurt School, but I think that just shows how ahead of their time the members of the FS were. Adorno gets criticized for painting with too broad a brush, but I feel like he was just making the right points too soon. For example, his remarks on the film industry make perfect sense in the context of contemporary superhero movie trends, even though they might have been exaggerated at the time. And clearly the message hasn't gotten through.

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!

LesZedCB• 3 years ago

if those apartments were $1000/mo for the quality of construction, you pay an extra $1500/mo on top for the surplus enjoyment of living the lifestyle which is intrinsically instagrammable.

qwertfisch• 3 years 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.

zeroonetwothree2• 3 years 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• 3 years 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.

fullshark2• 3 years ago

I don't see any novel TV. The last truly novel TV format was probably the different reality TV formats which exploded 20 years ago and kind of took over everything. Netflix which has dropped billions of dollars on TV basically decided to just copy every format which was successful on cable TV, and has invented nothing novel as far as I can tell except for the interactive TV specials (https://help.netflix.com/en/node/62526) which didn't really seem to take off.

yamtaddle• 3 years ago

But also at home I got the feeling there were less interesting movies.

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.

stereolambda2• 3 years 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.

psychoslave2• 3 years ago

What can I say, criticism of mediocracy all look the same:

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...

k2enemy• 3 years ago

The two I looked at were completely different. Or was the point that different fields are doing work with "mediocrity" in the title?

sacnoradhq3• 3 years 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• 3 years 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!

livelielife• 3 years ago

this is very funny, that all criticism of convergent blandness when written down converges blandly

m0llusk• 3 years ago

Makes me wonder what ChatGPT has to say about all of this.

1970-01-01• 3 years ago

Images are cherry-picked to support the argument.

didgetmaster• 3 years 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.

spankalee2• 3 years 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• 3 years 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_af2• 3 years 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.

sakex2• 3 years 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.

zeroonetwothree2• 3 years 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.

sakex2• 3 years 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• 3 years 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-3117455a884d3088101e1...

drewcon• 3 years 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.

dragonwriter2• 3 years 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-...

pelasaco• 3 years 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• 3 years 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

Ekaros2• 3 years 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_int132• 3 years 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• 3 years 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• 3 years 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• 3 years 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

FeteCommuniste• 3 years 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• 3 years 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

crazygringo3• 3 years 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• 3 years ago

One essayist calls this phenomenon “refinement culture”: 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"

bumby5• 3 years 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.)

ryandrake3• 3 years ago

Even if they had to ultra-optimize the aerodynamics so all the cars look like the same bar of soap (they don't have to), they could still at least paint the damn soap a different color. But, no. All you see coming out of the factory are white, silver, gray, black, the occasional red and the occasional blue.

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?

dclowd9901• 3 years ago

I’d argue that convergence _is_ soulless-ness and cars present a great example of the point.

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.

marcosdumay3• 3 years ago

AFAIK, the reason cars look the same is that they are optimized to use the same mass-produced parts. Not really because of physical, aesthetic, or usability reasons.

makeitdouble• 3 years ago

I think that's why "average" is felt as a tyranny.

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.

zestyping• 3 years ago

In the United States, size is one attribute in which cars have not converged.

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).

mdorazio• 3 years ago

You make a good point, but I think there's a qualifier that convergence in this case is convergence to mass-market appeal. Everything looks the same because that's the aesthetic that most appeals to ~75% of the population. What's missing is that there seems to be an increasing lack of alternative designs to appeal to the other ~25%.

sangnoir2• 3 years ago

The link between sameness and mass-market capitalism is obvious to me. I was surprised by its absence in the article and comments here.

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.

davidxc• 3 years ago

I don't think "most appeals" is accurate. It's the aesthetic that results in the most profit, which just means that it's optimal in terms of making tradeoffs between level of appeal to various consumer segments, price points, cost to manufacture, etc.

But maximizing profit and the tradeoffs that result from that are definitely not equivalent to most appealing to the general population.

a_c2• 3 years ago

It is convergence when evolved independently. Like how different crustaceans evolved into "crab" [1].

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...

bluetomcat4• 3 years ago

They've converged because we think they're nice.

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.

nradov2• 3 years ago

How is that a trap? Would people be better off if they wanted different things than "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.

epups6• 3 years ago

How would you differentiate "true" convergence, where everyone agrees a certain idea is superior, vs what you seem to describe here, a sort of imposition of ideas?

isk517• 3 years ago

As much as some openly oppose the idea, and others secretly do, we really are just a single species with fairly uniform tastes.

skeeter20203• 3 years ago

maybe biologically, but individual environmental factors are very diverse, and I have to believe strongly influence our tastes.

b212• 3 years ago

That was my first thought. It’s a hard pill to swallow as we all like to think we’re unique and special. Well…

mint24• 3 years ago

No. We Are Not.

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.

indymike• 3 years ago

Rather, the right word is "convergence".

I think the word "fashion" seems to fit this, too.

atoav• 3 years ago

Convergence is an interesting term, but in my eyes (as someone who both has worked as web and product designer) the reason it happens is not sales, but because looking the same as everyone else has some benefits:

- 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.

mpsprd• 3 years ago

The issue for me is how marketing keeps selling the opposite. The way homogeneous things are constantly sold as a unique way to express your difference (go watch any car ad or any new condo poster) creates that dystopian feel.

Its real life satire at this point.

jayd16• 3 years ago

I think convergence is also not quite right because you're not _exactly_ describing a mono-culture. Several different designs might be popular and good. Instead, we're at an age where everything is hyper-tuned.

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).

assafweinberg• 3 years ago

You're right in that there is a convergence happening across everything, and I think it's a product of the increased pace of communication facilitated by the internet.

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.

skeeter20203• 3 years ago

"Convergence" is only true when you use the average of a very narrow distribution. If you take a very complex and multi-dimensional topic like design, ask a bunch of people their opinions and use the average, at best they'll parrot back what they've "learned" is good, and at worst you end up with a product that doesn't embody the collective desires of the group but the ho-hum middle that doesn't satisfy or offend anyone.

> 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.

ozim• 3 years ago

Article point is that phenomena described are "negative" and that we should look for more expression.

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.

oxfordmale• 3 years ago

They did similar studies to determine the looks of an ideal romantic partner. The resulting look was very close to the average of all available romantic partners. However, that doesn't mean that individuals don't have different preferences. It is the same if you do a study of people's favourite colours. The average result will have little to do with people's personal preferences.

These designs are not people's preferred designs, just those that everyone least dislikes.

rippercushions2• 3 years ago

It's well known that symmetry is considered beauty, so when you average up enough imperfect faces, you'll get a symmetrical and thus beautiful average.

https://petapixel.com/2013/05/28/what-averaged-face-photogra...

titzer4• 3 years ago

Even if those things have converged aesthetically?

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.

epups6• 3 years ago

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.

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.

naijaboiler• 3 years ago

the push towards homogenous zeitgest has always existed. I think what's more accentuated in the modern times, is the world-wide convergence because we have made communication across vast geographical areas instantenous. with modern phones, and internet, everyone everywhere pretty much has visual access to the same things. Now convergence is not just local, it's global in scope.

smnc• 3 years ago

they go with the aesthetic de jure

You probably meant to write "du jour" :)

mortenjorck• 3 years ago

What makes something pretty and cool and interesting is skill, thoughtfulness and some sense of composition, color, and togetherness.

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.

anonymouskimmer5• 3 years ago

No, things have converged because lots of people with no taste[1] just ho-hummed along with the zeitgest.

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.

TigeriusKirk• 3 years ago

We've converged on the designs with the greatest acceptance. Not anyone's preference, just what they'll accept.

The phrase "lowest common denominator" applies here.

groby_b2• 3 years ago

This is a core point.

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.

Al-Khwarizmi• 3 years ago

Art nouveau buildings from the early 20th century are almost universally considered nicer than today's buildings, and yet they're no longer made.

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.

Arrath2• 3 years ago

The race to the bottom has taken a lot of brightness out of the world, its quite sad imo.

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.

crazygringo3• 3 years ago

almost universally considered nicer than today's buildings

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.

thomastjeffery10• 3 years ago

On the contrary!

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.

epups6• 3 years ago

I would dare say that 99.99999% of keyboard users expect a similar layout. Sure, it converged out of conformity and familiarity, but so what? This is part of the added value to me, I can learn to type in a particular layout and I'm good to go in any other. This is a crucial part of functionality in fact.

4111111111111113• 3 years ago

They're only the same if you're taking an extremely reductive approach to them... And at that point you could also say that "99.99999%%" of Smartphones are the same, wherever they're iPhones, Androids or windows from a dacades ago. They're all rectangular devices with a large screen and touch input after all.

8note• 3 years ago

That layout is not the case.

For instance, Canadian keyboards have a different layout from American ones, and keyboards that support other languages have different keys as well

mxmbrb• 3 years ago

Thank you for your analogy. Demand shapes supply is a capitalism fairy tale. For most markets you just can't buy what you want. Even if you would be willing to pay 2 to 4 times. You have to buy the mass produced sameness. We do not choose what there is to buy. In 95% of products and shops the supply dictates the demand, often with a simulation of choice. Look closely, for many applications there's only one or two products used nearly world wide. Often they are neither the best nor the cheapest. And don't get me started on the "choices" when it comes to smartphones.

PaulDavisThe1st8• 3 years ago

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.

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".

reso• 3 years ago

Lots of people before have claimed there is a "perfect" or "final" aesthetic that is discoverable through science. They've all been surprised 20 or 30 years later when people started liking different things.

JALTU• 3 years ago

I cringe at this idea, and especially when it comes to human distinction. I see what the "media" (advertising) portrays as a beautiful human body. I look at the people around me. Not the same.

lotsofpulp• 3 years ago

This reminds me of

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-a64OwOYqU

mint24• 3 years ago

This idea that there is a shared or converged sense of aesthetic or preference is really peculiar as it doesn’t match any of what I observe.

Convergence really seems to happen solely due to economics, particularly mass production combined with marketing to drive demand for those uniform items.

pixl978• 3 years ago

Convergence occurs because of the paradox of choice. A market that successfully converges will have happier users and more sales because of it.

p0pcult• 3 years ago

They've converged because manufacturers kowtow to the maximum likelihood sale, not because we think they're nice.

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.

JohnFen2• 3 years ago

Can't we just enjoy having nice things? Even if those things have converged aesthetically? They've converged because we think they're nice.

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.

renewiltord• 3 years ago

Things only exist if they are made. The ubiquity of this convergence then implies that those who make have similar tastes and those who have dissimilar tastes lack some fundamental capacity to construct.

majormajor2• 3 years ago

Looking at etsy or the long list of artists on Spotify putting out music without hitting the mainstream radio, I'm not convinced the world has converged everywhere. I have far more variety that appeals to me available to me than ever before - and so does a person with opposite tastes.

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...

eestrada2• 3 years ago

To bolster this point, the bestselling album of all time is still Michael Jackson's Thriller, released in 1982. So it has been literally over 40 years and nothing else has topped that for mainstream popularity, musically speaking. It has sold over 70 million copies. The next nearest album is AC/DC's Back in Black, released in 1980, at 50 million copies, a 20 million copy difference. A present day musician would be over the moon to sell 20 million copies. If I'm reading the charts right, the only musician to break 30 million sales for an album since 2010 has been Adele.

So, while mainstream creations may be homogenizing, independent creators are finding a larger audience than ever before. I see that as a good thing.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_albums

lfciv• 3 years ago

And as some categories converge others change. Aesthetics can be dynamic. I thought this video recently was interesting discussing the way that modern computer animation became homogeneous to capture that "pixar" look – and subsequently how it's now changing with Into the Spiderverse.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l96IgQmXmhM

taude• 3 years ago

I also think they miss the point on AirBnb in that all those AirBnb's that have "brooklyn" style now is because it's a trend, and will need to be updated in 10 years for the next new trendy styling if they want to keep targeting those same global travelers. Ask anyone in the boutique/trendy hotel industry what their ROI is on their refreshed looks. (Might not be 10 years, but it's defintely less than 20)

pdntspa• 3 years ago

Absolutely not. Variety is the spice of life, uniqueness is what gives it its verve and essence. The sameness of everything everywhere is absolutely suffocating.

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.

stephc_int132• 3 years ago

The issue, with this phenomenon, is that it tend to lead to local maximum, preventing the exploration of anything else that could be as good or better.

jcanyoh• 3 years ago

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.

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’.

generj• 3 years ago

Liquid Death is counter culture, deliberately rebelling against the status quo (and collecting a price premium for doing so). Even here they lean into conformity - their cans are shaped and styled like beer cans - partially for marketing and partially because that size of can was already made. The lettering on their cans leans into existing tropes about rebellious brands.

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.

rfwhyte• 3 years ago

This take is so wrong as it utterly discounts the affect of mass market brand advertising, a trillion dollar global industry. People's tastes haven't "Converged" they've been manipulated by corporations to be whatever is most profitable.

pixl978• 3 years ago

What kind of xahfsghihs do you like, and how much time in your life are you willing to spend to find a good one?

ssnistfajen4• 3 years ago

I don't think human society has ever evolved past what this article would describe as "average" at any point of its existence since recorded history began. Sure there were bursts of "creativity" and "diversity" at some points but they were usually just experimental prototypes that haven't yet been tested by market selection. Carcinisation is an example of this in nature.

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.

nottorp• 3 years ago

as they seem to carry negative connotations here

... and for good reason. Or perhaps I'm weird in wanting at least my entertainment to be varied, instead of 1280 indistinguishable netflix series?

pastacacioepepe• 3 years ago

Can't we just enjoy having nice things? Even if those things have converged aesthetically? They've converged because we think they're nice.

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.

teodorlu• 3 years ago

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.

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.

FrustratedMonky2• 3 years ago

What we must come to terms with is the fact that we are all inexorably drawn towards the realm of Plato's Forms, and this convergence is not something we can avoid or deny. It is not a matter of mere coincidence or happenstance, but rather an inherent feature of the world we inhabit. Regardless of our individual beliefs or perspectives, the Forms exert a profound influence on our experiences and perceptions, shaping the very fabric of our reality. Even those who reject Plato's philosophy cannot escape its grasp, for the Forms are embedded in the very structure of our existence. To say that we all experience convergence on Plato's Forms is to recognize the fundamental, undeniable role that the Platonic worldview plays in shaping our understanding of the world.

trgn11• 3 years ago

all inexorably drawn towards the realm of Plato's Forms

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.

DeathArrow3• 3 years 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.

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.

DeathArrow3• 3 years ago

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.

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.

misterprime2• 3 years ago

I know some people are making the point that taste is subjective, but I'd like to argue that, at least in some aspects, certain designs are solvable. There may be an interesting period of variety while we solve something, but eventually, we can get there. I was taken aback while watching Something's Gotta Give recently. The movie is from 2003 and spends a lot of time in a nice house. Well, the kitchen looked perfect to me, 20 years later. If I could have an ideal kitchen, it would be that one. If you want back 30, 40, and 50 years and showed me an expensive kitchen, they would not appear "solved" in the same way.

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

trgn11• 3 years ago

You might know already, but just to add on to it, director Nancy Meyers is (rightfully) admired for the impeccably designed homes in her movies https://www.apartmenttherapy.com/nancy-meyers-film-kitchens-... Jokey tone from the article aside, she nails that aspirational suburban rich people house.

amatecha• 3 years ago

Nice, yeah that looks great to me. Though the fridge looks counter-depth (I prefer a deeper fridge and dislike those disturbingly-shallow ones common in luxury homes). Proper spacing between the "islands" so two people (or more) can fit comfortably. It is indeed a very solid "solution" to the kitchen.

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.

efields• 3 years ago

Yep. I love that I don’t have to think about Car. Because I don’t care about Car. If I’m lucky enough to buy new Car then I _know_ Car will work great because we figured out Car.

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.”

qkls• 3 years ago

Isn't it great that you can converge on the things you don't care and specialize on the things you're interested in, like speccing and customizing your toothbrush.

civilized• 3 years ago

I'm favorable towards the position that we've converged to the optimal electric toothbrush.

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.

jonny_eh• 3 years ago

Things don't need to be different just for the sake of being different

Indeed, but this also opens up an opportunity for things to be different because they can be different.

munificent• 3 years ago

The fallacy in your argument is the belief in the average human.

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."

the_af2• 3 years ago

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.

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.

ilyt• 3 years ago

It also falls into traps of statistics. The individual will have its own bunch of likes or dislike and overall the set of them will be pretty unique.

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.

friend_and_foe• 3 years ago

Meh, I don't buy it. Fashion is invisible except in hindsight. It's all just fashion, it's hairspray and shoulder pads and bell bottoms. Nobody actually wants to live in a house that looks like a laboratory, it's just the fad of our time. And it sells, so with the current environment of investment first home second, greater-fool-in-a-few-years home buying strategy, it makes sense to reinforce it.

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.

notSupplied• 3 years ago

The article says “averaging”, you say “converging”, but what if the operative verb is actually “optimizing”?

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.

fennecfoxy3• 3 years ago

Yup, exactly. My comment was going to be "so what?"

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.

arendtio• 3 years ago

My guess is, that the global transparency about products and designs provided by the modern internet accelerated this convergence.

TheRealPomax• 3 years 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• 3 years 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• 3 years ago

The age of A/B testing

Last5Digits2• 3 years 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?

epups6• 3 years 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.

hgsgm3• 3 years 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.

schrijver2• 3 years 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.

acuozzo• 3 years ago

I barely consume media nowadays, because every book, movie, TV show, video game and song fails to give me an interesting or meaningful experience.

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.

Last5Digits2• 3 years ago

Thank you for this advice. Upon some self-reflection, I think I realize now that I've fallen into this exact trap. The few movies I've recently watched have been the kind of formulaic drivel that I know I'm sick of, and yet I've never felt any desire to watch genres I'm not already familiar with.

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.

2b3a51• 3 years ago

Some things I found to be 'new'...

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.

pclmulqdq• 3 years ago

Part of this phenomenon is that the traditional "curators" of art are not really doing their jobs as stewards of the art. They are just extracting money. You used to be able to find cinemas that showed art house films in places other than the center of big cities (where they are struggling to stay open), but now it's all Marvel movies and whatever new samey rom-com just came out. That leads people to not even start down the path of discovery to find what they really like.

schrijver2• 3 years ago

The latter probably, but you could also say that means your standards have evolved, and it’s less easy to find material that challenges you. I tend to think it’s out there though, so I wouldn’t give up just yet! Our desires might be simple, but art does not need to deal with it in a simple or formulaic way.

crazygringo3• 3 years ago

every book, movie, TV show, video game and song fails to give me an interesting or meaningful experience

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.)

ssnistfajen4• 3 years ago

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?

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.

guntherhermann• 3 years ago

There are 9 superhero/marvel films out this year.

I sit on the side of "It's because the modern entertainment industry has become stale."

harry8• 3 years ago

Don't overlook diminishing returns when examining this.

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.

alkonaut• 3 years 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• 3 years 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• 3 years 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• 3 years ago

Incredible article. I realized this on a subconscious level but feel very strange to see it so clearly articulated

ctrlp• 3 years ago

Article neglected to add that all the online writing is the same.

WorldPeas• 3 years 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• 3 years 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-ameri...

jppope• 3 years ago

A better title: The tyranny of the majority.

dsevil• 3 years 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• 3 years 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-memo...

ravenstine• 3 years 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.

hindsightbias2• 3 years 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.

ggregoire• 3 years ago

This made me think of https://www.reddit.com/r/battlestations.

kerowak• 3 years 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• 3 years 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...

revel• 3 years 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• 3 years ago

I think everyone is overwhelmed, their attention slammed. So they want things that don't activate a lot of cns arousal.

yowzadave• 3 years 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• 3 years 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• 3 years ago

ironically the author uses one of the most popular squarespace templates in the muted pink which is called out in the article

eutropia• 3 years ago

This rhymes with a few other articles and blog posts:

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?

greenhearth• 3 years ago

Is that Jesus in one of the paintings?

burlesona• 3 years 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.

trgn11• 3 years 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• 3 years ago

The age of surconsumerism*

ajuc• 3 years ago

TLDR convergent evolution is a thing.

artursapek• 3 years ago

It's called globalism, and it's depressing!

meghan_rain• 3 years ago

Old man yelling at cloud on...a generic blog

Fauntleroy• 3 years ago

Ironically, it's "another" one of "those" articles that populates the popular landscape.

dghnn• 3 years 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• 3 years 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=DaveS...

The Most Unwanted Music is nothing short of an avant-garde masterpiece: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDh4o0rOvr0&ab_channel=DaveS...

TsukiZombina• 3 years ago

Not in my country

sacnoradhq3• 3 years 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• 3 years ago

The author has discovered fashion.

jstummbillig• 3 years 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• 3 years 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• 3 years 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• 3 years ago

https://twitter.com/culturaltutor/status/1551976063483482115

carapace• 3 years 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!

jedberg• 3 years 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.

prakhar897• 3 years 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.

einpoklum• 3 years 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• 3 years 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• 3 years 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/co...

cbsmith• 3 years ago

I'm amazed this entire article managed to avoid mentioning ChatGPT.

DeathArrow3• 3 years 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.

ilaksh2• 3 years ago

Maybe they studied what paintings sold for them.

mlhpdx2• 3 years 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.

trgn11• 3 years ago

Can you provide some specific examples from a typical day?

mlhpdx2• 3 years 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?”.

ilaksh2• 3 years 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• 3 years 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)

inglor_cz• 3 years 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• 3 years ago

I remember a psychological experiment where they averaged faces artificially and the averaged faces consistently would be ranked the most beautiful.

fvdessen• 3 years 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

anfelor• 3 years 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-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• 3 years 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• 3 years 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• 3 years ago

Wait till she learns about web development and Corporate Memphis.

gampleman• 3 years 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• 3 years ago

Exactitudes (1994—ongoing) comes to mind:

https://exactitudes.com

eyphka• 3 years 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• 3 years 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• 3 years 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.

go_discover• 3 years 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• 3 years 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• 3 years ago

This seems pretty cherry picked to me.

It's not completely wrong but it's not super honest either.

pdar4123• 3 years ago

Just think how much worse it’s all going to get with the ubiquity of AI

grose• 3 years 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-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• 3 years ago

only the western main stream culture is converging cough cough

Balooga• 3 years 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/

d1l• 3 years 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/

silexia• 3 years ago

This is a result of over-regulation. Fear of being censured by creatives.

mlsu• 3 years 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...

jakkos• 3 years ago

bookmark

swah• 3 years 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• 3 years 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.

beckingz2• 3 years 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

sjkoelle2• 3 years ago

cntrl+f marvel

sjkoelle2• 3 years ago

want to push back a little though https://www.oldhouseonline.com/house-tours/story-sears-house...

anurag_baddam• 3 years 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.

The age of average

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