The "International AirBnB Style" isn't of a place but it's definitely of a time, and that time was probably ten years ago to now. I think it's fading. It always feels like styles will be eternal until they go out of fashion. Probably by 2035 it will be completely uncool and replaced by something different, maybe local. Maybe not, since we're more interconnected than ever, so styles end up propagating fast and wide. In 2050 though, it will be cool again, like all the other things that went out of fashion.
AirBnB is profit driven. So buy Ikea stuff or similar, paint the walls white, make it feel middle class for the $ but at the same time easy and cheap to maintain.
I had a weird boss once, who would reframe every prob or discussion into an explore-exploit tradeoff and how to "push" the ratio between the two towards more explore.
So for example he would say things like okay we have 10 ppl in explore mode and 90 ppl in exploit mode. The exploiters are generating enough cash to sustain org carrying capacity of explorers, how do we increase carrying capacity?
There has been discussion on this topic for about 100 years, but the most prominent is in the books Dialectic of Enlightenment by Theodor Adorno or One-Dimensional Man by Herbert Marcuse. They are a bit heavier than this article but they go into the problem with far more depth.
The Frankfurt school in general deals with this problematic of Capitalism losing its revolutionary potential and becoming a stagnant, homogenous, unchanging system. Walter Benjamin, the spiritual father of both the above authors, in fact did extensive work attempting to uncover the wondrous possibilities of early high capitalism before it collapsed under the rule of Louis Bonaparte, which was the subject of Marx’s quite famous article The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Disagree with Marx if you want but he did believe that capitalism, if left to run wild, would produce a new form of hypermobile, freely associating society, but when that gets close to happening in times of crisis a certain section of elite seize power for themselves and prevent the revolutionary social changes from occuring, thus producing this endless mediocrity.
While it’s mostly a laugh (a shock?) to read Guénon and Marcuse side by side, I think Vico is really misunderstood and under-appreciated in our present cultural moment and I think a lot of good could come from a revival of his thought. He’s influenced a diverse array of characters, from Marx to Rosmini-Serbati, and I see a lot of his thought in Horkheimer and Habermas (I.e., the side of the Frankfurt school that rediscovered the big questions in a non-reactionary, non-nostalgic way).
Not all, but a ton of these have everything to do with the profit motive and how everything is being cost cut to the bone.
- Simplified, bland corporate logos can be endlessly copied, moved and placed on canvasses and into a variety of mixed media. A bland, simplified logo is just at home plastered across packaging as it is painted on a piece of glass as it is cast in plastic and used as a decoration as it is floating atop stock footage as it is embossed in plastic on the side of a product. Design once, use everywhere, refresh occasionally.
- Five-over-ones are a response as outlined in the piece to building codes and space constraints. It's the tallest you can safely build a structure without using any steel, and the principle materials are concrete and wood which are very cheap. It can be configured as a mix of residential and commercial properties which means you have an inherent diversity in your investment as a landlord, or just as easily be 100% of either without many foundational changes.
- Corporate campuses have homogenized because of deregulation in corporate taxes and payment schemes, which incentivizes less investment in "cool shit" for your business. Why spend tons of money on a fancy headquarters with the top end of everything when instead you could just as easily give yourself all that money via stock buybacks, and then spend it on a yacht? And it's not like your competitors or customers give half a shit anymore, they all work in equally boring and dull campuses.
- To most people unfortunate enough to live in areas where cars are a necessity, they are at best, a convenient alternative to walking and at worst, an ongoing tax on their livelihood that must be paid. Your average Joe or Jane cares that a car is reliable and gets good fuel economy. The only people who care about looks are those that are status obsessed, and to them, the logo means far more than anything on the actual bodywork. Most of the status enabled vehicles are also identical to the cheaper ones, differed only by badges. It isn't even just platforms as the article says; tons of vehicles are outright the same damn vehicle being sold under a number of brands and models... because it's cheaper.
And as for less obvious things like AirBnBs and Coffee shops, it's just cheaper to imitate what's already working than doing any work to see what might be more interesting. Yeah those particular looks won out, but odds are that's less because of anything inherent to them, and more because it just... did, a no more consequential decision on the part of the universe than which specific fish happened to get legs right the first time. But for it being a different fish, maybe we'd all have legs that curved backwards instead of forwards at the knee.
And instagram face is what it is, as the article says, because of Kim Kardashian. Because she certainly didn't originate the concept of being famous for being famous, but she did perfect it, utterly buff it to a mirror shine, and what is being an influencer if not that?
At least with the "f*ck" books this is just a money grab. Subtle art was a hit - I also remember enjoying the book - and it sprung bunch of copy cats with no originality. I also got suckered into this, picking up another one of these books thinking it was a sequel, but it was the most boring non-sense and I dropped it almost immediately.
I suspect money drives most other of these trends. You want to builds homes to look away that is proven to get highest sale price. You want to make the car look like the model that has sold most over past decade. You want to make your coffee shop look like what a successful coffee shop looks like to attract more customers. You want to make you influencer account look like every other influencer account to get as much sponsor and ad revenue as possible.
This is the same reason why we see reboot after reboot and if it isn't a reboot it is a sequel or prequel or reimagining of some sort, since all of the arts are now investments and need to make profit, no one wants to take a risk on unproven idea.
As for why even my home has white walls? Most people don't change the default. I don't care enough about the wall color and I know that I will be selling at some point and would have to paint the walls white again.
I think this one's the gist of it, and the big irony we'll all suffer from: While it gets cheaper to produce new things, not a lot of things will be original anymore.
I once heard that the 90s were the decade of references, and that might have just stuck a bit for too long: The boom of second-hand, mid-century furniture, the "industrial" look, rounded edged everywhere. Hell, even smartphones are just a reference to Sci-Fi flicks from the 60s (the case was Apple VS Samsung, I think). On demand services and the easy piracy of digital goods... I feel while there has been an perceived increase in quality for each individual at first, all these things helped everything to converge into "the average" for everyone.
We still see originality here and there, but you can just feel their competition against big budget productions. The movie Mandy (2018) was great, so was the show Scavengers Reign (2023), Breaking Bad etc. Landscape FM produce really interesing audio gear. I'm sure Open-Source (Hard- and Software) makes a lot of this possible, but for small and big equaly alike - depending on business practice, small might even be in danger to suffer from it.
I'm sure we all have our gems, but they just feel rare in this huge landscape. I just wish it would be a more common practice to support local artists and individials that take this mentioned risk, without having to turn it into a growth hacking startup idea.
This is a byproduct of capitalism, which is fundamentally driven by optimization and efficiency.
The most efficient way to optimize is to homologate.
Funnily enough that’s an endgame that resembles closely what realist socialism would impose from the start, in order to distribute equally (whereas in capitalism this also led to increasing inequality).
Globalized capitalism now resembles a lossy compression algorithm applied to the world.
That said, the one shown by this article is also a very, very Western view of this issue.
A stroll through Asian smaller places and you’ll see the difference popping up.
There are also interesting Western holdouts, where usually tradition still defies optimization. Italy is a good example of that.
Edit: every time I mention a critique of capitalism on this forum it gets absolutely zero traction and even downvoted.
Why is this the reaction, instead of maybe even telling me why this analysis is completely worthless or wrong in a proper argumented comment? Change my mind! But be also open to see more structural issues in the way we all live, maybe?
> every time I mention a critique of capitalism on this forum it gets absolutely zero traction and even downvoted. Why is this the reaction, instead of maybe even telling me why this analysis is completely worthless or wrong in a proper argumented comment?
I'll break the silence to give you at least my view on it.
I find the "blame it on the capitalism" rhetoritc somewhat annoying, to be fair. It sounds like an escape hatch you can always invoke, and since we don't really have a significant example of a non-capitalist society, it's unfalsifiable. It often seems to me, that people use this argument as psychological escapism - a simple solution to a complex problem.
Specifically, I see the "capitalism is bad" argument often used on examples that are not really specific to capitalism and are instead a result of some general principles.
For example, it seems to me that this article just describes preferential attachment process (rich get richer) in various fields.Another common one is multipolar trap (or tragedy of the commons or collective action problem). Those things tend to happen absolutely everywhere, because the conditions for them are very simple to satisfy.
We shouldn't be suprised to see them in capitalism, and we should expect them to arise in different forms in practically every system.
Thank you, this is exactly the answer I would expect from this kind of forum.
I am all but an anti-capitalist per se. I believe that, among all forms of societal organization, capitalism has proven to be the most effective at taking masses out of poverty.
I am also very aware that different types of capitalism exist, and in my critique I'm usually referring to the American "unbridled" or more or less libertarian Capitalism, rather than the social democratic flavor we have in Europe.
We even have chinese capitalism, the most beautiful and effective economic oxymoron to ever prove effective at what it does.
My gripe is mostly with the American form, and its role as a fundamental engine of disequalities. It's socialism for the ultrarich, as many capitalists in America would define it with no issue. I do think that this explains not all, but a lot of the undercurrents that lead to what this article described, as most of this trend seem to spread from a globalized push for optimization through homologation.
Especially when discussing with an educated American counterpart, I have the feeling that capitalism is the untouchable axiom of everything - which is expressed in your "annoyance", or at least that's what I perceive.
"Oh, here we go, let's blame it all again on capitalism..."
To me that's like fish complaining that everything around them is always wet, but getting annoyed if anyone mentions water.
Of course, getting out of the water is not an option for them, and sure there is no alternative for us about capitalism.
In this case the options are twofold: go the Mark Fisher way, conceding to the despair of a lack of an alternative; promote constant discussion and self-reflection about it, in a democratic and dialectically constructive way, to make the best of the water we all swim in.
I can't tell if this article is trying to make it seem like a negative or not.
Every decade defines is own unique style and it spreads until it's no longer distinct.
3rd wave coffee shops all look like that because they started during peak farm to table aesthetic. It's funny because it was born out of the answer to 1990s strip-mall sameness where you'd find Chilis and Starbucks. I remember designers losing their shit when they found wood planks of fallen down barns they could use in their interiors.
Now that people are getting bored of farm to table, it'll be on to something else. When we look back in 50 years, all of this "sameness" the author is pointing towards will mostly just be here to define 2010-2020, with whatever name historians decide to call it.
Exactly. This is how you can place in time things like TVA in Loki and the office in Severance even though they do not belong to that time canonically.
I suspect that's the demographic shift towards older average population.
I've only got anecdotal examples of old people preferring blander colours, hence "suspect" rather than "think".
When my dad died, my mum replaced all the furniture and carpets with blander versions of the same — in particular replacing the bold orange living room carpet and dark green patterned hall, stairs, and landing carpets with mild off-white.
> I suspect that's the demographic shift towards older average population.
I agree. The downside is that this is a sort of permanent\long-term shift since the world is generally getting older and we are reproducing at below-replacement.
Maybe we are overstimulated by visual content and attracted to otherwise less visually striking objects, either to find some peace or to not be distracted from that content?
At least for me, visually minimalist objects and environments are appealing because I generally feel overstimulated in modern society and by modern technology. I might feel different if I were to spend my days on the field doing slow, repetitive hard work.
I don't really buy this line of reasoning. Nature can be immensely colorful yet soothing to all the senses. You don't need to stuff your house with psychedelic rugs, tapestries and color-changing LEDs for it to have color. Including color does not mean that your space is cluttered or maximalist in style.
We got a designer for a flat that was being renovated, and I realized that I needed to seriously involve myself in the project if the result was not going to turn out a lifeless, gray-white-beige soup.
Now the flat is full of green, (warm) wooden, peach and red elements, giving it a cozy autumn-y vibe. And I don't need to stuff it with props that "pop" to add personality - it has one of its own.
The prevailing wisdom seems to be "Make it all greige, and introduce life with (often pointless) colorful props". I feel this is more offending to the senses than having a tastefully colored environment where you don't need to "add" anything.
In some markets at least, like cars, this blandness is a sales optimization. Strong distinct colors are more likely to block a sale than bland generic ones.
It may not be exactly the same in other markets, but there's still a cost to offering additional color variants. It's a cost optimization to offer the fewest colors that are appealing, or at least aren't objectionable, to the widest range of potential buyers.
> can't tell if this article is trying to make it seem like a negative
or not
It left no ambiguity for me. Both the project (which is great art in
itself) and the commentary opens a door for a hard truth, and new
questions emerge,
In tech, might we learn from this?
from TFA: "Looking for freedom, we found slavery.”
Every parent. Every patrician, condescending patron. Every "elite".
Each have their idea of what "freedom" is best for others.
And the people say: "Boaty McBoatface!"
In cybersecurity we want people to be safe. But the people say;
"Give me TikTok, Microsoft...."
> Would Rousseau want us "being forced to be free"?
Probably. The French revolution actors were inspired by his work, and the French revolution led to the declaration of the human rights, which states that all people are born free and equal. If you take this claim as universal, then your moral duty is to make it happen.
So yes, do free people even if they believe their situation is fine. Perhaps for instance because they've been brainwashed into believing it is, or perhaps they don't even know what freedom is.
Unfortunately countries/organizations/persons that claimed to do that too often also had ulterior motives.
The phrase "looking for freedom, we found slavery" is interesting because if there's slavery, then there's a master. The master we are talking about is "norm" or "convention". The term "slavery" can be apt in some cases, but generally is excessive.
"Anticonformity" was somewhat a dismissive word in my country up to some point, but I have not heard it in that way for while, which suggests that people accept more easily "abnormal" people. When you want your freedom and you can have it, then there's no slavery nor tyranny.
It's odd that in almost all walks of life, freedom comes from
non-conformity. In arts, and in science, "progress" is a movement away
from wherever we are. We may not like non-conformists, but we
absolutely rely on them to move forward.
Yet totalitarian technological social systems are the only creation
that make those who conform "more free". By design they limit options
at the margins while enabling those in the middle of the mediocrity
curve. Slavery is freedom. And thus, since time stops for no man or
machine, systems invite their own inevitable destruction.
Technology is not just "a way of not having to experience the world"
(Max Frisch), but a way of not having to experience change. And I
think the "master" that you speak of is fear (fear of things
changing).
2010s visual art was full of super saturation and hyperrealism due to Marvel and Instagram filters.
Sony's "Into the Spiderverse" freed itself from the shadow of Pixar, and has forever changed what high quality, mass audience, computer animated films can be, and Dreamworks has already shifted its own design towards more expressive unique cartoon language.
Also, the rising shift of A24's unique visual aesthetic in the 2010s remained quite obscure until "Everything Everywhere All at Once" 2 years ago finally brought its "freedom" of visual expression to mainstream audiences. Now, others want to capture that same visual style and I'm seeing a broad shift away from over saturation, hyper realism, and toward the more muted and mundane. I'm impressed that Marvel is already applying some of it in "Agatha All Along".
Anyway, my point still stands, artists will constantly push back against whatever is mainstream in an effort to be seen and to define their own aesthetic/brand. It's easier to be 1 of 10, than it is 1 of a million. Plus, if they're lucky enough, they get to be known for starting or accelerating the movement.
Every single decade has very clearly defined aesthetics that designers copy until something new comes along to disrupt it.
For the very same reasons you point out, there is also a style shared by the servers who work at these coffee shops. We would expect young people from the same generation to adopt similar hairstyles, facial hair choices etc.
When we look at 70s interiors full of leather upholstery, wood panels and with a desaturated look from old film camera pictures, they feel outdated. It's hard for me to imagine looking at these white, clean HD interiors and saying "oh this feels so outdated" - but I bet that's exactly what people will think decades from now.
I've noticed this in many categories, where almost everything in the category converges extremely specifically on qualities that I simply... do not like, at all. For example, laptops and the "thin and light" fad.
I may have different needs from the average person, but why does nobody else have these needs? Am I the only autistic person on the planet, the only software developer on the planet, the only person on the planet who likes to be productive on a laptop? The only person on the planet who practically lives in their laptop?
I think hopefully not, but this is like... probably under 1% of people. And you know, almost nobody caters to this niche because if you cater to the 99% (or more) instead, you make so much more money!
What features are you seeking that aren’t available? There are many powerful, heavy laptops. There are many 16+ inch form factors. My current laptop has dual screens!
I agree it can be frustrating when the mainstream focuses on things you don’t like, but that doesn’t always exclude the things you do. I don’t like pop music but there’s more music I like now than when I was young.
> What features are you seeking that aren’t available? There are many powerful, heavy laptops. There are many 16+ inch form factors. My current laptop has dual screens!
Sure, there are many powerful, heavy laptops. Almost none with a HiDPI screen, though. And almost none that lack a numpad (and off-center trackpad). And almost none with half-height arrow keys, even among the ones without numpad.
To find one with all three of those? You may as well not even try. I have more requirements, but nobody really cares even about the most basic ones, so there's no point in hoping for the more complex ones.
Even among laptops with 4K screens they're bound to have "full-size" keyboards with a numpad. If no numpad, the arrow keys are still likely to be full-size, and there are probably dedicated Home/End/PgUp/PgDn buttons, which are always stupid compared to putting them into Fn+Arrows.
I get it, portable workstations are designed to be desktops in a laptop form factor. They're not designed to be laptops. But maybe something out there should be. Maybe there should be even a single laptop on the planet that is actually designed like a premium laptop, with workstation-class power inside.
There probably won't be, though - far more likely for everybody to tell me my expectations are completely unrealistic. (It'll happen any second now, probably.)
> I agree it can be frustrating when the mainstream focuses on things you don’t like, but that doesn’t always exclude the things you do.
The Framework Laptop 16 is one of the first Windows laptops I have ever seen that checks many of those boxes, but unfortunately it's still thin and light (and also AMD).
I recently got a Apple 16" MacBook Pro and it's okay. Really many of my requirements were inherited from the Mid-2015 MBP being possibly the best machine I'd ever used, but then Apple became terrible for a while, and nobody else (not even Razer) did a good job of replicating what I liked about that machine.
The new Apple Silicon machines outperform full-size desktop workstations. I'm OK with that.
(According to Geekbench, this machine outperforms my desktop 12400F by 20% in single-core and over 100% in multi-core, and it's also less than 5% behind my RTX 3090 in GPU performance... in practice though, I've noticed certain work tasks drop down from taking over 10 seconds to under 3 seconds.)
The reason I don't like thin and light Windows laptops is because they freaking don't.
In pros they stick more ram chips in parallel, and depending on storage the same for flash. I.e. more bandwidth. That may aid your tasks more than the extra geekbench scores.
You might be an exception. I, as a developer, really want "thin and light" laptop to make it as efforless as possible to carry it around and use anywhere. I've made the mistake of buying a heavy powerful one, and I basically never carry it around, because it's just too impractical.
Nice article, you also see that in content - creators using the same hooks, transitions etc. It gets tiresome after seeing the same "stop doing X this way/try this one trick/top ten" after a while.
Besides profit motive, there are fundamental and evolutionary reasons for the convergence - humans are naturally attracted to pleasing composition and natural light in AirSpace, have our attention easily manipulated by unconventional titles etc. So companies are just exploiting our penchants and preferences.
Yes everything looks the same now. But hasn't that always been the case to a certain extent? The world is a lot smaller now and that leads to ideas spreading quickly. This doesn't necessarily mean that things stay the same though. What is in fashion changes and generally only the best of each fashion trend stays around. Where I live there are a number of old buildings with exposed timer frames. At some point, most of the town would have looked like this, but now only the finest examples remain. I'm sure the same thing is true for fields other than architecture. I'm sure the past was full of generic imitation like it is today, though just more localised.
In some areas probably you're right. Pictures of men in certain eras all wearing identical hats spring to mind. On the other hand the film industry is a stark example where it really did used to be more varied. The article mentions it, before 2000 3 in 4 big films were original. Now it's getting close to zero.
And the music? Film music for everything popular seems to have come from the same music box.
But popular music itself is to a high degree very same. That's not to say that there is no original music anymore. There is a big amount. It's just people tastes that decide what becomes popular, and everybody wants to hear the same.
And yet, fashion and taste change. It's just a matter of time.
>It's just people tastes that decide what becomes popular //
What becomes popular seems to be whatever we get brainwashed with, ie what we get advertised.
It seems to be less driven by social changes than it is driven by profit motive of those able to feed most of us 10-15 minutes of advertising within each of the several hours of media consumption most of us partake of each day.
According to him, it is not just tastes, it is the way musicians get paid:
"Streaming platforms pay artists each time a track gets listened to. And a “listen” is classified as 30 seconds or more of playback. To maximise their pay, savvy artists are releasing albums featuring a high number of short tracks."
I'm late to reply but for the record I think you're way wrong about music. You (and I) are just old. I'm a musician and I do think there is a sense in which the most popular songs are "worse" - they contain fewer, simpler musical ideas. But there are plenty of good song writers doing interesting stuff. I'm not totally on the ball as I do prefer music from the past. But I would point to Billy Eilish as a particularly young example, there's also Jacob Collier for instance. Both very unusual, very popular.
> Yes everything looks the same now. But hasn't that always been the case to a certain extent? The world is a lot smaller now and that leads to ideas spreading quickly.
Most of what the article is complaining about is because the economics has led to monopolization.
At least back in the 1960s and 1970s, you had some individuality which would poke up. A department store wanted different clothes from the other department store to draw you in. A radio DJ wanted different music to get you to listen to their channel. etc.
However, once everything is a monopoly, there is no need to spend any money to be unique since there is nowhere different for anybody to switch to.
Ive never stayed in an airbnb that looked like any of those. Ive heard of this phenomenon but never experienced it. In the last few years ive been in airbnbs in Italy, hawaii, puerto rico, colorado, el salvador and none look like that style.
Some of this article seems to be about trends, which we always had? They come and go don't they? No ones doing barn doors anymore are they?
I find myself really missing Winamp and the ability to personalize the app using skins. This gave the user the ability to distinct the Ui using libraries of thousands of skins
There's something profound in that people like almost average, but don't like average. There are two ways this is true: categorization and imperfection.
Everything subjective has genres, then sub-genres, that a smaller group of people like, down to the individual. If something is very popular and/or mainstream in its sub-genre it becomes popular in its genre, and if very popular and/or mainstream in its genre becomes popular mainstream.
Everything subjective has "guidelines" it must follow in order to be popular, and the genres and sub-genres have further guidelines. But it can't follow every guideline or it won't be popular. At minimum people become desensitized, also some stated "guidelines" are wrong and the inherent "guideline" is different, because people don't completely know what they like. Because people don't completely know what they like, there are also "rare guidelines" that nobody follows or states but would create something especially popular, and rare guidelines create new genres.
For example, music. Almost every song (even non-traditional) has these common components: 12-tone equal temperament, simple time signature, "melody" "harmony" and "rhythm", etc.. Jazz, rock, electronic, etc. and have their own guidelines. Perhaps jazz was created because jazz chords used to be a rare guideline. But no song, even pop music, follows 100% of the guidelines. At minimum, instruments don't produce pure sine/square/triangle waves, melody has accents or modulation, etc. And the most popular songs do something novel (either completely novel, or they take something novel from a less-popular song and do better in other areas).
So how does this relate to the age of average? People know what I said above. AirBnB hosts, directors, etc. whose art is a business know the guidelines, both reported from others and inherently. But they don't know everything, and in particular, they either don't know how to break the guidelines in order to create something better, or they do know a way but don't believe it will work. So in order to create something that is the most likely to be the most popular, they follow the guidelines. What they create is at a local maxima, OK but bland, because it fits nobody's niche genres and there is no imperfection. Over time, it becomes less OK and more bland because everyone else follows the same guidelines, until some trend-setter reveals new guidelines that break the old ones and are more popular, then everyone follows those.
In order to be more successful than "OK" you have to know how to break the guidelines and follow rare ones, and the less other people who know the rare guidelines the more you'll be successful. But this requires 1) rare knowledge and 2) risk.
If everyone broke more guidelines, the world would be better, because to any individual, even though there would be more ugly AirBnBs and movies, there would be a few that are better than those we have today. And anyone who followed all the guidelines would create something that nobody wants, because although if you averaged everyone's ratings it would rate the highest, it would always be below first place. But since most people are following most of the guidelines, if one person breaks them, they get a few happy customers and less customers overall, so they give up or go out of business.
The former system, where everyone is following different guidelines, exists when people first discover an entirely new genre, and don't even know what the common guidelines are. But it transitions into the latter system, because every time someone discovers a rare guideline that captures enough of the market, the option that captures the most of the market is to follow the remaining common guidelines. We as a society can transition back into the former system and would remain until someone discovers a new rare guideline, but that takes cooperation which we don&#x...
Only if you bought all your books from one publisher. This was Penguins distinctive brand. They also had the turquoise Pelican brand. They were cheap compared to traditional publishers.
I respectfully disagree. Things look the same only if you look at the same things.
Fashion and trends where always a thing. They spread faster and more globally today because the communication is rich and easy, and of course there are a lot of followers of any trend.
But, not everything is "average". That bell curve is probably very high today, but there is a lot beyond the ±σ , just need to look there.
> there is a lot beyond the ±σ , just need to look there.
Of course, the world if large and kaleidoscopic. But the rate of homogeneity in the middle 80% is higher than it's even been, and that really affects everyone.
I actually want diversity in the mainstream, since some projects are only enjoyable if you can share them with others and if they get the most talented people to work on them.
The fact that nobody would make a Doctor Zhivago or even a Back to the Future today is not something I can fix with all my searching.
> The fact that nobody would make a Doctor Zhivago or even a Back to the Future today is not something I can fix with all my searching.
What do you mean by that?
I'm not familiar with Doctor Zhivago so I had to look it up, the 1965 film is based on a 1957 novel, which seems to match just fine with the pattern of The Martian, The Three Body Problem, Game of Thrones, Fifty Shades of Grey, etc.
Back to the Future is a fun trilogy, but the first film was mostly set in 1955 (so if it had been done today the past would have been 1994, compare to Captain Marvel being mostly set in 1995), the second film was 1985's idea of 2015 (and we still get plenty of what-if fiction in the near-ish future, e.g. Blade Runner 2049, Cyberpunk 2077), the third was yet another wild-west Cowboys-and-Indians gunslinger (1885) — but if you mean to focus on the more playful and fun aspects of how it was put together, or the positive vibes of good people working to solve problems and where it's clear who the goodies and baddies are, BttF reminds me more of The Orville or Lower Decks. (And The Martian if you want to consider the environment/time travel itself, rather than Biff, to be the problem).
I don't mean in broad genres, but more in terms of the range of emotions and thoughts that the top movies of the year evoke. The Martian is great movie, and does thankfully hit a different spot than the generic dystopian Sci-Fi, but there still seems to be a compression of that range, one which unfortunately nobody can quantify so that's why it's mostly opinion here.
For that issue, I think that as any medium ages, it transforms from "explore" to "exploit", which is also why films have a lot more sequels and reboots.
So, if you want more range, explore new media: games, youtube, etc.
> For that issue, I think that as any medium ages, it transforms from "explore" to "exploit", which is also why films have a lot more sequels and reboots.
I've never agreed with this argument, it just felt like an excuse. For 100 years movies kept changing as society also changed, and all of a sudden they hit the exploit phase somehow after 2000, when GCI was still improving.
Movies are in part a product of a social climate, and that climate is never static, so to me it seems like there should always be something to explore. It just seems that financier no longer want to put any money in exploring, and culture becomes poorer while the GDP grows.
It wasn't a sudden change, it's been a gradual tendency towards them. James Bond was already 19 films by the turn of the century (or 20 if you include the other Casino Royale), King Kong and Star Trek both got to 6, Batman 8, Star Wars had just had the 4th, Friday the 13th had reached 9 films.
Even BttF itself was three films, and in the second one was parodying the tendency towards sequels with the holographic Jaws 19.
There used to be more regional diversity, though. Things had distinctive characteristics that could easily be associated with the culture that produced them. A German car looked restrained and taut and had no cupholders. A French car looked kinda unusual and Avant-garde. Now everyone is driving the same blobby thing with several cupholders decided after a customer survey among Americans driving through McDonalds.
McDonaldization = globalization? The world is smaller now than it was in the 80's, and even then there were trends in design and fashion that spread across the world.
They are not quite the same idea. In a globalised but diverse economy, a Japanese buys a Swiss watch and a Swiss buys a Japanese air conditioner. McDonaldization refers to the incessant urge of Western societies to over-rationalise every aspect of the economic and cultural life, resulting in bland uniformity. It is a progression of Max Weber's ideas on bureaucracy and rationalisation.
I think globalized but diverse was always kind of a pipe dream because along with things you're trading across the globe you're also spreading information back and forth. And as the article points out, human preference is roughly the same in aggregate across the globe, so we all loosely converge on a local maximum of "the best" rinse, repeat, and you suddenly get homogenization.
there are a million million subcultures with pretty stark differences in taste/aesthetics that you can dig up on the internet. looking at what's grossing in mega-dense populations of millions of people then yeah, perhaps in aggregate at large N, things their individuality -- surprise?
there are parts of every major city that feel the same, but if you're willing to take a train out 45 minutes in any direction without google maps, i'm willing to bet you get into spaces that are incredibly local!
Wild thought, but I think it might point to something deeper about us as a species.
In the animal kingdom, other organisms who live in collectives like ants, birds etc fall in to patterns that unique. Could it be that we are subconsciously following these instincts and falling into these "consistent" patterns?
I think something that plays into this for products is that there is a lot of obvious incentive to making the function of things more efficient to build first. But as we become more efficient at building just the function of things, adding diverging flavor takes up a higher proportion of cost even if the cost of it itself absolutely stayed the same.
I do think broadly we're probably oversaturated with the flavor of high definition and 'realness' in the mainstream. But I don't think this is the end of taste evolution. Recently I've been looking back on movie posters from past decades. I think movie posters and advertisements are decent to examine here as they play to the mass taste of their time. In isolation of their moment and market there was a uniformity in style, yet over time it still progresses despite keeping it's core features.
Globalism is perhaps disappointing here because it means we have few equally sized parallel 'mainstreams' taking place. But at least with the internet, you can still just as rapidly find many actively diverging styles that are otherwise relatively niche to the mainstream.[1]
The most relevant thing about this article to me is the continued need for editors, and for people to push back on articles like this before they see the light of day.
This article is dead on arrival unless you start with explaining when in US or global cultural the general trend was individual distinctiveness.
Visual examples of sameness could be assembled from practically any point in human history.
An argument can also be made for a similar effect on language. In the UK in recent decades I've noticed a trend towards young people from various regions adopting a specific south London accent or dialect. Ironically although this seems to be part of adopting the culture of south London, it is also abandoning the dialect of their region which traditionally in the UK has been a very powerful source of identity.
In the town in England where I grew up I could easily tell if someone was from the nearest town (<10 miles away) within a few sentences, or the city a similar distance in the opposite direction. I suspect that won't be possible once the current generations have died out.
Homogeneity is just a natural result of more effective mixing.
It's autistic for the computer to be an extension of your brain. For you to think in computing, for the performance of your computer to be central to the performance of your thought. Access to powerful computers has shaped the way I think and work to the point where I practically live online. I'm not a hacker in the traditional sense, but the computer is my world, the internet is my home. Not in the shallow, social-media sense, like today's "influencers", but in a deep fundamental way. I don't even identify with humanity; being online allowed me to create my ideal self from scratch.
There are so many niches here I don't even know how to start listing them all. I am a unique type of person. I have not yet found even a single other person like me in this way. I have found a total of two other people who share my neurotype but none that share my attitude. That is how lonely it is.
Sure looking for certain things in a laptop is not necessarily autistic. But think of the reasons why people would look for these things. Normal people don't care as long as it works and is good enough for them. Because I live on this computer, every detail of how it works needs to be right. I need something that is perfect for me. I need a perfect screen, perfect keyboard, and high performance, all at the same time. Every machine with that perfect screen and perfect keyboard tends to get it mixed up with being "thin and light" and all that performance goes away. I hate that.
I can get used to some deviation. A lot of my preferences are simply resistance to change. But a lot of them are because I've tried anything else (possibly for years) and I hated it. There are things that I genuinely consider better and they're practically not available in a package that works for me.
Current economic supply/demand balance as well as philosophical principles are so utterly deranged, people lean toward what could maximize their profit. If this is achieved through conformism & doing what you're accustomed to, no one will try to truly innovate and prefer staying in their comfort zone.
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[ 5.0 ms ] story [ 219 ms ] threadSo for example he would say things like okay we have 10 ppl in explore mode and 90 ppl in exploit mode. The exploiters are generating enough cash to sustain org carrying capacity of explorers, how do we increase carrying capacity?
An entire yearly event devoted to the trade offs twixt exploration and exploitation.
The Frankfurt school in general deals with this problematic of Capitalism losing its revolutionary potential and becoming a stagnant, homogenous, unchanging system. Walter Benjamin, the spiritual father of both the above authors, in fact did extensive work attempting to uncover the wondrous possibilities of early high capitalism before it collapsed under the rule of Louis Bonaparte, which was the subject of Marx’s quite famous article The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Disagree with Marx if you want but he did believe that capitalism, if left to run wild, would produce a new form of hypermobile, freely associating society, but when that gets close to happening in times of crisis a certain section of elite seize power for themselves and prevent the revolutionary social changes from occuring, thus producing this endless mediocrity.
While it’s mostly a laugh (a shock?) to read Guénon and Marcuse side by side, I think Vico is really misunderstood and under-appreciated in our present cultural moment and I think a lot of good could come from a revival of his thought. He’s influenced a diverse array of characters, from Marx to Rosmini-Serbati, and I see a lot of his thought in Horkheimer and Habermas (I.e., the side of the Frankfurt school that rediscovered the big questions in a non-reactionary, non-nostalgic way).
- Simplified, bland corporate logos can be endlessly copied, moved and placed on canvasses and into a variety of mixed media. A bland, simplified logo is just at home plastered across packaging as it is painted on a piece of glass as it is cast in plastic and used as a decoration as it is floating atop stock footage as it is embossed in plastic on the side of a product. Design once, use everywhere, refresh occasionally.
- Five-over-ones are a response as outlined in the piece to building codes and space constraints. It's the tallest you can safely build a structure without using any steel, and the principle materials are concrete and wood which are very cheap. It can be configured as a mix of residential and commercial properties which means you have an inherent diversity in your investment as a landlord, or just as easily be 100% of either without many foundational changes.
- Corporate campuses have homogenized because of deregulation in corporate taxes and payment schemes, which incentivizes less investment in "cool shit" for your business. Why spend tons of money on a fancy headquarters with the top end of everything when instead you could just as easily give yourself all that money via stock buybacks, and then spend it on a yacht? And it's not like your competitors or customers give half a shit anymore, they all work in equally boring and dull campuses.
- To most people unfortunate enough to live in areas where cars are a necessity, they are at best, a convenient alternative to walking and at worst, an ongoing tax on their livelihood that must be paid. Your average Joe or Jane cares that a car is reliable and gets good fuel economy. The only people who care about looks are those that are status obsessed, and to them, the logo means far more than anything on the actual bodywork. Most of the status enabled vehicles are also identical to the cheaper ones, differed only by badges. It isn't even just platforms as the article says; tons of vehicles are outright the same damn vehicle being sold under a number of brands and models... because it's cheaper.
And as for less obvious things like AirBnBs and Coffee shops, it's just cheaper to imitate what's already working than doing any work to see what might be more interesting. Yeah those particular looks won out, but odds are that's less because of anything inherent to them, and more because it just... did, a no more consequential decision on the part of the universe than which specific fish happened to get legs right the first time. But for it being a different fish, maybe we'd all have legs that curved backwards instead of forwards at the knee.
And instagram face is what it is, as the article says, because of Kim Kardashian. Because she certainly didn't originate the concept of being famous for being famous, but she did perfect it, utterly buff it to a mirror shine, and what is being an influencer if not that?
I suspect money drives most other of these trends. You want to builds homes to look away that is proven to get highest sale price. You want to make the car look like the model that has sold most over past decade. You want to make your coffee shop look like what a successful coffee shop looks like to attract more customers. You want to make you influencer account look like every other influencer account to get as much sponsor and ad revenue as possible.
This is the same reason why we see reboot after reboot and if it isn't a reboot it is a sequel or prequel or reimagining of some sort, since all of the arts are now investments and need to make profit, no one wants to take a risk on unproven idea.
As for why even my home has white walls? Most people don't change the default. I don't care enough about the wall color and I know that I will be selling at some point and would have to paint the walls white again.
I think this one's the gist of it, and the big irony we'll all suffer from: While it gets cheaper to produce new things, not a lot of things will be original anymore.
I once heard that the 90s were the decade of references, and that might have just stuck a bit for too long: The boom of second-hand, mid-century furniture, the "industrial" look, rounded edged everywhere. Hell, even smartphones are just a reference to Sci-Fi flicks from the 60s (the case was Apple VS Samsung, I think). On demand services and the easy piracy of digital goods... I feel while there has been an perceived increase in quality for each individual at first, all these things helped everything to converge into "the average" for everyone.
We still see originality here and there, but you can just feel their competition against big budget productions. The movie Mandy (2018) was great, so was the show Scavengers Reign (2023), Breaking Bad etc. Landscape FM produce really interesing audio gear. I'm sure Open-Source (Hard- and Software) makes a lot of this possible, but for small and big equaly alike - depending on business practice, small might even be in danger to suffer from it.
I'm sure we all have our gems, but they just feel rare in this huge landscape. I just wish it would be a more common practice to support local artists and individials that take this mentioned risk, without having to turn it into a growth hacking startup idea.
No point in self-censoring, just make the discussion constructive. [0]
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
edit: shit, fuck, shit.
Edit: every time I mention a critique of capitalism on this forum it gets absolutely zero traction and even downvoted. Why is this the reaction, instead of maybe even telling me why this analysis is completely worthless or wrong in a proper argumented comment? Change my mind! But be also open to see more structural issues in the way we all live, maybe?
I'll break the silence to give you at least my view on it.
I find the "blame it on the capitalism" rhetoritc somewhat annoying, to be fair. It sounds like an escape hatch you can always invoke, and since we don't really have a significant example of a non-capitalist society, it's unfalsifiable. It often seems to me, that people use this argument as psychological escapism - a simple solution to a complex problem.
Specifically, I see the "capitalism is bad" argument often used on examples that are not really specific to capitalism and are instead a result of some general principles.
For example, it seems to me that this article just describes preferential attachment process (rich get richer) in various fields.Another common one is multipolar trap (or tragedy of the commons or collective action problem). Those things tend to happen absolutely everywhere, because the conditions for them are very simple to satisfy.
We shouldn't be suprised to see them in capitalism, and we should expect them to arise in different forms in practically every system.
I am all but an anti-capitalist per se. I believe that, among all forms of societal organization, capitalism has proven to be the most effective at taking masses out of poverty.
I am also very aware that different types of capitalism exist, and in my critique I'm usually referring to the American "unbridled" or more or less libertarian Capitalism, rather than the social democratic flavor we have in Europe. We even have chinese capitalism, the most beautiful and effective economic oxymoron to ever prove effective at what it does.
My gripe is mostly with the American form, and its role as a fundamental engine of disequalities. It's socialism for the ultrarich, as many capitalists in America would define it with no issue. I do think that this explains not all, but a lot of the undercurrents that lead to what this article described, as most of this trend seem to spread from a globalized push for optimization through homologation.
Especially when discussing with an educated American counterpart, I have the feeling that capitalism is the untouchable axiom of everything - which is expressed in your "annoyance", or at least that's what I perceive.
"Oh, here we go, let's blame it all again on capitalism..." To me that's like fish complaining that everything around them is always wet, but getting annoyed if anyone mentions water.
Of course, getting out of the water is not an option for them, and sure there is no alternative for us about capitalism. In this case the options are twofold: go the Mark Fisher way, conceding to the despair of a lack of an alternative; promote constant discussion and self-reflection about it, in a democratic and dialectically constructive way, to make the best of the water we all swim in.
Every decade defines is own unique style and it spreads until it's no longer distinct.
3rd wave coffee shops all look like that because they started during peak farm to table aesthetic. It's funny because it was born out of the answer to 1990s strip-mall sameness where you'd find Chilis and Starbucks. I remember designers losing their shit when they found wood planks of fallen down barns they could use in their interiors.
Now that people are getting bored of farm to table, it'll be on to something else. When we look back in 50 years, all of this "sameness" the author is pointing towards will mostly just be here to define 2010-2020, with whatever name historians decide to call it.
https://lab.sciencemuseum.org.uk/colour-shape-using-computer...
2. Design values and aesthetics are ossifying around certain "hard" rules.
I've only got anecdotal examples of old people preferring blander colours, hence "suspect" rather than "think".
When my dad died, my mum replaced all the furniture and carpets with blander versions of the same — in particular replacing the bold orange living room carpet and dark green patterned hall, stairs, and landing carpets with mild off-white.
I agree. The downside is that this is a sort of permanent\long-term shift since the world is generally getting older and we are reproducing at below-replacement.
At least for me, visually minimalist objects and environments are appealing because I generally feel overstimulated in modern society and by modern technology. I might feel different if I were to spend my days on the field doing slow, repetitive hard work.
We got a designer for a flat that was being renovated, and I realized that I needed to seriously involve myself in the project if the result was not going to turn out a lifeless, gray-white-beige soup.
Now the flat is full of green, (warm) wooden, peach and red elements, giving it a cozy autumn-y vibe. And I don't need to stuff it with props that "pop" to add personality - it has one of its own.
The prevailing wisdom seems to be "Make it all greige, and introduce life with (often pointless) colorful props". I feel this is more offending to the senses than having a tastefully colored environment where you don't need to "add" anything.
It may not be exactly the same in other markets, but there's still a cost to offering additional color variants. It's a cost optimization to offer the fewest colors that are appealing, or at least aren't objectionable, to the widest range of potential buyers.
It left no ambiguity for me. Both the project (which is great art in itself) and the commentary opens a door for a hard truth, and new questions emerge,
In tech, might we learn from this?
from TFA: "Looking for freedom, we found slavery.”
Every parent. Every patrician, condescending patron. Every "elite". Each have their idea of what "freedom" is best for others.
And the people say: "Boaty McBoatface!"
In cybersecurity we want people to be safe. But the people say; "Give me TikTok, Microsoft...."
Would Rousseau want us "being forced to be free"?
Probably. The French revolution actors were inspired by his work, and the French revolution led to the declaration of the human rights, which states that all people are born free and equal. If you take this claim as universal, then your moral duty is to make it happen.
So yes, do free people even if they believe their situation is fine. Perhaps for instance because they've been brainwashed into believing it is, or perhaps they don't even know what freedom is.
Unfortunately countries/organizations/persons that claimed to do that too often also had ulterior motives.
The phrase "looking for freedom, we found slavery" is interesting because if there's slavery, then there's a master. The master we are talking about is "norm" or "convention". The term "slavery" can be apt in some cases, but generally is excessive.
"Anticonformity" was somewhat a dismissive word in my country up to some point, but I have not heard it in that way for while, which suggests that people accept more easily "abnormal" people. When you want your freedom and you can have it, then there's no slavery nor tyranny.
It's odd that in almost all walks of life, freedom comes from non-conformity. In arts, and in science, "progress" is a movement away from wherever we are. We may not like non-conformists, but we absolutely rely on them to move forward.
Yet totalitarian technological social systems are the only creation that make those who conform "more free". By design they limit options at the margins while enabling those in the middle of the mediocrity curve. Slavery is freedom. And thus, since time stops for no man or machine, systems invite their own inevitable destruction.
Technology is not just "a way of not having to experience the world" (Max Frisch), but a way of not having to experience change. And I think the "master" that you speak of is fear (fear of things changing).
Sony's "Into the Spiderverse" freed itself from the shadow of Pixar, and has forever changed what high quality, mass audience, computer animated films can be, and Dreamworks has already shifted its own design towards more expressive unique cartoon language.
Also, the rising shift of A24's unique visual aesthetic in the 2010s remained quite obscure until "Everything Everywhere All at Once" 2 years ago finally brought its "freedom" of visual expression to mainstream audiences. Now, others want to capture that same visual style and I'm seeing a broad shift away from over saturation, hyper realism, and toward the more muted and mundane. I'm impressed that Marvel is already applying some of it in "Agatha All Along".
Anyway, my point still stands, artists will constantly push back against whatever is mainstream in an effort to be seen and to define their own aesthetic/brand. It's easier to be 1 of 10, than it is 1 of a million. Plus, if they're lucky enough, they get to be known for starting or accelerating the movement.
Every single decade has very clearly defined aesthetics that designers copy until something new comes along to disrupt it.
When we look at 70s interiors full of leather upholstery, wood panels and with a desaturated look from old film camera pictures, they feel outdated. It's hard for me to imagine looking at these white, clean HD interiors and saying "oh this feels so outdated" - but I bet that's exactly what people will think decades from now.
The age of average - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35355703 - March 2023 (474 comments)
I may have different needs from the average person, but why does nobody else have these needs? Am I the only autistic person on the planet, the only software developer on the planet, the only person on the planet who likes to be productive on a laptop? The only person on the planet who practically lives in their laptop?
I think hopefully not, but this is like... probably under 1% of people. And you know, almost nobody caters to this niche because if you cater to the 99% (or more) instead, you make so much more money!
I fucking hate having special needs sometimes.
I agree it can be frustrating when the mainstream focuses on things you don’t like, but that doesn’t always exclude the things you do. I don’t like pop music but there’s more music I like now than when I was young.
Sure, there are many powerful, heavy laptops. Almost none with a HiDPI screen, though. And almost none that lack a numpad (and off-center trackpad). And almost none with half-height arrow keys, even among the ones without numpad.
To find one with all three of those? You may as well not even try. I have more requirements, but nobody really cares even about the most basic ones, so there's no point in hoping for the more complex ones.
Even among laptops with 4K screens they're bound to have "full-size" keyboards with a numpad. If no numpad, the arrow keys are still likely to be full-size, and there are probably dedicated Home/End/PgUp/PgDn buttons, which are always stupid compared to putting them into Fn+Arrows.
I get it, portable workstations are designed to be desktops in a laptop form factor. They're not designed to be laptops. But maybe something out there should be. Maybe there should be even a single laptop on the planet that is actually designed like a premium laptop, with workstation-class power inside.
There probably won't be, though - far more likely for everybody to tell me my expectations are completely unrealistic. (It'll happen any second now, probably.)
> I agree it can be frustrating when the mainstream focuses on things you don’t like, but that doesn’t always exclude the things you do.
The Framework Laptop 16 is one of the first Windows laptops I have ever seen that checks many of those boxes, but unfortunately it's still thin and light (and also AMD).
I recently got a Apple 16" MacBook Pro and it's okay. Really many of my requirements were inherited from the Mid-2015 MBP being possibly the best machine I'd ever used, but then Apple became terrible for a while, and nobody else (not even Razer) did a good job of replicating what I liked about that machine.
(According to Geekbench, this machine outperforms my desktop 12400F by 20% in single-core and over 100% in multi-core, and it's also less than 5% behind my RTX 3090 in GPU performance... in practice though, I've noticed certain work tasks drop down from taking over 10 seconds to under 3 seconds.)
The reason I don't like thin and light Windows laptops is because they freaking don't.
Besides profit motive, there are fundamental and evolutionary reasons for the convergence - humans are naturally attracted to pleasing composition and natural light in AirSpace, have our attention easily manipulated by unconventional titles etc. So companies are just exploiting our penchants and preferences.
But popular music itself is to a high degree very same. That's not to say that there is no original music anymore. There is a big amount. It's just people tastes that decide what becomes popular, and everybody wants to hear the same.
And yet, fashion and taste change. It's just a matter of time.
What becomes popular seems to be whatever we get brainwashed with, ie what we get advertised.
It seems to be less driven by social changes than it is driven by profit motive of those able to feed most of us 10-15 minutes of advertising within each of the several hours of media consumption most of us partake of each day.
According to him, it is not just tastes, it is the way musicians get paid:
"Streaming platforms pay artists each time a track gets listened to. And a “listen” is classified as 30 seconds or more of playback. To maximise their pay, savvy artists are releasing albums featuring a high number of short tracks."
Most of what the article is complaining about is because the economics has led to monopolization.
At least back in the 1960s and 1970s, you had some individuality which would poke up. A department store wanted different clothes from the other department store to draw you in. A radio DJ wanted different music to get you to listen to their channel. etc.
However, once everything is a monopoly, there is no need to spend any money to be unique since there is nowhere different for anybody to switch to.
Some of this article seems to be about trends, which we always had? They come and go don't they? No ones doing barn doors anymore are they?
Everything subjective has genres, then sub-genres, that a smaller group of people like, down to the individual. If something is very popular and/or mainstream in its sub-genre it becomes popular in its genre, and if very popular and/or mainstream in its genre becomes popular mainstream.
Everything subjective has "guidelines" it must follow in order to be popular, and the genres and sub-genres have further guidelines. But it can't follow every guideline or it won't be popular. At minimum people become desensitized, also some stated "guidelines" are wrong and the inherent "guideline" is different, because people don't completely know what they like. Because people don't completely know what they like, there are also "rare guidelines" that nobody follows or states but would create something especially popular, and rare guidelines create new genres.
For example, music. Almost every song (even non-traditional) has these common components: 12-tone equal temperament, simple time signature, "melody" "harmony" and "rhythm", etc.. Jazz, rock, electronic, etc. and have their own guidelines. Perhaps jazz was created because jazz chords used to be a rare guideline. But no song, even pop music, follows 100% of the guidelines. At minimum, instruments don't produce pure sine/square/triangle waves, melody has accents or modulation, etc. And the most popular songs do something novel (either completely novel, or they take something novel from a less-popular song and do better in other areas).
So how does this relate to the age of average? People know what I said above. AirBnB hosts, directors, etc. whose art is a business know the guidelines, both reported from others and inherently. But they don't know everything, and in particular, they either don't know how to break the guidelines in order to create something better, or they do know a way but don't believe it will work. So in order to create something that is the most likely to be the most popular, they follow the guidelines. What they create is at a local maxima, OK but bland, because it fits nobody's niche genres and there is no imperfection. Over time, it becomes less OK and more bland because everyone else follows the same guidelines, until some trend-setter reveals new guidelines that break the old ones and are more popular, then everyone follows those.
In order to be more successful than "OK" you have to know how to break the guidelines and follow rare ones, and the less other people who know the rare guidelines the more you'll be successful. But this requires 1) rare knowledge and 2) risk.
If everyone broke more guidelines, the world would be better, because to any individual, even though there would be more ugly AirBnBs and movies, there would be a few that are better than those we have today. And anyone who followed all the guidelines would create something that nobody wants, because although if you averaged everyone's ratings it would rate the highest, it would always be below first place. But since most people are following most of the guidelines, if one person breaks them, they get a few happy customers and less customers overall, so they give up or go out of business.
The former system, where everyone is following different guidelines, exists when people first discover an entirely new genre, and don't even know what the common guidelines are. But it transitions into the latter system, because every time someone discovers a rare guideline that captures enough of the market, the option that captures the most of the market is to follow the remaining common guidelines. We as a society can transition back into the former system and would remain until someone discovers a new rare guideline, but that takes cooperation which we don&#x...
Fashion and trends where always a thing. They spread faster and more globally today because the communication is rich and easy, and of course there are a lot of followers of any trend.
But, not everything is "average". That bell curve is probably very high today, but there is a lot beyond the ±σ , just need to look there.
Of course, the world if large and kaleidoscopic. But the rate of homogeneity in the middle 80% is higher than it's even been, and that really affects everyone. I actually want diversity in the mainstream, since some projects are only enjoyable if you can share them with others and if they get the most talented people to work on them.
The fact that nobody would make a Doctor Zhivago or even a Back to the Future today is not something I can fix with all my searching.
What do you mean by that?
I'm not familiar with Doctor Zhivago so I had to look it up, the 1965 film is based on a 1957 novel, which seems to match just fine with the pattern of The Martian, The Three Body Problem, Game of Thrones, Fifty Shades of Grey, etc.
Back to the Future is a fun trilogy, but the first film was mostly set in 1955 (so if it had been done today the past would have been 1994, compare to Captain Marvel being mostly set in 1995), the second film was 1985's idea of 2015 (and we still get plenty of what-if fiction in the near-ish future, e.g. Blade Runner 2049, Cyberpunk 2077), the third was yet another wild-west Cowboys-and-Indians gunslinger (1885) — but if you mean to focus on the more playful and fun aspects of how it was put together, or the positive vibes of good people working to solve problems and where it's clear who the goodies and baddies are, BttF reminds me more of The Orville or Lower Decks. (And The Martian if you want to consider the environment/time travel itself, rather than Biff, to be the problem).
For that issue, I think that as any medium ages, it transforms from "explore" to "exploit", which is also why films have a lot more sequels and reboots.
So, if you want more range, explore new media: games, youtube, etc.
I've never agreed with this argument, it just felt like an excuse. For 100 years movies kept changing as society also changed, and all of a sudden they hit the exploit phase somehow after 2000, when GCI was still improving.
Movies are in part a product of a social climate, and that climate is never static, so to me it seems like there should always be something to explore. It just seems that financier no longer want to put any money in exploring, and culture becomes poorer while the GDP grows.
Even BttF itself was three films, and in the second one was parodying the tendency towards sequels with the holographic Jaws 19.
The concept of "McDonaldization" (coined in 1993) sums it best: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonaldization
there are a million million subcultures with pretty stark differences in taste/aesthetics that you can dig up on the internet. looking at what's grossing in mega-dense populations of millions of people then yeah, perhaps in aggregate at large N, things their individuality -- surprise?
there are parts of every major city that feel the same, but if you're willing to take a train out 45 minutes in any direction without google maps, i'm willing to bet you get into spaces that are incredibly local!
In the animal kingdom, other organisms who live in collectives like ants, birds etc fall in to patterns that unique. Could it be that we are subconsciously following these instincts and falling into these "consistent" patterns?
I do think broadly we're probably oversaturated with the flavor of high definition and 'realness' in the mainstream. But I don't think this is the end of taste evolution. Recently I've been looking back on movie posters from past decades. I think movie posters and advertisements are decent to examine here as they play to the mass taste of their time. In isolation of their moment and market there was a uniformity in style, yet over time it still progresses despite keeping it's core features.
Globalism is perhaps disappointing here because it means we have few equally sized parallel 'mainstreams' taking place. But at least with the internet, you can still just as rapidly find many actively diverging styles that are otherwise relatively niche to the mainstream.[1]
1. https://aesthetics.fandom.com/wiki/Category:2020s
This article is dead on arrival unless you start with explaining when in US or global cultural the general trend was individual distinctiveness.
Visual examples of sameness could be assembled from practically any point in human history.
Where's the evidence that this is a new trend?
In the town in England where I grew up I could easily tell if someone was from the nearest town (<10 miles away) within a few sentences, or the city a similar distance in the opposite direction. I suspect that won't be possible once the current generations have died out.
Homogeneity is just a natural result of more effective mixing.
There are so many niches here I don't even know how to start listing them all. I am a unique type of person. I have not yet found even a single other person like me in this way. I have found a total of two other people who share my neurotype but none that share my attitude. That is how lonely it is.
Sure looking for certain things in a laptop is not necessarily autistic. But think of the reasons why people would look for these things. Normal people don't care as long as it works and is good enough for them. Because I live on this computer, every detail of how it works needs to be right. I need something that is perfect for me. I need a perfect screen, perfect keyboard, and high performance, all at the same time. Every machine with that perfect screen and perfect keyboard tends to get it mixed up with being "thin and light" and all that performance goes away. I hate that.
I can get used to some deviation. A lot of my preferences are simply resistance to change. But a lot of them are because I've tried anything else (possibly for years) and I hated it. There are things that I genuinely consider better and they're practically not available in a package that works for me.