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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I would probably look at listings of new apartments in various parts of the world to get picture what is common and what is not. And this should be matched to similar segments(low, mid and high income) in each location.
That would definitely be better, although you're still only capturing part of what's available, or at least a biased sample of what's available. Different form factors come onto the market at different rates - some may never be on the market, or not in an easily accessible manner (sold locally, or via word of mouth, or via private auction etc). I think perhaps that's a distinction that the article fails to make, it's easier than ever to access goods and services from all over the world, but that ease also favours mass market products. If you put as much effort into doing whatever you're trying to do as someone would have pre-internet, you probably have access to at least as much variety as they did.
And even that is fraught with problems, because in my neck of the woods (Germany) we generally do not buy houses/appartments furnished (and renting appartments furnished is also an exception and not the norm. Even kitchens are empty rooms without cabinets and appliances.).
Edit: Even though the AirB'n'B methodology is not perfect, I agree with some of the conclusions. Just like radio/tv has smoothed out local accents and dialects within a country, the internet produces global trends. This is not all bad.
That is bassically the same here (usa), although we typically include major appliances and cabinets.
However, when houses are put up for sale, they are typically "staged", where the seller will rent furnishings to make it look more homely.
Apartments are more hit and miss. The bigger complexes will often have a show apartment they keep furnished for toors, and may often used a furnished one for their pictures.
Obviously the way you furnish a house for show is not the same way you would to live in it. But it seems like a reasonable approximation of the 'average' sensabilities of the market.
Nobody can afford to furnish an apartment the way big complexes stage their model. They rent good-looking but useless furniture from some place like Rent-a-Center. They can afford the rent on it (they pay for it pre-tax, while actual people have to pay for it post-tax) but its such shoddy quality that it will fall apart as soon as you use it. I've never seen anyone decorate their apartment like this. Even AirBnB hosts quickly find out that they can plaster cheap glittery decorative tchotchkes everywhere but the bed and couch need to be something that won't fall apart if you look at it wrong.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
It's not quite that simple. If you've ever lived in a tall building and heard/seen/smelled stories of sewer pipes backing up, well you'll know what I mean. The bottom floor of a 50 storey building needs much more sewage space than the bottom floor of a 5 storey building. Anyway, there are considerations about venting, as well as increased capacity for lower floors versus higher floors, and the whole thing has to be designed in conjunction with the rest of the plumbing anyway.
Try dropping a baseball from the 75th floor of a building and watch how hard it hits the ground. You can't just have a sewage vertical going up that high.
Sewage is far more difficult to handle than water.
You need to maintain a continuous downward slope. You are very limited in how you can have bends in pipes or two pipes join each other. You need to make sure air can get in and out of every point of the pipes, otherwise differences in air pressure will make things get stuck inside.
With pressurized water it just gets pushed wherever you route the pipes and you don't need to worry about the exact route nearly as much. Yeah, you need pumps to get the appropriate pressure on higher floors, but it's still simpler than sewage.
Freshwater, sewage, fire codes, elevators, foundations, load-bearing structures, HVAC all get more difficult as you add more floors (beyond some small number around 4 where it's all pretty trivial).
Another advantage 5-over-1s have (which the NYT article also mentions) is that they are cheap and easy to build. Very tolerant to cheap building materials, lots of prefabricated parts, lots of contractors who are familiar with how to build them. And because there's more demand then supply and people mostly pay based on location there's little incentive to do something more expensive
And those economic pressures include: at 5 floors, you can stickbuild the structure with relatively unskilled labor. External skins can make them look relatively different, but a single concrete floor with stores, and a structure that wraps around and hides the parking structure is, pragmatically, easy and cheap to build.
It's not the format that I'm referring to but the style.
The dominant architectural style of them includes:
- Multiple boxes merged into each other at different heights and depths
- Multiple (2-3) siding materials used in a regular pattern, such as vinyl slats + brick, or smooth aluminum + brick + cement.
- Multiple colors used in a regular pattern, usually white + gray + bright-primary-color. Primary color is used in small rectangular splashes, usually below or beside alternate windows
The basic look is that of many shipping containers nestled into each other.
That's also caused by design reviews and regulation that require "breaking up massing". So you get boxes jutting out and a mishmash of cladding materials.
My biggest gripe with 5 over 1's is the interior and the pricing. They're all cheap drywall with no insulation, quartz counter tops with an island and stainless steel appliances, and vinyl, wood grain flooring. They then claim that because they hit all of the "luxury" points, they are "luxury" apartments and can charge an extra $750 more than other apartments. In the end, all new apartments are like this, and beside location, basically interchangeable.
They're marketed as "luxury" because it's so hard to build new housing in the US. The luxury you're paying for is new construction. You're not going to get competition on materials used in housing until it becomes easy to compete on housing.
Kind of weird that you are calling out drywall here, what other building material makes sense for interior walls? And when you say no insulation do you mean in the interior for sound proofing? Exterior walls certainly have and require adequate insulation to be to code.
All housing waves produce cookie-cutter housing. Victorians all look like other Victorians, dingbats look like other dingbats, and brownstones look like other brownstones.
> 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.
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.
No it’s not and stop trying to be smarter by saying it’s always been this way.
Go look at art of different societies from as near as 150 years ago. Spanish, French, English, and American fashion, architecture, and style are wildly different compared to the sea of homeginity of today.
I am tired of hacker news for always having these shallow “smarter than you” sage comments that completely miss the point. It’s just like the article pointed out. At scale here everyone’s comment is “no you’re wrong because [some mundane detail observation that misses the point].” It’s like engineer cognitive scale Markov chain.
> I am tired of hacker news for always having these shallow “smarter than you” sage comments that completely miss the point. It’s just like the article pointed out. At scale here everyone’s comment is “no you’re wrong because [some mundane detail observation that misses the point].”
Nitpicking mundane (and unimportant) details is HN Commentary In a Nutshell. I totally expected these comments and did not come away disappointed. We make an art out of missing the forest for the trees here!
It sucks, too, because the article makes a great point with numerous examples, but all we have here are comments like "Well, ackshually, in paragraph 5 sentence 3, the author says 'all' when he meant 'most' so the entire article is clearly wrong!" which completely miss the point.
I think he means globalization. All those cultures were probably homogeneous to some extent in their own isolated bubbles. The thing that changed was near-instant global communication. When most people in each society had full visibility into the standards/cultures of other societies, their definitions of an ideal society converged based on the new information.
> Go look at art of different societies from as near as 150 years ago
Precisely.
150 years ago, countries lived in their own cultural bubble because communication was much slower and mostly limited to local information. Or look at ancient societies which had their own homogenous culture compared to other cultures (eg: Ancient Greece vs Aztecs).
I think it's fair to say that today with globalization and the internet, we're really getting into what McLuhan denominated the global village. Instagram is a good example of this.
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.
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?!
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Something that was always fascinating to me: there had been a time, around 1100, when the style of ceilings in sacral architecture was "discussed" with urgency and churches went through 3 redesigns and rebuilds in just 10 years (from a flat ceiling, to barrel vault, to cross ribs, which became predominant in about 1105/1107 – there are several examples). This is totally unthinkable nowadays, where buildings that went through planning and construction phases of a decade and more are still considered "dernier ci".
Yes, good point. I was thinking as I was writing that it isn't exactly the world wars, something like the leadup into it and through the interwar period. I was more thinking of the post-industrial revolution in general, which was associated with tremendous societal change in general, not just militarily speaking. But you're right that the idea of a uniform "Victorian" period is a little weird and/or misleading.
> 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'm living in a city where most of the buildings are 100+ years old. (The house I'm living in was built in 1904.) You can usually date a building from that era by about +/- 2 years of accuracy, just by the looks, regardless, whether it's art nouveau or a more conservative expression of style. However, as you approach WWII, things considerably slowed down. (Mostly for economic reasons.)
I think, this idea of a mostly stable era is a product of the shift in paradigms, you mentioned before, where we put anything that happened before in a paradigmatic box. (E.g., like it has just recently happened with brutalism, where a wide variety and evolution of concepts and oppositions was subsumed into the same thing.)
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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
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.
Completely disagree. Streaming has unlocked music listeners and artists to quickly iterate so that choice is boundless. Do you really think being stuck with the same sound for 10 years is a good thing? You don't know what 2010s music sounds like because it's completely individualized. Maybe that has its own problems involving increased siloization and could be linked to political tribalization but claiming its "homogenized nothing" is senseless.
I think the issue is you haven't actually found the sound you enjoy. If you just let pop radio take you on your way you're going to get lowest common denominator sound. And streaming has made this effect much worse. Now music radio is only for people who can't be assed to choose their own music, so it's even more lowest common denominator than before.
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.
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.
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).
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.
>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.
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.
>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.
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".
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.
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.
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[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 309 ms ] threadThe 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.
They didn't take that description and give it to artists all around the world to paint. "Komar and Melamid then set about painting a piece that reflected the results."
So _they_ painted pictures that were essentially the same, reinforcing their own point. The rest of the article selects pictures reinforcing the same point.
As user nassimm pointed out, you only need to walk down the street and look around to see the differences. Travel a little and you'll see the differences everywhere.
People may want similar things, but the actualization of that is different everywhere.
> Before long, the designer had stumbled on the perfect research tool: AirBnB. From the comfort of her home the app gave her a window into thousands of others. She could travel the world, and view hundreds of rooms, without leaving her chair.
AirBnB the perfect research tool for interior inspiration? Well, it is if you wish to cherry pick for the specific topic of things looking the same.
And even that is fraught with problems, because in my neck of the woods (Germany) we generally do not buy houses/appartments furnished (and renting appartments furnished is also an exception and not the norm. Even kitchens are empty rooms without cabinets and appliances.).
Edit: Even though the AirB'n'B methodology is not perfect, I agree with some of the conclusions. Just like radio/tv has smoothed out local accents and dialects within a country, the internet produces global trends. This is not all bad.
However, when houses are put up for sale, they are typically "staged", where the seller will rent furnishings to make it look more homely.
Apartments are more hit and miss. The bigger complexes will often have a show apartment they keep furnished for toors, and may often used a furnished one for their pictures.
Obviously the way you furnish a house for show is not the same way you would to live in it. But it seems like a reasonable approximation of the 'average' sensabilities of the market.
The author seems to be experiencing a case of what's known as Baader–Meinhof phenomenon.
There may be such thing as the AirSpace look, but this may be driven by cost cutting more than actual style.
Exposed brick, exposed air ducts, reclaimed wood, brass plumbing pipe lamps with Edison bulbs...
All this is DIY stuff you do when you want to keep your expenses at the minimum while making the place look nice, and it accomplishes that very well, if donde right, I think.
But I bet most people would go with a $50K custom Italian kitchen instead of exposed shelves if they could afford it.
Many things can be crushed by efficiency. If every work and business has to solve some inefficiency (which seems to be true even in a communist-type system), in an optimal world you starve to death.
Still, there are many ways to use reclaimed and used stuff that won't look Instagrammy.
I'd argue, the element of cultural alignment to the universally accepted is predominant, regardless of the price.
(As often, the simple, DIY-style, apparently cheap, is actually more costly. As a fancy example, once VW/Audi sold the same platform twice, once as the more elaborate Audi 80, once as the more base-line, economic VW Passat. Both variants shared the same dashboard with minor variations: the Audi came with sleek control lights behind a smooth cover, whereas the Passat exhibited its economic appeal by a group of bare lamps in the cavities of a basic, moulded plastic base board. However, the Audi dashboard was considerably cheeper to produce, with just a printed sheet of plastic snapping onto the mounts, while the economic appeal of the Passat afforded lights of varying color and a complex moulding of the plastic inlays.)
The ubiquity of the 5-over-1 architecture in the US is very striking. The NY Times had an article recently called "America the Bland" [1] which challenged people to tell if apartments were in Nashville, Seattle or Denver. All I could think looking through it was "These look exactly like all the apartments near me in Boston and Cambridge.
1. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/20/realestate/housing-develo...
Also unless land is just atrociously expensive, the marginal cost of adding floors doesn't go down. In fact it really goes up at some point. I've still never actually worked out how sewage works in supertall buildings.
Its getting the fresh water up that should get exponentially more difficult as building height increases.
You need to maintain a continuous downward slope. You are very limited in how you can have bends in pipes or two pipes join each other. You need to make sure air can get in and out of every point of the pipes, otherwise differences in air pressure will make things get stuck inside.
With pressurized water it just gets pushed wherever you route the pipes and you don't need to worry about the exact route nearly as much. Yeah, you need pumps to get the appropriate pressure on higher floors, but it's still simpler than sewage.
Another advantage 5-over-1s have (which the NYT article also mentions) is that they are cheap and easy to build. Very tolerant to cheap building materials, lots of prefabricated parts, lots of contractors who are familiar with how to build them. And because there's more demand then supply and people mostly pay based on location there's little incentive to do something more expensive
that's a bit circular, no?
The dominant architectural style of them includes:
- Multiple boxes merged into each other at different heights and depths
- Multiple (2-3) siding materials used in a regular pattern, such as vinyl slats + brick, or smooth aluminum + brick + cement.
- Multiple colors used in a regular pattern, usually white + gray + bright-primary-color. Primary color is used in small rectangular splashes, usually below or beside alternate windows
The basic look is that of many shipping containers nestled into each other.
I don't disagree, but this is simply bad rhetoric. Don't start with an incorrect/misleading/confusing example, and then expect readers to stick with you for the more compelling stuff.
The difference is now the cultural bubble is global and of course it's completely irrelevant for survival.
Go look at art of different societies from as near as 150 years ago. Spanish, French, English, and American fashion, architecture, and style are wildly different compared to the sea of homeginity of today.
I am tired of hacker news for always having these shallow “smarter than you” sage comments that completely miss the point. It’s just like the article pointed out. At scale here everyone’s comment is “no you’re wrong because [some mundane detail observation that misses the point].” It’s like engineer cognitive scale Markov chain.
Nitpicking mundane (and unimportant) details is HN Commentary In a Nutshell. I totally expected these comments and did not come away disappointed. We make an art out of missing the forest for the trees here!
It sucks, too, because the article makes a great point with numerous examples, but all we have here are comments like "Well, ackshually, in paragraph 5 sentence 3, the author says 'all' when he meant 'most' so the entire article is clearly wrong!" which completely miss the point.
Precisely.
150 years ago, countries lived in their own cultural bubble because communication was much slower and mostly limited to local information. Or look at ancient societies which had their own homogenous culture compared to other cultures (eg: Ancient Greece vs Aztecs).
I think it's fair to say that today with globalization and the internet, we're really getting into what McLuhan denominated the global village. Instagram is a good example of this.
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.
Sure we can agree on the obvious conclusions that mass production is going to try for mass appeal and thus “saminess”.
But my house certainly isn’t white with wood tones. That’s because I’ve been putting in the work to select and restore beautiful furniture from decades past and gradually building towards a more unique aesthetic.
Let me tell you it is expensive in both time and money.
- Just selecting a non-neutral wall color is very difficult and pretty much locks you into certain furniture.
- If you want to commission the perfect dining room table it will cost you $5-20k easily depending on your tastes. Or it will cost weeks of labor to DIY (assuming you’ve already devolved the prereq skills). Mass produced pieces will be your only option.
- For architecture, you don’t really get a choice. Custom building a home is hugely expensive and you’ll need a huge amount of skill/stress capacity to GC it yourself or pay $$$ for someone with a reputation.
I guess I don’t get the point of articles like this. I don’t think they’re entirely wrong, but I’m also pretty sure it’s always been like this. You don’t just get beautiful and unique things for free. It’s just when we look back on history we’re usually blinded by survivorship bias of the beauty that has stood the test of time.
Look up some of Brent Hull’s content about historical architecture. You’ll see that even though he rags on modern buildings, he’ll describe how the different architectural forms were massively influenced by the industrial capabilities of the time.
It hasn't always been like that, if you put down the US-centric lens. Every shopping mall in a bigger city anywhere in the world now looks similar to a US shopping mall. Fast-food venues across the world resemble US venues, even if it's not a franchise under a US brand. It's a cultural hegemony that is exported through consumer products.
It used to be that every region had its own distinctive "malls" with mostly locally-made products, and now the whole world is stuck with Chinese-made products tuned primarily for the US taste.
Make shipping 100x the cost and this disappears.
The only reason the US 'won' here is after WWII we had relatively high pay and transported a lot of goods. As shipping got faster and cheaper it expanded beyond the US and took over the world.
One of my favourite coffee table books is Designed in the USSR: 1950–1989. Pretty much everything in the book could easily rival or even triumph over Western designers of the same era, but the vast majority of the industrial designs shown never made it beyond the prototype stage. They looked like nightmares for mass production and it was hard to perceive a meaningful demand for them even in a market economy. These were made by Design Bureaus staffed with people whose sole job is to design things. It would be unfair to compare their work with products that have stood through the tests of user demand over time.
Unusual, eccentric or otherwise interesting opinions aren't going to show up in a market researcher's poll. What were they expecting?
The reason why things were more varied in previous generations is the speed of communications. it took much longer for fashions to permeate through society, this mean that more local variations happened.
Now, fashions are almost always global, but they still change at the same rate. The difference being is that they change much more in unison across the globe.
It feel like we're stuck in a global, homogenized, test-group-approved fashion loop.
Of course cars are going to look mostly the same. If you change anything too much (e.g. cybertruck) you're just straying from a highly optimised design.
Look at bicycles. Before the invention of the safety bike there were lots of different designs. But the safety bike is such a good design you can't really get away with it.
Or phones. Everyone complains about glass rectangles and where are the sliders and flip phones? They don't exist anymore because the glass rectangle is such a good design.
(I've been observing this for at least the past 15 years or so. This feels more like the "post-history" of fashion.)
Edit: Regarding the speed of communications, mind that there were much read, trend-setting magazines, which came out periodically, every week or every month and that they had to make a point, relative to the previous issues. And, as a reader, you wouldn't have referred to a past issue from half a year ago. Moreover, past issues were hard to come upon, as they weren't sold anymore. Now compare this to websites, which keep lingering around (you wouldn't discard last month's posts) and platforms, where trends gradually gain momentum, until they eventually become ubiquitous. (At this point, a trend would have been "out" and "uncool", previously, but now this is when they are really enforced by algorithms.) I'd rather argue, for things like fashion, the speed of communications has decreased considerably and stability has increased, thanks to technology.
E.g., https://www.washingtonpost.com/home/2022/10/27/why-victorian...
The idea was the world went through a drastic change with WWII and the Victorian mansion started seeming like a ghostly remnant of the earlier age.
Antiques Roadshow had a similar podcast where they discussed the "brown is down" phenomenon.
Did the fast-changing fashions of the postwar era reflect something about normal trends, or was it a sort of equilibrating phenomenon, and now we've returned to some normal again, that we haven't seen in over 100 years?
I wonder if you were to travel pre-world-war era if you'd come to the same conclusion about the speed at which fashions change. Maybe but maybe not.
Coincidentally I was talking to my spouse last night about how if you look through architecture and design websites and magazines, the stuff you see is different from what we were referring to "real estate style" and here was referred to as "Airbnb" style. In architecture and design circles there's less uniformity and more color and contrast.
The problem with this I've found is that it's difficult to find something different, of the sort in architectural circles. So if you want some of this stuff you often have to have it custom made, or made by a single boutique manufacturer, which is expensive and difficult.
So some of this uniformity in style I think is international economies of scale, which creates supply constraints and a sort of monopsony of sorts. This might be reinforcing in turn.
I don't know why the English-speaking cultures are so quick into reducing it into "Victorian", but it was recognized as a time of quick change.
I'm living in a city where most of the buildings are 100+ years old. (The house I'm living in was built in 1904.) You can usually date a building from that era by about +/- 2 years of accuracy, just by the looks, regardless, whether it's art nouveau or a more conservative expression of style. However, as you approach WWII, things considerably slowed down. (Mostly for economic reasons.)
I think, this idea of a mostly stable era is a product of the shift in paradigms, you mentioned before, where we put anything that happened before in a paradigmatic box. (E.g., like it has just recently happened with brutalism, where a wide variety and evolution of concepts and oppositions was subsumed into the same thing.)
This has only been true for a few decades. It's a very new and foreign thing!
Who cares if movie posters and book titles are converging towards something that markets well? The parts that matter (the content, themes, style, etc) are probably very different among all those books/movies.
IMO Fashion like this exists just so that salesmen can convince consumers that they can buy The Current Thing and earn respect from their peers. Chasing the latest furniture, latest clothes, latest cars, etc.. It's all a shallow, costly signal of wealth that excludes the not-wealthy and distracts the wealthy from more fulfilling/productive pursuits.
If this trend means that fashion is dying, good riddance.
E.g., just compare major fashion trends in the 1970s (from mini to maxi, to bell-bottoms, to pants and tube socks & disco attire, to clogs and para jackets, to college look vs. punk) to the major fashion trends of the last decade (slim fit). This variation from season to season, while, of course, invented as a vehicle for marketing, actually provided a vehicle for repositioning in a varying landscape of tribal subcultures that was typical, then.
Places like Stanford and MIT slowly become more Harvard every year IMO, and it sucks for student life too. Driving forces may not be exactly the same, but I think there are cultural undertones pervasive across these changes and some of the more superficial ones. It reminded me of this article: https://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/2022/12/stanford-hates-fu...
Anecdotally, I think it affects science too. Grants become increasingly formulaic, and anything deviating even slightly intellectually only has a chance as a token "high risk" project. People are afraid of saying something wrong that also clashes with current scientific norms, so everything seems so damn homogenous despite the many questions we still have little answer for.
I think the "optimization" process that got us here is bad in part because it is optimizing for a single institution style that independently will do fine, and is thus a safe play for any decent university. However that is not the same as the set of institutions that would collectively do the best, not even close IMO. Homogenization can be efficient and should happen to some degree within an institution. But between institution diversity is already bad and continuing to die off year over year.
This is alarming to me and I think there is something to the aesthetics that go with it. People's behavior can absolutely be impacted by the broader cultural vibe that pervades. Signaling is important too - when you go to visit MIT and see the dingy af student center it is part of the model you build about what the school cares about. Selecting a specific type of student body is much easier when it goes both ways, because good luck assessing someone's motivations on a modern college app. When surface-level marketing becomes homogenous across the board it is going to have downstream impacts.
Granted, the art and architecture that have managed to survive for 2000 years is more unique, but that's just survivorship bias.
edit: I'm not millennial, I'm a Gen-X. And this categories also contributes to this sameness and conformity.
Avacado green or burnt orange kitchen tiles, furniture, thick brown window drapes, and so on. Side burns. It must have felt like everyone/everywhere looked the same.
Later it became ridiculed and despised.
It's a great article, but to me, the article does not illustrate a "trend". Rather it illustrates what has been occurring, well, for 150 years. Essentially, the commodification of everything (truly everything, there is no end in sight). This is modernity playing out, on the same track, in the same direction as it has since the 1800s.
This is why, imho, modernity was already fully understood by the 70s. This was the last generation who had still somewhat of a living memory of life outside consumer culture, of living outside the framework where daily experience is mediated by things circulating in a global market. Ellul, Baudrillard, Debord, McLuhan, Mumford, Lasch, ... all were describing "blanding" processes (to use the terminology of the article).
Sorry to continue on and hijacking this, it truly is absolutely fascinating. The effect must be even worse in the new upcoming countries. They have much less has a physical anchor than the west has.
To your point though, note also that current pop-phychology/philosophy is no longer a mash-up of Marx and Freud, which it certainly still was post WW2. I think this would help explain why we're living in "a-historical" times, as both very deeply cared about grounding thought into historical time (generally western history, nonetheless, something we no longer do).
The author then identifies a commonality between these trends, that they are all “average”. I don’t quite see that commonality, it seems a little strained. To be frank, the stronger commonality shared by all these styles is “the author despises it”. But there sort of is something there, “average” does kinda capture something they have in common, so I’ll buy it for the sake of discussion.
So, the author has discovered the current overall aesthetic of the age. Maybe from the inside it feels like it will consume the world and nothing will change, but from the outside it’s just the current overall aesthetic of the age, there were others before it and there will be others after it. You could write a very similar article about the Victorian period, maybe titled “The Age of Ornate”, filled with complaints that every field seems to be obsessed with adding a million curlicues and embellishments to whatever they’re making. The Victorian era (in architecture, fashion, etc., basically all the same categories mentioned in the article) lasted for 70-odd years or so, I bet it felt similarly never-ending and all-consuming to some people living through it back then.
Nowadays I can't shake off this weird feeling of sameness emanating from every design. I can hardly distinguish brands any more, I can't tell cultures apart and that's a shame because there's never been an era with such abundance of products and expression mediums as the current one
I think the issue is you haven't actually found the sound you enjoy. If you just let pop radio take you on your way you're going to get lowest common denominator sound. And streaming has made this effect much worse. Now music radio is only for people who can't be assed to choose their own music, so it's even more lowest common denominator than before.
I feel like a time prisoner /fugitive constantly trying to break out of this window-loop.
Why argue with that one pretty girl and give in into her needs, if there's more than 10,000 other girls who look literally identical, have the same gymed up bodies, have the same personalities, same preferences and fall for the same jokes?
To me, devaluing other people like this is abhorrent, but for him it's no problem.
Also, rejecting love and affection is the dumbest thing a person will ever do (not to speak to GPs example specifically of course, i don't know the situation).
I 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.
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
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.
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
>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/