[HN Gopher] The age of average
___________________________________________________________________
The age of average
Author : kloch
Score : 827 points
Date : 2023-03-29 11:39 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.alexmurrell.co.uk)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.alexmurrell.co.uk)
| jedberg wrote:
| You see the same thing in companies that use A/B testing to drive
| all of their decisions. They land on a local maxima and then
| stick with it. Radical ideas get pushed out even if they could
| represent a new maxima.
|
| The problem with purely data driven design is that you get faster
| horses instead of cars.
|
| We need a new generation of tastemakers to just start designing
| beautiful things.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| It's easy to avoid these homogenizing trends, just dig through
| historical art works from different time periods and from
| different regions of the world.
| mlhpdx wrote:
| I'm clearly in a different world; I see wild diversity in
| aesthetics and function around me every day. Conformity and
| convergence? Yes, it's there but all around it is the beautiful
| chaos of creativity and divergence.
| trgn wrote:
| Can you provide some specific examples from a typical day?
| m3kw9 wrote:
| A few of the examples is a bit unfair like houses look the same,
| but in reality they are same because the structure works and the
| building code are more easily adhered when they look like that,
| instead of say a parallelogram, and it's more efficient to work
| with the current set of technologies + materials that are readily
| available.
|
| I do agree we are not taking enough risks in art but instead
| trying to please everyone's tastes
| Ekaros wrote:
| I would say that if you were to take similar use buildings from
| same period of time they would look very close to each other.
| Ofc, there is always some trend setters or outliers, but in
| general they would look pretty close to each other or follow
| certain formula. It is just less apparent as we see mix of
| those periods very often.
| alexpotato wrote:
| This article is implicitly also an example of Hotelling's Law [0]
|
| Essentially, it's rational for firms to move towards "the middle"
| of the market. That could be the middle of a boardwalk if you are
| a hot dog stand or the middle of the political spectrum if you
| are a politician.
|
| It's not necessarily because of testing but rather because being
| in the middle gives you access to the largest section of the
| market.
|
| As a counter point, you could argue that a counterpoint is the
| expression "there are riches in the niches".
|
| 0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotelling%27s_law
| textread wrote:
| One of the strategies a politician could use to move towards
| the middle is creating a Sister Souljah moment [0]
| A Sister Souljah moment is a politician's calculated public
| repudiation of an extremist person, statement, group or
| position that is perceived to have some association with the
| politician's own party.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sister_Souljah_moment
| werds wrote:
| ironically the author uses one of the most popular squarespace
| templates in the muted pink which is called out in the article
| prakhar897 wrote:
| Am I dumb or is this article pseudoscience?
|
| The AirBNB example is horrible. I've worked on ranking side of a
| very similar hotel aggregator app. Certain pics are boosted
| because users click on them more, the AirBNB hosts then see this
| and make their house more conforming to the top pictures. A few
| cycles of this and you've got complete homogeneity. Same with
| Instagram Models, Youtube thumbnails, Book covers etc.
|
| I want to point out a key difference. It's not that people like a
| specific thing, it's more that a kafkaesque algorithm boosts
| specific traits. People realize this and start to mimic those
| traits.
|
| The infrastructure arguments falls flat because creativity
| requires money which most buildings have scarcity of. So they
| mostly follow the cookie cutter model.
| game_the0ry wrote:
| I used to think that the convergence of similar branding (logos,
| colors, etc) was the product of corporations hiring the same
| marketing consultants, but the part about the instagram aesthetic
| blew my mind. Looking through my wife's feed, a lot of women post
| pics in similar clothes, in similar poses, in similar locations,
| doing similar activities.
|
| We're dumb heard animals, apparently.
| pqb wrote:
| Perhaps we try to do the same as others (wear the same clothes,
| pose the same way, buy the same things, etc.) so as not to be
| an alien too much?
| game_the0ry wrote:
| I can agree with that - fitting in is important. Totally
| makes sense.
| RedCondor wrote:
| It's worth understanding how some people's idea of what is
| "great" (elite) is formed. Friedrich Nietzsche's endurance as a
| philosopher is a good index of the popularity of such ideas:
|
| >Nobody grows rich or poor anymore: both are too much of a
| burden. Who still wants to rule? Who obey? Both are too much of a
| burden. No herdsman and one herd.
|
| Uniqueness, standing out from a "mediocre" herd, "acceptance" of
| "harsh realities," etc. are not just how some people decide to
| enjoy themselves, but also how they look down upon others.
|
| https://redsails.org/losurdo-und-telepolis/
| wellpast wrote:
| There must be a name for this phenomenon where someone sits in
| their academic study, spends time smartly and refinedly analyzing
| some aspects of social behavior, and among myriad possible
| theories they select the one where mankind, in general, is
| stupid, philistine, average...
| revel wrote:
| Although they weren't mentioned, social media and streaming video
| are the most striking cases. There's one flavor of social media
| website and it sucks. It's the same infinite scrolling page of
| 30s attention grabbing headline/video/images posted by the same
| people on the same 5 or 6 websites made by the same set of
| engineers. There are minor variations, but they're better
| described as "positioning" than truly differentiated experiences.
| What makes instagram "better" (or worse) than tiktok or twitter?
| It's the same soup filling the contours of the same, slightly
| differently shaped bowl.
|
| Streaming video is even less differentiated. Every player looks
| more or less the same now and the content is largely fungible
| between platforms. It used to be that Netflix had superior
| selection and had the best player, but content has been
| balkanized and every platform looks and works roughly the same
| way. Almost every platform is now targeting the same type of
| content: low cost, easy to mass produce, and mass consumable. I
| will give youtube and twitch credit for being quite different --
| at one time. Now, for whatever reasons, these services seem like
| they're on a steady march towards homogeneity too.
|
| There are signs of the phenomenon the article describes
| everywhere and it seems to have happened across most artistic and
| business disciplines around the same time period. I would be very
| curious to know the ages of some of the posters in this thread
| since there are some interesting differences in
| opinion/experience. If you see it, you see it and feel it
| everywhere, but if you never saw what life was like before
| there's no way to make any kind of comparison. There were places
| and services and things objects that did not even attempt to
| cater to average expectations. That difference was real, in ways
| both tangible and abstract. This article won't resonate with
| posters in their 20's like it does for those in their 40's.
| stephc_int13 wrote:
| The worst part of this trend, IMHO, is related to electronic
| devices, especially smartphones.
|
| The iPhone design is great in many aspects, and it covers quite a
| few use cases, but not all of them, there should be space for
| alternatives, different form factors, different styles.
|
| We often tend to blame individuality and selfishness, but at the
| collective level our herd behavior is quite a bit stronger than
| our individuality.
|
| The implied heuristic behind herd behavior is that some
| individuals are taking the risk, and the group follows those who
| succeed. But when nobody is taking risk we're all losing.
| ilaksh wrote:
| Most people instinctively hate things that are truly new or
| different or generally stand out. It may be due to cognitive
| limitations or maybe just common instinct.
|
| That's why the conclusion of the article doesn't work. You can't
| sell anything that's truly new or different. I think that the
| only way trends change is when so many people have tried that the
| herd has basically migrated to that new position accidentally
| inch-by-inch. It will trample all of the people leading the way
| and deny that they existed.
| sacnoradhq wrote:
| 0. The vehicle similarity has a name: jellybean cars.
|
| 1. So this explains why hipsters all look the same too.
|
| 2. If one desired to create different enough to look different,
| then they should stop looking at everyone and everything else to
| minimize bias. Forget the outside world and what _they_ might
| think. It also reduces personal discontent and misery by avoiding
| comparisons with others. Perhaps the Amish have something by
| choosing purposefully plain almost uniforms as the antithesis of
| Instagram.
| _shadi wrote:
| The age of A/B testing
| ilyaskolgotkin wrote:
| Article doesn't tell us anything new apart from a normal
| distribution in the widely globalised world.
| eyphka wrote:
| For much of this article, I know nothing.
|
| But on the one area I can speak intelligently about, video games,
| this article is dead wrong. There has been an explosion of
| experimentation in terms of anything measurable: genres, art
| styles, etc. And from a product/ company point of view, this can
| be seen by the diversity of who is winning. The largest game in
| the world in terms of revenue AND number of users is Minecraft,
| which looks zero like the next best selling game.
|
| This makes me think the whole article is wrong.
| karaterobot wrote:
| All of those examples do look the same, as long as you ignore the
| ways in which they look different. If you do that, then it all
| makes pretty good sense as an argument. If you start pointing out
| how they aren't all the same, then the argument breaks down a
| little bit. Take your pick of approaches, depending on whether
| you are predisposed to agree or disagree with the thesis.
| demaratus83 wrote:
| The author has discovered fashion.
| jonnycat wrote:
| A tangent from the point of the post, but Komar & Melamid did a
| similar "experiment" with music to produce both the most wanted
| and most unwanted songs, and the results are amazing/hilarious.
|
| The most unwanted song, for example, features all the thing
| people dislike in music (according to their surveys): opera
| singers rapping about cowboys, bagpipes, uncomfortably slow
| tempos, and choirs of children singing ad jingles among other
| things.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gPuH1yeZ08
| FeteCommuniste wrote:
| Wow. Not just an opera singer rapping, but an opera singer
| rapping over a drum-machine beat with what sounds like a tuba
| playing the bassline and discordant accordion, bagpipe, and
| harp riffs coming in and out.
|
| Hahaha, this is beautifully terrible. Thanks for linking it.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| According to [1] 53% of Americans are fans of Taylor Swift. Does
| that mean we've "converged" on Taylor Swift as the optimal
| musician?
|
| No, it means you just have to work harder to find music with
| actual creativity behind it.
|
| [1] https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/majority-
| ameri...
| Last5Digits wrote:
| I'm always wary of articles like this. The feeling of things
| becoming mediocre strongly resonates with me, but I am aware that
| there could be a great many different biases at play.
|
| When I was younger, entertainment media felt magical. The
| complexity and depth of experiences I could get from even a
| second-rate story was immense. I remember staying up late at
| night to process the last movie I watched, or feeling that rich
| combination of sadness and inspiration from finishing a long
| book.
|
| I barely consume media nowadays, because every book, movie, TV
| show, video game and song fails to give me an interesting or
| meaningful experience. They all feel like grey slop - and after a
| few minutes, I start to fantasize about vacuuming my apartment,
| because even that seems like an adventure in comparison.
|
| The question is, why do I feel this way? Is it because the modern
| entertainment industry truly has become stale, or is it because
| I've lived long enough to see the simple patterns underlying most
| of our desires and fantasies?
| VancouverMan wrote:
| [flagged]
| oh_sigh wrote:
| > The effects of the rise of "political correctness",
| hypersensitivity, and "cancel culture" over the last three or
| so decades should be considered, too.
|
| There are countless books, movies, and songs from before the
| rise of these concepts that OP has almost certainly not
| consumed. Presumably OP wasn't just talking about new media,
| but rather all media, and therefore is probably a them issue
| and not a media issue.
| Fauntleroy wrote:
| This is most certainly not it.
| schrijver wrote:
| The latter probably, but you could also say that means your
| standards have evolved, and it's less easy to find material
| that challenges you. I tend to think it's out there though, so
| I wouldn't give up just yet! Our desires might be simple, but
| art does not need to deal with it in a simple or formulaic way.
| ssnistfajen wrote:
| >Is it because the modern entertainment industry truly has
| become stale, or is it because I've lived long enough to see
| the simple patterns underlying most of our desires and
| fantasies?
|
| Most likely the latter. There's so much content being created
| nowadays thanks to advancements in pretty much everything,
| making it easier to for anyone to create content. Patterns
| eventually emerge since creating truly original and unqiue
| ideas is not compatible with the current rate of content
| creation.
| guntherhermann wrote:
| There are 9 superhero/marvel films out this year.
|
| I sit on the side of "It's because the modern entertainment
| industry has become stale."
| ssnistfajen wrote:
| When there's so much content being produced, of course some
| of them will become stale. It is a consequence, not a
| cause.
| acuozzo wrote:
| > I barely consume media nowadays, because every book, movie,
| TV show, video game and song fails to give me an interesting or
| meaningful experience.
|
| I felt this way too until I realized that what I was really
| experiencing was that my desire to explore outside of my
| comfort zone had lessened with age.
|
| Have you jumped into silent films? Buster Keaton?
|
| Have you explored European Atmospheric Cinema? Jean-Luc Godard?
|
| Art House? Non-Kurosawa Japanese films? Pre-Bollywood Indian
| films?
|
| In the past, when confronted with questions like that, I would
| reply with a statement akin to: "Yeah, but that's not what
| interests me!"
|
| And the lesson I needed to learn about myself was contained
| within those-- _my own_ --words.
| Last5Digits wrote:
| Thank you for this advice. Upon some self-reflection, I think
| I realize now that I've fallen into this exact trap. The few
| movies I've recently watched have been the kind of formulaic
| drivel that I know I'm sick of, and yet I've never felt any
| desire to watch genres I'm not already familiar with.
|
| I seem to get some perverse kind of satisfaction from
| reinforcing my nihilistic view of the current state of things
| while doing absolutely nothing to challenge or improve that
| perception - and all the while I'm longing for some nostalgic
| idea of the past.
| squidsoup wrote:
| > I seem to get some perverse kind of satisfaction from
| reinforcing my nihilistic view of the current state of
| things
|
| Oh, you're going to love Bela Tarr, maybe start there.
| vmladenov wrote:
| It's a bit fiendish to nudge an unsuspecting victim
| towards Satantango like that :P
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| Part of this phenomenon is that the traditional "curators" of
| art are not really doing their jobs as stewards of the art.
| They are just extracting money. You used to be able to find
| cinemas that showed art house films in places other than the
| center of big cities (where they are struggling to stay
| open), but now it's all Marvel movies and whatever new samey
| rom-com just came out. That leads people to not even start
| down the path of discovery to find what they really like.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| The age of curation and stewarding is gone. You can find
| all sorts of new, boundary-pushing art online, but there's
| no money or respect in curation anymore. Media is being
| created faster than any curator can keep up and the market
| is so wide that it's easier for individuals to just ask
| friends instead of seeking a trusted curator.
| 2b3a51 wrote:
| Some things I found to be 'new'...
|
| Harold Lloyd _Safety Last_ is a comedy silent film that I sat
| with 2000 other people to watch about a decade ago. There was
| an orchestra in the pit playing the music that was composed
| for the film. Talk about laughing until you cried. Magic
| evening.
|
| Nitin Sawhney has written and performed _new_ music for
| silent movies from India and Japan. Again performed to full
| concert halls producing quite a novel experience. _A throw of
| the dice_ was quite something.
|
| Philip Jeck and Gavin Bryars' _The Sinking of the Titanic_
| played with a small 1917 style dance band. Projected visuals
| cut from contemporary newsreel film of huge ocean liners and
| crowds playing against Jeck 's turntable based
| improvisations. A magic and elegiac evening.
|
| The common thread for me is performance I think.
| epups wrote:
| Yeah I agree. Part of growing up is recognising patterns
| everywhere, including art. I don't doubt the process of making
| everything more average is there, but it's hard to ascertain
| that when every observer is biased.
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _every book, movie, TV show, video game and song fails to
| give me an interesting or meaningful experience_
|
| I'm curious, have you tried watching shows like _Russian Doll_?
| _Andor_? _The Last of Us_? _The Leftovers_?
|
| These are shows that deal with the very deepest of human themes
| -- growth overcoming trauma, political radicalization,
| paradoxical aspects of love, and finding meaning in life
| (respectively, for those four shows).
|
| They're some of the most exciting and well-written pieces of
| art to come around in a long time. And then after each episode,
| you can easily spend a couple of hours reading story analysis
| and criticism, listening to podcast analysis and so forth.
| Because there is a _lot_ to unpack -- the patterns there aren
| 't simple at all.
|
| I can't help but wonder if you're not finding things like these
| that are actually pushing the envelope. (Obviously we're not
| talking about things like the NBC reboot of _Night Court_.)
| hgsgm wrote:
| > is it because I've lived long enough to see the simple
| patterns underlying most of our desires and fantasies?
|
| Yes. And also, ironically because as you get older novelty is
| less important, so new stuff is boring regardless of whether is
| differ or same.
|
| In every generation kids have loved the new generation of Star
| Wars, despite us adults knowing that the best one was the one
| we say when we were kids.
| schrijver wrote:
| This why I find the geek-o-sphere so tiring dissecting things
| like why are the new Star Wars movies bad... I have no
| problem believing that... the old ones might have been
| better, but they were also formulaic and badly acted and the
| reason they seemed so profound and amazing at the time was
| seeing them as a kid! Those spending time watching and hating
| on kids movies might better seek out something that can
| actually challenge them.
| [deleted]
| kerowak wrote:
| Ironically, this reads like any other repetitive blogpost running
| with a half-baked premise. To me, the author is mostly describing
| culture. Things look a certain way at a certain point in history
| because of the averaging effects of culture. Houses from the
| 1950's look like houses from the 1950's. Fashion from the 1970's
| looks like fashion from the 1970's. Coffee shops from 2020 look
| like coffee shops from 2020.
|
| The subtext seems to be that American society looks like it does,
| and _that's bad_. This is a more nuanced point that deserves to
| be examined as it applies to different aspects of our aesthetic
| culture. I hate Marvel movies and what they've done to mainstream
| cinema, but I don't particularly care if a certain type of woman
| wants to emulate Kim Kardashian. I think the notion that you
| _should_ care about this trend in the appearances of a certain
| type of women, especially when juxtaposed against cheugy Airbnb
| decor, is not a good perspective to hold onto. No one is making
| you decorate your house like an Airbnb, dude.
|
| The author concludes that the current state of our aesthetic
| culture is a market opportunity to "reintroduce" variation. This
| is a flawed notion. If you succeed in changing a piece of our
| aesthetic culture, then you will have successfully spurred the
| mass-adoption of your personal brand of blandness. You may have
| gotten rich in the process, but you will be a failure in your
| stated goal.
|
| Counterculture exists for a reason
| adverbly wrote:
| Totally agree.
|
| However, I think that this current generation is fundamentally
| different because of a different balance between culture and
| counterculture driven by demographic changes.
|
| The 50s through to the 90s were all time periods when the
| population was predominantly youthful, and far more likely to
| belong to belong to counterculture movements. Because there was
| a lot of them, they made up a significant market, and so
| advertisers would pick up counterculture movements.
|
| But in modern times, there are a lot of baby boomers who are
| pretty old. Their tastes are far less likely to change at this
| point, there are a lot of them, and they have a lot of money.
|
| Give it 10 years, and hopefully we will start to see some more
| variety. Variety is the spice of life as they say...
| nathias wrote:
| if you zag when the world zigs, you're getting zapped
| ajuc wrote:
| TLDR convergent evolution is a thing.
| cbsmith wrote:
| I'm amazed this entire article managed to avoid mentioning
| ChatGPT.
| dsevil wrote:
| All the websites look the same but it's mostly because all the
| frameworks are the same. I'm thinking mainly of Bootstrap and
| Zurb Foundation. They share a lot of the same principles such as
| the 12-column grid, general typographic dimensions, button
| styles, etc. Granted, a lot of that stuff is for good reasons. In
| point of actual fact, I've studied their final CSS products and
| they share quite many implementation details.
|
| There's also that "rule of threes" which almost every client
| likes.
|
| Also, most of the new fonts are derivative. Amazon Ember looks
| like a bland mashup of Calibri and ITC Officina, like the latter
| of which a lot of other fonts look, and the former of which is
| bland as heck. Poppins looks like ITC Avant Garde Gothic.
| TheSansMono kind of looks like Consolas. There are a truckload of
| direct modifications of DejaVu Sans Mono/Bitstream Vera Sans
| Mono. Bitstream eVera Sans is a fugly bizarro version of
| Verdana/Tahoma.
| uptownfunk wrote:
| >> This article argues that from film to fashion and architecture
| to advertising, creative fields have become dominated and defined
| by convention and cliche. Distinctiveness has died. In every
| field we look at, we find that everything looks the same.
|
| It's a very sad thing to witness, the death of uniqueness,
| distinct identity. Part of me hesitatingly attributes it to
| wokeness and cancel culture. People are more afraid now than ever
| of being cancelled. This makes it harder to be unique for fear of
| being offensive. With that comes a true regression to the mean.
|
| Welcome to the age of average
| stereolambda wrote:
| So on the first example, I wouldn't be surprised if regular
| people everywhere had somewhat similar tastes and can't see why
| it would be a bad thing. Aesthetics diverge because of artistic
| cultures. If you're not a part of an "in" crowd, well, there's no
| reason why you'd be clued into what idiosyncratic things to like.
| Breaking out of isolated villages is actually a great thing of
| modernity, if you have any practical idea of premodern life. I
| prefer not to be locked into life of my rural grandparents, no
| matter how "authentic" it could be.
|
| For the mass culture part, skepticism of most of the comments
| here does feel cheap. It's not that you aren't allowed to think
| about the world without properly hacking your p-values and pinky
| promise double blind peer review by your bros.
|
| I think there's some merit to the feeling we are living in times
| of neo-midcentury rampant social conformity and anxiety to fit
| in, or else. A big part of this, I think, is economic anxiety
| that one has to conform to biologically survive in an unstable
| world and not be left alone. Though from my experience one can
| still escape much of it by dissociating from the terminally
| online algorithmic mainstream. Numerically most (?) of people
| don't care about it _that_ much. It 's good not to care about
| mainstream acceptance for yourself and your stuff, which is of
| course harder to do if you are an advertising person.
|
| Let's hope these will be kinds of problems we'll care about in
| 10-15 years.
| jppope wrote:
| A better title: The tyranny of the majority.
| nassimm wrote:
| The "people all look the same" part is absolutely ridiculous. The
| overwhelming majority of people I pass by in the streets look
| nothing like these people (in fact, I can't even remember the
| last time I saw someone who looked like that in real life)
|
| The rest of the article isn't much better in my opinion: it cites
| only anecdotal evidence, and it says nothing about the past state
| of affairs despite the title of the article being about "the age
| of" something.
| angarg12 wrote:
| 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.
| rom16384 wrote:
| I think the author would enjoy the art project and book
| Exactitudes, https://exactitudes.com/collectie/
| julianlam wrote:
| The amusing point of all this average-ness is that every once in
| awhile a company does a wild rebrand that tries to set them apart
| from their competition.
|
| e.g. Dropbox rebrand in 2017... remember that? Wild colours,
| weird fonts, blocky text, lots of white space..
|
| Then, of course, everybody else shifts their rebrand the same
| direction and we end up with all the same new normal (e.g. Wise
| -- https://wise.com/community/en/brand-new-look)
| crazygringo wrote:
| What the article describes is correct, but I don't think the
| words "average" or "homogeneity" or "conformity" are the right
| terms, as they seem to carry negative connotations here. Rather,
| the right word is "convergence".
|
| The point is, people like certain things aesthetically. It used
| to be that artists and designers were still trying to figure out
| what looks good, and trying all the things. But now we've tried
| so many things and we've gotten better at zeroing in the precise
| aesthetics viewers and consumers want. We've converged.
|
| Sure, you can design electric toothbrush branding that "stands
| out", but it's probably going to result in less sales. Because
| most people don't want to express their unique personality via
| their electric toothbrush, they just want a nice slim white
| object that blends into their sink area.
|
| The great mistake that this article makes is thinking that people
| need to be constantly expressing themselves in some unique way
| that nobody's ever done before. But the world has almost 8
| billion people, few things are as unique as you think.
|
| Can't we just enjoy having nice things? Even if those things have
| converged aesthetically? They've converged _because_ we think
| they 're nice. Things don't need to be different just for the
| sake of being different. Because different can also be _worse_.
| teodorlu wrote:
| > The great mistake that this article makes is thinking that
| people need to be constantly expressing themselves in some
| unique way that nobody's ever done before. But the world has
| almost 8 billion people, few things are as unique as you think.
|
| I'd like to riff on this.
|
| People's attention is limited. People's capacity for novel
| stuff is limited. And things are bound to be commoditized.
|
| But that's not necessarily a bad thing. Firefox is a tool that
| just works for me. It doesn't crash and delete my tabs when it
| visits a random web site. Sure, that's predictable.
|
| But that frees up my attention to go elsewhere. To do /brand
| new/ stuff, not just mess around with web browsers.
|
| If every airbnb looks the same, perhaps that's just because
| people get out of the airbnb to do the stuff they actually want
| to do?
|
| Stability enables movement.
| bluetomcat wrote:
| > They've converged because we think they're nice.
|
| Here is the trap. We _think_ they are nice because
| globalisation works on a more profound level. The "visible"
| level of globalisation are the consumer products. What's also
| transmitted are certain intellectual ideas and schools of
| thought, certain aesthetics and forms of art. For example, the
| attempts to explain the economy on an individual behavioural
| and psychological basis are pretty much a post-WW2 Western
| thing and now it has pervaded the world. Every non-English
| self-help book reads like a similar US book. In a way, these
| ideas transform the local cultures and now everybody thinks
| like the West and wants the same things as the West.
| nradov wrote:
| How is that a trap? Would people be better off if they wanted
| different things than "the West"?
|
| Are Japan and South Korea part of "the West"? Looking around
| my home I see a lot of stuff designed in those countries.
| bluetomcat wrote:
| It could be a trap if you value diversity or it could be a
| good thing if you value supra-national uniformity across
| continents, where people act the same way, think and build
| the same way, want the same cars and want the same visual
| traits in women.
| GauntletWizard wrote:
| I like weird shit a lot more than the next guy, and I
| think you're being pointlessly melodramatic about it.
| Convergent evolution of tastes is not the same as
| fascism.
| trgn wrote:
| It's much worse. It's global submission to the machine,
| which is not even a political project. What is easy,
| convenient, efficient, from a machine perspective,
| therefore is aspirational, desirable, wholesome from a
| human perspective. This is what's happening.
|
| We are all becoming widgets, that is to say, mere
| participants in bureaucracies, cogs in mechanized
| processes. Compare the existential dread people
| experienced in the 1800s when the factory mode of
| production reduced people to skinner pigeons, how it
| alienated labor. Now, we've completed submitted to this
| alienation, in fact, even celebrate it. For example,
| think some Tesla promotional with a robotized factory
| floor and a single worker with some doodad pressing
| buttons. A truly dystopian sight, yet, there we are,
| using it as advertisement.
| epups wrote:
| How would you differentiate "true" convergence, where
| everyone agrees a certain idea is superior, vs what you seem
| to describe here, a sort of imposition of ideas?
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| I often revist the ideas of Brooks; are we converging on
| the essense, the "conceptual integrity"? or the
| superficial, the accidental? I also recognize that there's
| unlikley to be a single dimension for convergence. The
| individual will define the balance and acceptable
| tolerances to it.
| marnett wrote:
| I also used to think that ubiquity was some sort of
| evidence of superiority. However, as was briefly mentioned
| upthread, you realize that often ubiquity has more to do
| with consumer products and the monopolies that capture
| markets. And ubiquitous consumer products often do not
| achieve that status due to superior design, but actually
| superior profit margins, which in the realm of manufactured
| consumer products, means the most efficient design for the
| most efficient manufacturing method. You realize that the
| manufacturing process can influence the design. The most
| ubiquitous door, urinal, toilet, and hand dryer are often
| not the most aesthetically pleasing or even, design-wise,
| most sensibility designed, but just the cheapest to
| purchase, most efficient to manufacture, or the only
| option.
|
| So to answer your question, we typically call the latter in
| cultural studies capitalism.
| epups wrote:
| I don't think we should conflate ubiquity with
| superiority, but it is easy to see how the latter often
| leads to the former. Perhaps Western movies are indeed
| considered very good, even by people from other cultures,
| which is why they decide to watch them. Or perhaps the
| cars invented last century, first developed in the West,
| already found some optimal designs that are simply more
| efficient, and therefore will be widely adopted.
|
| Your implied explanation is rather bleak, as it seems
| that capitalism is independent of consumer wants or needs
| in this perspective.
| jonny_eh wrote:
| > Things don't need to be different just for the sake of being
| different
|
| Indeed, but this also opens up an opportunity for things to be
| different because they can be different.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > Can't we just enjoy having nice things? Even if those things
| have converged aesthetically? They've converged because we
| think they're nice.
|
| But just because aesthetics have "converged" doesn't mean that
| everyone finds them pleasing. There's quite a lot of those
| converged aesthetics that I find unpleasant.
|
| Surely, there's still room for variety.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Things only exist if they are made. The ubiquity of this
| convergence then implies that those who make have similar
| tastes and those who have dissimilar tastes lack some
| fundamental capacity to construct.
| JohnFen wrote:
| I think it implies that the "convergence" is toward the
| lowest common denominator. That is, a design that avoids
| displeasing most people rather than pleasing most people.
|
| It's a cost-savings measure. It also is, I think, a large
| reason why the modern world tends to lack aesthetic
| excellence.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| "Convergence" is only true when you use the average of a very
| narrow distribution. If you take a very complex and multi-
| dimensional topic like design, ask a bunch of people their
| opinions and use the average, at best they'll parrot back what
| they've "learned" is good, and at worst you end up with a
| product that doesn't embody the collective desires of the group
| but the ho-hum middle that doesn't satisfy or offend anyone.
|
| >> Things don't need to be different just for the sake of being
| different. Because different can also be worse.
|
| Different _is_ worse for the majority and that 's a good thing,
| because it can then be really, really good for a small subset.
| If we repeat this everyone can get something really good, and
| have things they really dislike. This is the world I want to
| live in, emphasis on the living part.
| titzer wrote:
| > Even if those things have converged aesthetically?
|
| But they haven't converged aesthetically any more than
| preferences have been absolutely _overwritten_ , _overridden_ ,
| and _overprinted_ by whatever is most easy to produce today.
| Your comment somewhat assumes that where we are is the ultimate
| endpoint of some long process, when in reality fads come and
| go. Tastes change. What is out there now is no more inevitable
| than bell bottoms might have seemed in the 1970s.
|
| Sure, maybe its just nostalgia, but there were plenty of trends
| and aesthetics from my younger years that are just nowhere to
| be found. Why? Because when people renovate, they go with the
| aesthetic de jure, what's available and what the social
| pressures are. Hardly anyone is going to renovate a 1980s
| basement and put in...1980s carpet. Can't be sourced, and
| people think it looks ugly.
|
| > They've converged because we think they're nice. Things don't
| need to be different just for the sake of being different.
| Because different can also be worse.
|
| No, things have converged because lots of people _with no
| taste_ [1] just ho-hummed along with the zeitgest. The
| zeitgeist just so happens to be a bland sameness and
| characterless, charmless, antiseptically clean and dead
| grayness that we see on all the HGTV shows and AirBnBs.
| Different is frigging great if you ask me. At least, different
| _than that_. Give me the inside of a 1985 McDonalds instead of
| this, TBH! What makes something pretty and cool and interesting
| is _skill_ , _thoughtfulness_ and some sense of composition,
| color, and togetherness. Today it 's a thoughtless cheap
| imitation made at scale.
|
| [1] Taste is subjective, always will be.
| smnc wrote:
| > they go with the aesthetic de jure
|
| You probably meant to write "du jour" :)
| naijaboiler wrote:
| the push towards homogenous zeitgest has always existed. I
| think what's more accentuated in the modern times, is the
| world-wide convergence because we have made communication
| across vast geographical areas instantenous. with modern
| phones, and internet, everyone everywhere pretty much has
| visual access to the same things. Now convergence is not just
| local, it's global in scope.
| groby_b wrote:
| This is a core point.
|
| It most stuck out to me when the article talked about car
| colors - most cars are black or white _because car makers
| mostly make black or white_. Buying a car with a splash of
| color is hard. Red is your best chance. Followed by butt-ugly
| blues.
|
| You cannot meaningfully choose according to your taste
| because choice is restricted. (Related, try to buy furniture
| that isn't a fucking cheap imitation of mid-century modern)
|
| And _that_ happened because offerening the most bland and
| inoffensive looks will be bought by the vast majority of
| people who don 't care about taste, or don't have any. (How
| would you develop taste if all the choices are the same)
|
| It's bland things for bland lives reinforcing more bland
| choices in product design. Mixing all colors gets a dull
| grey, and that's where we're landing.
| stefl14 wrote:
| Manufacturers mostly make black or white cars because
| that's what people want. Modern culture has made people so
| boringly conventional that there's no point in
| manufacturers painting on different colours, so they charge
| a premium or don't do it at all. Your explanation fails to
| explain why exactly the same trend is happening in fashion.
| Is there some conspiracy where clothing manufacturers are
| trying to restrict choice in clothing, too? At some point,
| you have to question the culture at large rather than
| individual industries.
| citizenpaul wrote:
| Safety is an under appreciated function of car color. I've
| had a number of same looking cars of different color. I
| noticed that driving a white version results in
| substantially less near miss/near accidents while driving.
|
| I will only buy white cars now because of this. I'm tired
| of dodging inattentive drivers that are sleepdriving
| through their commute or whatever they are doing besides
| driving.
| marketerinland wrote:
| This ^
|
| I read once that grey cars have the highest possibility
| of accidents for this exact reason.
|
| And since then have only driven white cars.
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| > No, things have converged because lots of people with no
| taste[1] just ho-hummed along with the zeitgest.
|
| You buy what you can afford. Whether that be a shotgun shack
| with second-hand traipings or a McMansion with IKEA
| furniture.
|
| AirBNB's are optimizing for cheap, easy to clean and
| maintain, but still providing the minimum expected features.
| If you want variety, go to actual B&Bs.
|
| The big mistake the artists in the first part did was to
| average all input, instead of cluster analyzing the input to
| discover more than one average type. On average, most people
| like nature, so nature is what you're going to get. A better
| test would be to have an art museum with diverse art, and
| then see which paintings attract the most interest, or even
| better, which patterns emerge when tracing many individuals
| throughout the museum.
|
| I actually find the paintings fairly diverse, both in their
| individual content, and when compared to each other. But a
| person who has a mind to average everything will, of course,
| find a lot of similarity between them.
| groby_b wrote:
| "You buy what you can afford. "
|
| The problem is, there is "almost everybody can afford
| this", and there is "completely bespoke". We have
| eliminated the middle ground.
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| Yeah.
|
| People still reupholster old furniture. I think the real
| problem is that many goods these days are either so cheap
| it's cheaper to replacement them entirely, or not built
| to last, so they never get to a rebuild stage.
| titzer wrote:
| Indeed, and all the local (and unfortunately global
| incentives, like GDP) are aligned for _production_ , not
| wealth preservation and quality of life. The reupholster
| option is the most efficient wealth preservation option
| and saves production capacity for making new furniture
| for other people.
| nine_k wrote:
| Since birth rate is below reproduction in most of the
| world, and population declines (slowly or faster)
| basically everywhere in the "developed world", even
| including China, there will be fewer and fewer "other
| people".
|
| We'll have to produce less and less if we do not keep
| replacing existing stuff with new (hopefully superior)
| stuff.
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| > new (hopefully superior) stuff.
|
| And this is a big deal, too. We've made huge strides in
| cars and appliances. Outside of specialty needs furniture
| and carpentry hasn't changed much over the years.
|
| > there will be fewer and fewer "other people".
|
| This is going to take a long time (when measured over the
| typical human lifespan), and won't be very noticeable
| outside of child-oriented institutions. Major changes in
| industries and other events that prompt large numbers of
| people to move will still be more noticeable.
| Arrath wrote:
| I don't know how many times I watched my dad sit on the
| armrest of the couch.
|
| I try that with my couch and I am rewarded with the sound
| of particle board splintering.
| mortenjorck wrote:
| _> What makes something pretty and cool and interesting is
| skill, thoughtfulness and some sense of composition, color,
| and togetherness._
|
| This is key, yet it highlights an important aspect largely
| missing from these critiques of popular aesthetics: _Any
| style popular enough to become hegemonic will itself contain
| examples spanning a wide range of quality and taste._ There
| are beautiful expressions of the AirBnB interior, the NHTSA-
| approved car, even the five-over-one low-rise, just as there
| is also a sea of mediocre variations on them.
|
| A style alone does not make a designed object or space high-
| taste or low-taste, good or bad; it is the values of good
| design and craftsmanship that make it thus.
| sirmarksalot wrote:
| I think that's a bit reductive. Part of what's missing here
| is personality, or what I would call unique mediocrity.
| People who have no idea what they're doing just deciding to
| paint a wall yellow because they feel like it. The issue
| isn't just that some apartments have craftsmanship and
| others don't: it's that the high-skill and low-skill
| efforts look superficially the same.
|
| Think about it with Marvel or Star Wars movies. There are
| some really good ones, and some really boring ones, and
| although you can definitely say "Thor Ragnarok" was better
| than "Iron Man: Age of Ultron", that doesn't change the
| fact that when you zoom out, it seems all we're getting is
| superhero and Star Wars movies, and maybe it would be nice
| to watch something else now and again.
|
| We want more than just good craftsmanship. We need people
| of mediocre skill to be making things that are weird and
| interesting.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| Weird and interesting are a part of individual behavior,
| and unfortunately our economy is trending towards more
| consolidation.
|
| The urban streetscapes of older cities are dominated by
| very similar buildings, but often the differentiation is
| not just a result of the architecture but of the tenants.
| You have multiple buildings, multiple landlords, and
| multiple tenants, and the combinatoric permutations of
| all of them produce interesting variation on just a
| single city block.
|
| These days, the modern five over one probably takes an
| entire block or at least half of one, and the relevant
| landlords or HOAs basically all but forbid tenant
| individuality. For example, I have a balcony, but I'm not
| allowed to hang clothes, or flags, or art, or anything,
| and so the only thing that is actually out there is some
| basic outdoor furniture. Businesses with storefronts in
| these buildings also have similar restrictions, because
| today's corporate landlords are used to sterile,
| manicured environments like malls.
| nine_k wrote:
| Isn't this one of the points that the article is making?
| TigeriusKirk wrote:
| We've converged on the designs with the greatest acceptance.
| Not anyone's preference, just what they'll _accept_.
|
| The phrase "lowest common denominator" applies here.
| epups wrote:
| > Sure, maybe its just nostalgia, but there were plenty of
| trends and aesthetics from my younger years that are just
| nowhere to be found. Why? Because when people renovate, they
| go with the aesthetic de jure, what's available and what the
| social pressures are. Hardly anyone is going to renovate a
| 1980s basement and put in...1980s carpet.
|
| And were people in the 1980s using furniture from the 1940s
| when they renovated? If not, embrace the fact that things
| change and will always change. I bet the 1980s aesthetics are
| going to get a revival at some point.
| titzer wrote:
| > embrace the fact that things change and will always
| change.
|
| Living in a European city for a few years got me thinking
| about what the sources of changes are. Everything, and I
| mean _everything_ requires maintenance, or it will crumble
| into dust. That maintenance is like a running cost. For
| (what we consider today to be) high-value jewels of the
| past, we pay this cost, because we like having these
| amazing things--like cathedrals and churches and minarets
| and bridges and monuments and works of art. This
| maintenance is literally fighting the forces of entropy.
| Fall behind, and it will crumble and disappear. When it
| crumbles or is old or broken, or even destroyed--e.g. after
| WWII--will you rebuild what was there, as it was, or do
| something new because it strikes your fancy?
|
| In Europe, they draw the line very differently than in
| North America. Much of the old is maintained, rebuilt,
| preserved. Because it is considered _wealth_ in itself.
| Because people fight these forces of entropy, honor their
| past, and heck, maybe even like things? As an American, I
| see we do not do this. We seem to _hate_ things. We hate
| buildings and bridges and doorknobs and pipes[1]; partly
| because most stuff is built like cheap crap--no matter the
| era--so of course it falls down and needs to be rebuilt.
| And it is, the cheapest way possible, usually. Today it
| seems to be being rebuilt all in a particular way. I dunno,
| I just think America 's total disregard for the past is
| infecting the rest of the world.
|
| [1] Not above-ground power lines, poles, and endless ugly
| nests of wires, though. Obviously. Those friggin power
| lines are going to be the absolute _last_ thing that
| anybody tears down.
| majormajor wrote:
| Looking at etsy or the long list of artists on Spotify putting
| out music without hitting the mainstream radio, I'm not
| convinced the world has converged everywhere. I have far more
| variety that appeals to me available to me than ever before -
| and so does a person with opposite tastes.
|
| Expensive to build or change things have - houses or cars - but
| _art_ or more commodity products have fractured.
|
| The people/media one is the author's biggest blind spot here:
| there is still a dominant mainstream that people are chasing,
| but it's audience is smaller than before. I think this is _why_
| they chase the same thing more aggressively. So your
| "bestsellers" look alike, but more people are reading random
| shit that would never crack that list in the past either.
| Selling to a niche is precisely the opposite of what gets you
| in the bestseller list, but the niches I like have SO MUCH
| STUFF available now. The non-mainstream has fractured, making
| the remaining mainstream look more similar to chase a narrower
| segment. The most watched TV shows now have a far lower
| percentage of the country watching, and also have more variety
| in what the cast as a whole looks like, whether that's
| hairstyle or tattoos or piercings or whatnot.
|
| EDIT: here's an experiment to try to demonstrate. Tell me how
| many of those lookalike movie and book poster/cover images
| you've watched. And how many you'd watch more of.
|
| Movies: I've seen 0 of those (I'm not a horror fan anyway, but
| I've seen a couple in the last five years, Hereditary and The
| Invisible Man, and they didn't look like those posters).
|
| Self-help books: I've read 0.
|
| I haven't been reading any Danielle Steele, John Grisham,
| Kathryn Stockett, or Stieg Larsson in the last 15 years
| either... but Grisham was much more common in my circle, and I
| read some, in the 90s. I had less fewer options! I read over 30
| books last year, and none of them popped up in this article...
| eestrada wrote:
| To bolster this point, the bestselling album of all time is
| still Michael Jackson's Thriller, released in 1982. So it has
| been literally over 40 years and nothing else has topped that
| for mainstream popularity, musically speaking. It has sold
| over 70 million copies. The next nearest album is AC/DC's
| Back in Black, released in 1980, at 50 million copies, a 20
| million copy difference. A present day musician would be over
| the moon to sell 20 million copies. If I'm reading the charts
| right, the only musician to break 30 million sales for an
| album since 2010 has been Adele.
|
| So, while mainstream creations may be homogenizing,
| independent creators are finding a larger audience than ever
| before. I see that as a good thing.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_albums
| rfwhyte wrote:
| This take is so wrong as it utterly discounts the affect of
| mass market brand advertising, a trillion dollar global
| industry. People's tastes haven't "Converged" they've been
| manipulated by corporations to be whatever is most profitable.
| pixl97 wrote:
| What kind of xahfsghihs do you like, and how much time in
| your life are you willing to spend to find a good one?
| ssnistfajen wrote:
| I don't think human society has ever evolved past what this
| article would describe as "average" at any point of its
| existence since recorded history began. Sure there were bursts
| of "creativity" and "diversity" at some points but they were
| usually just experimental prototypes that haven't yet been
| tested by market selection. Carcinisation is an example of this
| in nature.
|
| Cars looking all the same isn't really a new thing. The
| illusion of variety in the 1980s-2000s era was just old cars
| not yet being phased out by regulation changes. Modern cars
| have far better function at everything than older cars while
| only an extremely small price on aesthetics was paid in
| exchange.
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| What we must come to terms with is the fact that we are all
| inexorably drawn towards the realm of Plato's Forms, and this
| convergence is not something we can avoid or deny. It is not a
| matter of mere coincidence or happenstance, but rather an
| inherent feature of the world we inhabit. Regardless of our
| individual beliefs or perspectives, the Forms exert a profound
| influence on our experiences and perceptions, shaping the very
| fabric of our reality. Even those who reject Plato's philosophy
| cannot escape its grasp, for the Forms are embedded in the very
| structure of our existence. To say that we all experience
| convergence on Plato's Forms is to recognize the fundamental,
| undeniable role that the Platonic worldview plays in shaping
| our understanding of the world.
| trgn wrote:
| > all inexorably drawn towards the realm of Plato's Forms
|
| I almost retched reading that. All the examples in the
| article are of the most bland, disposable junk imaginable. I
| think the common interpretation of Plato's ideals is one of
| an aspirational, idealized world, beyond our grasp. Seeing
| such perfection realized in mass produced crap is baffling to
| me.
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| Or, Plato's Forms are not what we would expect. Because
| humans are converging on something, and it doesn't fit
| 'someone's specific concept of ideal', doesn't mean it
| isn't converging to the Form. That is just arrogantly
| saying you have more of the 'ideal' in mind than anyone
| else. But nature can be ugly too, and that is potentially
| the true 'ideal'.
| isk517 wrote:
| As much as some openly oppose the idea, and others secretly do,
| we really are just a single species with fairly uniform tastes.
| mint2 wrote:
| No. We Are Not.
|
| Real estate developers have converged on beige toned car
| oriented soulless tracts. Some people think they like that
| suburban style. Others loathe it and choose to live in
| walkable, vibrant urban areas.
|
| I could go on for days, other than having the common taste
| that our five basic needs are met, there is tremendous
| diversity in what we actually prefer.
|
| Averages are artificial concepts that fail in reality.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| maybe biologically, but individual environmental factors are
| very diverse, and I have to believe strongly influence our
| tastes.
| b212 wrote:
| That was my first thought. It's a hard pill to swallow as we
| all like to think we're unique and special. Well...
| mint2 wrote:
| This idea that there is a shared or converged sense of
| aesthetic or preference is really peculiar as it doesn't match
| any of what I observe.
|
| Convergence really seems to happen solely due to economics,
| particularly mass production combined with marketing to drive
| demand for those uniform items.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Convergence occurs because of the paradox of choice. A market
| that successfully converges will have happier users and more
| sales because of it.
| steve76 wrote:
| [dead]
| mpsprd wrote:
| The issue for me is how marketing keeps selling the opposite.
| The way homogeneous things are constantly sold as a unique way
| to express your difference (go watch any car ad or any new
| condo poster) creates that dystopian feel.
|
| Its real life satire at this point.
| bumby wrote:
| I've tried making this same point when it comes to auto designs
| (at least in the competitive, cost-sensitive ones). A lot of
| mid-sized cars look the same because the design constraints
| generally converge on the same handful of principles. They've
| converged not in the aesthetic sense as much as the engineering
| sense: because they work at a relatively low cost.
|
| (I'm speaking mainly about things like aerodynamics here, not
| necessarily EV-vs-ICE etc.)
| makeitdouble wrote:
| I think that's why "average" is felt as a tyranny.
|
| Sure these vehicles make sense in a cost vs aerodynamics for
| a base set of functionality. But taking a step back, not
| everyone want the same base functionalities, nor have the
| same need or desire of cost vs aerodynamics.
|
| At an extreme some people want a golf cart that have some
| trunk capacity and is road legal. At another extreme some
| want a practical but "fun" to drive car. Others want a mid-
| sized car that can somewhat fit two mountain bikes without
| being too much a trouble to use as a daily commuting car.
|
| These could all have optimized, wildly different designs, but
| it's more cost effective to cut off the minority cases and
| aim for an average that somewhat pays lip services to each
| specific case. And the more the cost effective average option
| is prioritized, the costlier it becomes to have a custom
| design for a niche use case, creating a vicious circle.
|
| To take another industry, we're seeing that in laptop
| computers: Macbooks nail the average with perfection, and
| that also means there's no way to get a big screen low power
| laptop from Apple, for instance. In comparison smaller makers
| have more niche models, Lenovo or Asus have wild models that
| are probably commercially possible because they don't try to
| catter to everyone with a single laptop line in the first
| place.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Even if they had to ultra-optimize the aerodynamics so all
| the cars look like the same bar of soap (they don't have to),
| they could still at least _paint_ the damn soap a different
| color. But, no. All you see coming out of the factory are
| white, silver, gray, black, the occasional red and the
| occasional blue.
|
| What's driving this? That's what the article is about. Is it
| actually pull from customers, or is it push from the
| manufacturers? Is it: people all actually demand boring white
| soapbar shaped cars -> companies make boring white soapbar
| shaped cars? Or is it the other way around: Companies are
| economically incentivized to offer only a small number of
| colors and styles -> customer really doesn't have a choice ->
| customer buys what's available -> companies think that's what
| they really want because of their purchase choice.
|
| Same with the AirBNB look. Do people really like it, which
| translates into more rentals copying the look? Or are the
| landlords just uncreative, all copying each other, and that's
| all that ends up on the market? Or is something else driving
| it?
| nradov wrote:
| Car paint colors are driven by pull from franchised dealers
| and the dealership financing model, as well as by push from
| supply chain issues. In the US at least, most mainstream
| consumers expect to buy a car from dealer inventory and
| drive it away that day. So dealers mostly order only a few
| bland colors because most consumers are willing to settle
| for those as long as the car has the options they want and
| they get a good price. Like maybe you would prefer a bright
| green car but will settle for gray because the dealer
| offers low-interest financing. Dealers also incur inventory
| costs (floorplan financing) and their business model
| depends on rapid turnover so they can't afford to order
| "lot poison" that sits for months waiting for the right
| customer. Reducing color choices also simplifies
| manufacturing operations.
|
| Some luxury or performance oriented car brands such as
| Porsche and Tesla do allow color orders from a wider
| palette, sometimes to the extent of even doing custom paint
| blending to match a customer sample. But those customers
| are willing to wait longer and pay more. They don't need
| basic transportation to get to work tomorrow.
| pnw wrote:
| Tesla have reduced their palette to just five colors,
| presumably to cut costs.
|
| Porsche is the leader in paint color choice, no doubt
| about that, with 14 basic colors plus custom options. And
| to your point, consumers are willing to wait for the
| Porsche factory to build their car, rather than driving
| one off the lot that day.
| runnerup wrote:
| Aston Martin probably has them beat by a landslide for
| number of colors. They offer well over 100 colors.
|
| Actual Porsche prices out the door look like about
| $100,000 (even though MSRP for the cheapest models are a
| lot less). Please correct me if Porsche is significantly
| cheaper than Aston Martin vantage ($150k)... to me
| anything between $100k-200k seems like the same market
| segment but maybe I'm just poor.
| rippercushions wrote:
| At least for the Model 3, Tesla also charges extra if you
| choose anything other than white. Guess which color is
| the most common by far?
| ProfessorLayton wrote:
| I believe a lot of it has to do with resale value. People
| want to be able to trade in their car for maximum value,
| and picking the color with the widest appeal helps with
| that. This seems to have created a feedback loop where car
| manufacturers ship more of the "boring" colors because
| that's what customers are buying.
|
| This also applies to things like computers: A cursory
| search on ebay shows that a silver iMac generally sells for
| more than an equivalent yellow iMac, for example. For
| someone who trades in their old equipment when buying new,
| this is a big deal.
| nicenewtemp84 wrote:
| Odd colors actually have the best resale value on the
| used market. A yellow Porsche is very hard to sell new.
| Very few are made and sold in yellow because dealers
| don't spec them that way. 10 years later, if you try to
| sell a black Porsche, you have 72 others competing with
| you. If you try to sell a yellow Porsche, the buyer will
| fly from across the US to buy it from you.
| ProfessorLayton wrote:
| >Very few are made and sold in yellow because dealers
| don't spec them that way
|
| Dealers aren't speccing them yellow because they don't
| sell as well as other colors. If people were lining up
| for yellow Porsches, dealers would absolutely be ordering
| more yellow Porsches.
|
| Odd colors may be priced differently at the top of the
| market for used cars (I don't know), but that's just not
| true for the typical car used buyer.
| nicenewtemp84 wrote:
| I specifically wrote that a new yellow Porsche is
| difficult to sell.
|
| People will travel for used cars. New car buyers want to
| pick a car. A few new car buyers do spec out custom
| orders and wait, but it's very rare. In general, that's
| atleast how half the crazy colors come into the market.
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| > so all the cars look like the same bar of soap (they
| don't have to)
|
| they do have to, though. updated standards to fuel
| efficiency and crash safety.
|
| there are only so many ways to make that happen -- an
| aerodynamic, fuel efficient bumper that also meets safety
| requirements -- and still be cheap enough for the average
| person.
| hoosieree wrote:
| There are a lot of good reasons for "the AirBNB look. White
| walls reflect ambient light and can enhance existing light
| sources. This can help make up for small (i.e: cheap)
| windows or limited light fixtures.
|
| Natural wood is durable but not hard and cold like metal or
| glass, nor will it break down and end up permeating your
| cell membranes like plastic. Exposed beams make ceilings
| more interesting visually but also dampen echoes and make a
| space feel less sterile and prison-like.
|
| Humans have been living in shelters made from wood and
| stone since the beginning. It wouldn't surprise me if
| affinity toward these materials shows up somewhere in our
| DNA.
|
| Not sure about the Nespresso machines.
| sacnoradhq wrote:
| I'm surprised they didn't call it _Architectural Digest
| look._
|
| Empty palatial interiors staged to appear on magazine
| covers, but not necessarily lived in by actual humans.
| Sometimes, I wonder if the the AD places are empty
| investment homes / porn shoot locations.
| Earw0rm wrote:
| Reasonably acceptable coffee without demanding skill
| (aeropress, barista machine), potentially creating mess
| (anything using fresh grounds), or needing much in the
| way of regular cleaning & maintenance (any of the full-
| service machines which contain a dairy refrigerator).
| Inexpensive and mostly idiot-proof. Just ignore the
| grotesque environmental waste of the pods.
| majormajor wrote:
| It's often just fashion, not actual affinity for natural
| materials.
|
| The "AirBnB look" IME is usually engineered wood (aka
| bits of wood + liberal amounts of adhesive) floor, or
| even vinyl (tile if they're fancy), not natural wood.
| Natural wood scratches too easily and is more expensive
| to deal with generally. So for a rental? Nah. But yeah in
| actually older places sometimes it's natural wood
| liberally coated with basically-plastic clear coat. ;)
|
| A lot of the exposed beams are also not "real" structural
| beams. Often they're plastic too! Stuff like this. Lower
| maintenance, doncha know.
| https://www.architecturaldepot.com/BM.html
| golergka wrote:
| I'm a digital nomad. I've lived in a lot of Airbnbs, and I
| love the Airbnb look. You know why? Because when landlords
| are trying to get creative, the result is usually horrible.
|
| Getting creative, if you're not a specialist in the field,
| would yield horrible results 95% of the time. Which is okay
| if you're doing it as a hobby, of course. But as a
| customer, I really don't want to be subjected to this.
|
| And Airbnbs where landlords have actually hired a competent
| interior designer usually have "Luxe" brand and are clearly
| targeted towards people in a completely different tax
| bracket.
| bandofthehawk wrote:
| Maybe that has more to do with your specific taste
| though? For me personally, I think my tastes have changed
| over time where I think I enjoy a bit more variety/chaos
| in terms of decoration and environment compared to the
| sterile greige look that's currently popular.
| amalcon wrote:
| There's a very boring, practical thing that most of those
| colors have in common. White, silver, and gray make your
| typical road dirt less visible. Black also accomplishes
| this pretty well in climates where they don't need to salt
| the roads.
|
| Blue and red are common favorite colors, so it's not
| surprising you get a little of those. Brown and tan used to
| be very common up until the late 80's or so; I'm not sure
| why that went away but that's the only one that seems
| surprisingly absent.
| nicenewtemp84 wrote:
| I sold cars for a decade. I love red cars. Atleast at the
| brands I worked for, dealers specd out their own vehicles
| including colors and interiors. We ordered a lot of black
| white greys because they are the easiest to sell.
|
| If someone likes a car in general, almost anyone will
| accept either black or white or grey, even if you would
| like red (rare).
|
| If you like a car, and all they have is red, while you
| dislike red (very common), you don't buy it.
|
| Dealerships have been around for 100 years and make
| millions of dollars for their owners. They're not operated
| by stupid people.
| hgsgm wrote:
| Companies like selling cars, so I think they pick colors
| most people prefer. "Exciting" "Unique" colors look a bit
| silly or non-unique when your neighbors have the same
| color. If what you are asking for is 1000 color choices
| instead of 10, that's obviously more expensive to mass
| produce or customize.
| mc32 wrote:
| There was a time in the aughts when nail polish colors
| were prevalent in (sub) compact cars for some reason. Not
| so much now.
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| > "Exciting" "Unique" colors look a bit silly or non-
| unique when your neighbors have the same color.
|
| Reminds me a lot of the orange Chevys Cruzing around.
| efsavage wrote:
| > What's driving this? That's what the article is about. Is
| it actually pull from customers, or is it push from the
| manufacturers?
|
| It's both. Most people don't want a gray car as their first
| choice, but it's probably more people's second choice than
| a real color. So red cars sit on the lot for 15.3 days,
| blue ones for 14.2, and gray for 11.6. Obviously (in MBA
| terms) the dealer, should order more gray cars. So they
| sell more gray cars, and the feedback loop means it's now
| hard to find a blue or red car because, if you ask a
| dealer, "nobody" buys them. So now the manufacturer just
| stops making those colors, which makes their life easier,
| and the cycle is complete.
|
| I begrudgingly have a gray truck and my wife has a silver
| SUV, because those were basically the only options
| available, many brands now you can't get a decent color
| selection if you special order them.
| [deleted]
| YellOh wrote:
| Fwiw, the explicit advice I got from my parents about
| cars/houses was to never choose a unique looking one. I was
| told odd-colored cars are more likely to be broken into,
| and houses that draw attention (if placed in a neighborhood
| of otherwise very similar houses) are more likely to be
| robbed.
|
| So even if my favorite color was an easy option when
| choosing a car, I'd probably go monochrome as long as
| that's what the majority of other cars are doing, almost
| entirely for property crime reasons.
|
| On writing this out, I have absolutely 0 idea how
| factually-based this is, but it is at least a thing some
| middle-class Americans tell their kids.
| bumby wrote:
| There's an old thought that red/yellow sports cars are
| more likely to get tickets because they are more
| noticeable. No idea if that's just lore or if data bears
| it out.
| bandofthehawk wrote:
| It's very unlikely. Once you control for the type of car
| (minivan, sports car, etc) and type of person buying the
| car (young/old, male/female), red cars get similar amount
| of tickets to other colors.
|
| https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/red-handed/
| ensemblehq wrote:
| They generally have higher insurance rates although I'm
| not clear on what's driving the model.
| nicenewtemp84 wrote:
| People repeat this for decades... Apparently never
| noticing that they have never ever been asked for the
| color of their car when getting an insurance quote.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > They generally have higher insurance rates
|
| Because they are on average driven by people who rate
| higher risk for other reasons, not because color is part
| of the model.
|
| Otherwise, a popular hack would be to get insurance
| _first_ , and then paint a car red/yellow if that's what
| you wanted.
| Macha wrote:
| So I checked the local market and while metallic grey is
| the most popular here in Ireland, white is fifth, compared
| to its clear first place when I've been to California.
| White is established in popular culture as the colour of
| transit vans and small traders, which isn't an image that
| inspires demand in personal vehicles. I think in recent
| years, Tesla marketing has rehabilated the image of white
| cars a little, but I don't see them getting US levels of
| use in the near future, especially as there aren't actually
| that many Tesla's being sold here.
|
| So I think there's some level of marketers adapting to at
| least what they think works in the market rather than
| simple volume discounts on white paint.
| anonymous_sorry wrote:
| > All you see coming out of the factory are white, silver,
| gray, black, the occasional red and the occasional blue.
|
| Isn't this just fashion?
|
| I've heard it argued that times of popular optimism and
| plenty tend to favour bright colours, extravagant design
| and conspicuous consumption. Think Calvin Klein underpants
| deliberately on show above low slung waistbands, analogous
| to frilly lace ruffs and cuffs in earlier ages.
|
| Times of austerity tend to be associated with muted shades,
| and perhaps virtue signalling rather than wealth
| signalling.
|
| Since the 2008 banking crises I think we've been firmly in
| the the dull, serious phase.
| dclowd9901 wrote:
| I'd argue that convergence _is_ soulless-ness and cars
| present a great example of the point.
|
| The "soul" of something that is inanimate is the qualities
| that make it memorable or stick it in our mind with some
| manner of tactility. Not literal tactility but the nature of
| how you can visualize something so clearly it's almost like
| you can touch it in your mind.
|
| I'm getting a bit spacey here but let's get concrete: Jeremy
| Clarkson often posited that a car tended lacked soul if it
| was refined and well put together. Often, he felt like older
| Italian cars, with all of their questionable design decisions
| were very soulful, because they reflect the fact that people,
| fallible human beings built it. It was a product of them, as
| much as a piece of art is purely a product of its artist.
| It's why a Van Gogh has soul but a Van Gogh replica does not.
|
| The effort to make things perfect and completely refined with
| no strange decisions removes the humanity from them. Renders
| them soulless.
| bumby wrote:
| Yes, I agree. My point is more akin to addressing why it
| happens in a somewhat different context than the article
| which states it's driven by customer subjective taste.
|
| I'm saying it can also be driven by something else. There
| are probably only a few major players in the automotive
| aerodynamic software design space. Unlike the days when the
| design was driven by an artist with a block of clay, I
| suspect modern designs are often based on the same computer
| driven models with the same underlying physics. The
| software is probably a more refined and optimized approach,
| but this results in a convergence in looks and a lack of
| that idiosyncratic "soul"
| karmakaze wrote:
| I agree that convergence _is_ soullessness, both on the
| part of the producer and consumer who is choosing the
| default or merely practical. That 's fine for those who
| only see cars as a means of transportation. A 'better
| looking' (according to those 'with taste') shape of a car
| doesn't have to cost more intrinsically. The reason we have
| many similar, not so great looking cars is because it's not
| a primary filter for sales volume. Something that paints
| outside convergent lines, _is_ however a reason why a
| potential buyer would _not_ buy it.
|
| Poor quality can give a car a kind of personality, but
| that's not the soul of it. The same car could be reliable
| and have the same soul. The main difference is whether it
| is developed to a specific vision, or if checking boxes and
| aggregated by committee.
| hgsgm wrote:
| We have troubles at work dealing with more than ~50 souls
| in our monkeysphere. Do we really benefit from 100 or more
| souls in our homes, one for every appliance and piece of
| furniture?
| PaulHoule wrote:
| I think of Nader's _Unsafe at any speed_ which pointed out
| how numerous stylistic features in old cars were dangerous:
| for instance you could get spiked by a hood ornament,
| slashed by tail fins, etc.
|
| People tend to think of cars as an old technology but cars
| are under intense regulatory (and commercial, see https://e
| n.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insurance_Institute_for_Highwa...)
| pressure on issues like safety, emissions, noise, and fuel
| economy. A narrowbody airliner today can be based on a 1967
| design with almost-state-of-the-art engines and nowhere-
| near-state-of-the-art avionics and control systems but
| there is no room on our roads for a new car based on a 1967
| design.
|
| With all of the requirements acting on cars it is little
| wonder that looks go by the wayside.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| AFAIK, the reason cars look the same is that they are
| optimized to use the same mass-produced parts. Not really
| because of physical, aesthetic, or usability reasons.
| bumby wrote:
| Yes, they often are designed to use a common platform. But
| I'm speaking specifically to aerodynamic shapes. The body
| of a car is relatively easy to change in the design phase
| even with the same underlying mechanical systems, but I
| believe they still converge on the same basic aerodynamic
| shapes.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| There are actually quite a lot of possible shapes that
| don't degrade aerodynamics. If you take a look on the
| conception of any modern car, you'll see that the
| original design is always completely different from the
| one it gets after it's adapted to factory.
| bumby wrote:
| You're probably right, it's more about aero + production
| constraints. I don't think the concept cars use the same
| constraints, which is why they have to change to get to
| production. Even if a design looks different and is still
| aerodynamic it doesn't mean it can be economically
| produced without large changes to the production process.
|
| I've only worked in body panel stamping in automotive
| assembly as a controls engineer, so I may be taking a bit
| out of school here.
| p0pcult wrote:
| They've converged because manufacturers kowtow to the maximum
| likelihood sale, not because we think they're nice.
|
| Of course, _some_ people think they are nice. And yeah, maybe
| in a choice discrimination /maxDiff study, I would choose some
| of these converged styles over other styles, but not
| necessarily among _all potential options_.
|
| Then, because manufacturing capacity is limited (whether we are
| manufacturing cars/spaces/aesthetics/ideas), the choice set
| that is actually available narrows.
|
| Call it the tyranny of data science.
| civilized wrote:
| I'm favorable towards the position that we've converged to the
| optimal electric toothbrush.
|
| I'm neutral about five over one apartment buildings.
|
| I emphatically reject that it's natural or desirable for
| everyone to aspire to look like Kim Kardashian or have
| Instagram Face. Ugh.
| jayd16 wrote:
| I think convergence is also not quite right because you're not
| _exactly_ describing a mono-culture. Several different designs
| might be popular and good. Instead, we're at an age where
| everything is hyper-tuned.
|
| Its an age of wonder not average, but with that comes the fact
| that its harder to build a better mouse trap. Popular things
| can have design input from millions (and billions if you count
| something like a Facebook feed).
| Al-Khwarizmi wrote:
| Art nouveau buildings from the early 20th century are almost
| universally considered nicer than today's buildings, and yet
| they're no longer made.
|
| Not because we think modern buildings are nicer, but purely for
| a matter of cost.
|
| I suspect the same is the case (even if to a lesser extent) in
| electric toothbrushes and other items of our daily life.
| Arrath wrote:
| The race to the bottom has taken a lot of brightness out of
| the world, its quite sad imo.
|
| Anecdotally, my home town replaced a three way intersection
| with a nice roundabout and then put up a little art piece in
| the center of it. People complained to the heavens about a
| minor expenditure on an art installation when the money could
| have gone to, who knows, resurfacing a half block of
| sidewalk? Not everything needs to be so drab and utilitarian,
| yet despite the supposed massive output of the economy we've
| built, we must scrimp and pay bottom dollar for every last
| thing.
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _almost universally considered nicer than today 's
| buildings_
|
| I can't agree with that. They're a fascinating curiosity, but
| they're also awfully gaudy (no pun intended). The
| ornamentation is extremely excessive by the standards of any
| common style since. Not because of cost, but just because of
| taste.
| trgn wrote:
| Art nouveau can be seriously intimidating, some of the
| interiors seem genuinely frightening to live in.
|
| Nonetheless, it was one of the last art movements with a
| true vision, and most importantly staying with the theme of
| the article, divorced from concerns of practically and unit
| economics. It's unlikely we ever see something similar
| arise.
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| On the contrary!
|
| There is a key difference going from "convergence" to
| "conformity": circular reasoning.
|
| People who need to sell the thing they invent, tell themselves
| that "convergence" is the best way there. Customers like
| familiar traits. So they design for _intentional_ convergence,
| and that is the essence of conformity.
|
| 99.99999% of keyboards are the same physical layout. This
| layout is a standard that _conforms_ to the general shape of an
| 1800s typewriter. There is no _functional_ need to continue
| this. There was no natural convergence toward this shape: it 's
| so bad it often injures the user! The only driver is the value
| of _familiarity_ to the act of _selling_ a keyboard.
|
| With the advent of cheap 3D printers, we have seen a surge in
| hobby keyboard design. These people care so much about getting
| a better keyboard shape that they are willing to spend hundreds
| or thousands of dollars to get there. What they want they
| cannot buy; this was especially the case 5-10 years ago. The
| very existence of this group proves that traditional keyboards
| are the result of _conformity_ , not _convergence_.
| mxmbrb wrote:
| Thank you for your analogy. Demand shapes supply is a
| capitalism fairy tale. For most markets you just can't buy
| what you want. Even if you would be willing to pay 2 to 4
| times. You have to buy the mass produced sameness. We do not
| choose what there is to buy. In 95% of products and shops the
| supply dictates the demand, often with a simulation of
| choice. Look closely, for many applications there's only one
| or two products used nearly world wide. Often they are
| neither the best nor the cheapest. And don't get me started
| on the "choices" when it comes to smartphones.
| pixl97 wrote:
| >For most markets you just can't buy what you want. Even if
| you would be willing to pay 2 to 4 times.
|
| This is a problem I see everywhere... People have no idea
| that mass production leads to order of magnitude reduction
| in costs or more.
|
| In most products you buy today there is a 4X price range
| between low to high end products. When suddenly you're
| talking about 10-100X price range people go with why they
| can buy.
|
| You'd think HNers would have a better idea on manufacturing
| costs.
| 411111111111111 wrote:
| They're only the same if you're taking an extremely reductive
| approach to them... And at that point you could also say that
| "99.99999%%" of Smartphones are the same, wherever they're
| iPhones, Androids or windows from a dacades ago. They're all
| rectangular devices with a large screen and touch input after
| all.
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| They are physically _the exact same size and shape_. That
| isn 't reductive at all.
| 411111111111111 wrote:
| And phones aren't?
|
| And for the record, keyboards have massive size
| difference, in all dimensions. Keyboards actually have a
| way bigger variance then you'd find in phones.
|
| Some are just a few mm high, others go as high as 5cm.
| There are 60% keyboards. Ergonomic keyboards. Keyboards
| that're basically just a small nipple with which you're
| doing input by gesture.
|
| the keys and actuation themselves are another topic with
| Rubberdome on cheap and trashy keyboards, mechanical with
| springs and other techniques, even some optical - though
| they're pretty gimmicky.
|
| There are stylized key caps off all kinds, including some
| really cringe material like ahego keys from a few years
| ago. And actually quite pretty one's with mountains,
| clouds and areas stylized under resin [1]
|
| Some are so small you can only use them with your thumbs
|
| [1] random example
| https://www.etsy.com/de/listing/1289117693/mountain-
| creeks-s...
| epups wrote:
| I would dare say that 99.99999% of keyboard users expect a
| similar layout. Sure, it converged out of conformity and
| familiarity, but so what? This is part of the added value to
| me, I can learn to type in a particular layout and I'm good
| to go in any other. This is a crucial part of functionality
| in fact.
| eimrine wrote:
| > I would dare say that 99.99999% of keyboard users expect
| a similar layout.
|
| Why don't they expect the best one? Seems like the
| 99.99999% of users are fooled by monkeys and bananas on
| ceiling experiment. I can not name that amount of people
| just idiots but if your upper-home row consist a word
| "typewriter" I consider your choice as definitely not wise.
| pixl97 wrote:
| >Why don't they expect the best one?
|
| Best is multi-dimensional, so please tell me 'best what'.
|
| Is 'best' affordable?
|
| Is 'best' compatible with what I learned without invested
| more time in learning something new?
|
| Is 'best' something that's going to live far beyond it's
| usefulness based on it's cost?
|
| Is 'best' something you can't hand to someone else and
| have them use it?
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| You are precisely the consumer demand that drives
| conformity here. You are real! That doesn't change any of
| the other things I just said: in fact, it exasperates the
| issue, because it isn't _wrong_ to target your familiarity
| as a reliable selling point.
|
| The problem is that it's _also_ a good thing to try create
| new designs. I have a keyboard that you would _hate_ to
| use. That 's how _I_ feel about the traditional design you
| prefer. We can _both_ be served by the market, but only if
| designers have enough confidence to do so.
|
| You wouldn't even care about this if you had originally
| learned to type on my keyboard. If that was the ubiquitous
| thing you started with, then we wouldn't even be having
| this conversation. Had the progression of keyboard design
| been free to explore other options, it might have
| _naturally_ converged on something more ergonomic; which
| would serve both the need for familiarity _and_ the desire
| for ergonomics.
|
| We are already seeing ergonomic keyboard designs converge
| to 3 shapes: Dactyl-like extreme ergonomics that place keys
| as close as possible to the resting fingertip; flat
| compromises like ergodox that can use a PCB; and grid
| layouts like planck that optimize the difficulty of
| _conceptual memory_ layouts when using many layers. All
| three place keys in columns, so they are pretty easy to
| switch between. The only real mystery left is the thumb.
|
| Most of the discomfort involved in switching _from_ the
| typewriter layout stems from how obscure and unwieldy it is
| _relative to_ anything else. Like a Who from Whoville, we
| look at the elegant hammer - as a replacement for the
| familiar Whabam - with distaste.
| 8note wrote:
| That layout is not the case.
|
| For instance, Canadian keyboards have a different layout from
| American ones, and keyboards that support other languages
| have different keys as well
| eimrine wrote:
| Canadian layout is slightly different from regular qwerty,
| but they both use to share equal amount of stupidity.
| stephc_int13 wrote:
| The issue, with this phenomenon, is that it tend to lead to
| local maximum, preventing the exploration of anything else that
| could be as good or better.
| reso wrote:
| Lots of people before have claimed there is a "perfect" or
| "final" aesthetic that is discoverable through science. They've
| all been surprised 20 or 30 years later when people started
| liking different things.
| nottorp wrote:
| > as they seem to carry negative connotations here
|
| ... and for good reason. Or perhaps I'm weird in wanting at
| least my entertainment to be varied, instead of 1280
| indistinguishable netflix series?
| indymike wrote:
| > Rather, the right word is "convergence".
|
| I think the word "fashion" seems to fit this, too.
| JALTU wrote:
| I cringe at this idea, and especially when it comes to human
| distinction. I see what the "media" (advertising) portrays as a
| beautiful human body. I look at the people around me. Not the
| same.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| This reminds me of
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-a64OwOYqU
| lfciv wrote:
| And as some categories converge others change. Aesthetics can
| be dynamic. I thought this video recently was interesting
| discussing the way that modern computer animation became
| homogeneous to capture that "pixar" look - and subsequently how
| it's now changing with Into the Spiderverse.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l96IgQmXmhM
| taude wrote:
| I also think they miss the point on AirBnb in that all those
| AirBnb's that have "brooklyn" style now is because it's a
| trend, and will need to be updated in 10 years for the next new
| trendy styling if they want to keep targeting those same global
| travelers. Ask anyone in the boutique/trendy hotel industry
| what their ROI is on their refreshed looks. (Might not be 10
| years, but it's defintely less than 20)
| misterprime wrote:
| I know some people are making the point that taste is
| subjective, but I'd like to argue that, at least in some
| aspects, certain designs are solvable. There may be an
| interesting period of variety while we solve something, but
| eventually, we can get there. I was taken aback while watching
| Something's Gotta Give recently. The movie is from 2003 and
| spends a lot of time in a nice house. Well, the kitchen looked
| perfect to me, 20 years later. If I could have an ideal
| kitchen, it would be that one. If you want back 30, 40, and 50
| years and showed me an expensive kitchen, they would not appear
| "solved" in the same way.
|
| I realize this may be just my personal taste, but I doubt that.
| Feedback would be welcome.
|
| You can see the kitchen here: https://youtu.be/K0fcPiUjh64
| trgn wrote:
| You might know already, but just to add on to it, director
| Nancy Meyers is (rightfully) admired for the impeccably
| designed homes in her movies
| https://www.apartmenttherapy.com/nancy-meyers-film-
| kitchens-... Jokey tone from the article aside, she nails
| that aspirational suburban rich people house.
| misterprime wrote:
| That's completely new information to me. Thanks!
| pdntspa wrote:
| Absolutely not. Variety is the spice of life, uniqueness is
| what gives it its verve and essence. The sameness of everything
| everywhere is absolutely suffocating.
|
| I have long argued that we humans are obsessed with data when
| we shouldn't be. Intuition, taste, and artistry create the
| variety that gives everything character, and we systematically
| and violently beat it out through endless focus-group testing
| and lowest-common-denominator sterilization.
| munificent wrote:
| The fallacy in your argument is the belief in the average
| human.
|
| According to your argument, we should all buy the same shirt
| size, medium. Because that's the size that isn't too big or too
| small for the most people.
|
| But people _are different_ , and in a human-centered world, our
| products would be as unique and varied as we are, which is much
| more varied than you give us credit for.
|
| _> They 've converged because we think they're nice._
|
| There is no _we_ when it comes to preference. I, and you, and
| everyone couldn 't possibly care less about whether our
| toothbrush is a color or shape that pleases someone else. It's
| _my_ toothbrush. The last thing in the world I want is it being
| used by any other human.
|
| The idea of aggregate human desire does not exist _in humans._
| We each only have our own personal desires, shared by no one.
| When I walk into Baskin-Robbins, I _do not care_ what flavors
| of ice cream other people like.
|
| Where aggregate demand exists is _in corporations making
| products_. Because they are trying to amortize their design and
| manufacturing costs across an ever larger number of consumers,
| they _create_ the notion of average human preference as a
| target for their designs. But it 's important to always
| remember that average preference is an invention of mass
| manufacturing.
|
| It's soul-crushing to discredit your own desires simply because
| it's not cost effective for a company to cater to them.
|
| The clear evidence against your argument is that _products
| across the entire spectrum of human artifice used to be much
| more varied_. I 'm fairly certain Homo sapiens has not
| measurably evolved in the past hundred years or so. We are the
| same people we used to be, with the same passions and
| pecadillos.
|
| What has changed is the economic and organizational structure
| of the groups creating the stuff we use. When you got your
| shirt for a local tailor who only made stuff for your city, it
| naturally sold shirts that made sense for your climate. The
| "average" it was targeting was a much smaller aggregate based
| on people whose lives are measurably more similar to yours.
|
| But now that everything comes from a handful of transnational
| mega-corporations, shipping containers means any product can
| come from anywhere, and mobility means that everyone is from
| nowhere, products are trying to please all possible humans.
|
| And the result is an alienating wash of forgettable products
| that tell us at every moment that we use them, "The people who
| made this only care 0.0000001% about you."
| DeathArrow wrote:
| > What the article describes is correct, but I don't think the
| words "average" or "homogeneity" or "conformity" are the right
| terms, as they seem to carry negative connotations here.
|
| But this is the essence of article, that the average has bad
| tastes when it comes to art.
|
| Salvador Dali has way less exposure than some random Instagram
| influencer and Bach has way less exposure than some random hip
| hop "legend" from Brooklyn, NY. Some random people from Tik Tok
| have more exposure than Friedrich Nietzsche.
| oxfordmale wrote:
| They did similar studies to determine the looks of an ideal
| romantic partner. The resulting look was very close to the
| average of all available romantic partners. However, that
| doesn't mean that individuals don't have different preferences.
| It is the same if you do a study of people's favourite colours.
| The average result will have little to do with people's
| personal preferences.
|
| These designs are not people's preferred designs, just those
| that everyone least dislikes.
| rippercushions wrote:
| It's well known that symmetry is considered beauty, so when
| you average up enough imperfect faces, you'll get a
| symmetrical and thus beautiful average.
|
| https://petapixel.com/2013/05/28/what-averaged-face-
| photogra...
| hammock wrote:
| One essayist calls this phenomenon "refinement culture":
| https://medium.com/@lindynewsletter/refinement-culture-51d96...
|
| Another essay that I can't find anymore called it "expedience."
| As in, we all converge on the same products not because they
| are the best, but because they are "good enough"
| atoav wrote:
| Convergence is an interesting term, but in my eyes (as someone
| who both has worked as web and product designer) the reason it
| happens is not sales, but because looking the same as everyone
| else has some benefits:
|
| - you can rely on existing/known design methodology and tools
| which takes less time and is cheaper to deliver results in
|
| - it is the safe choice. The times were some manager would
| admit they have no idea about design and let designers do their
| job is a thing of the past. So they instead tell designers to
| do what $marketleader is doing. They use bootstrap? So do we
| now!
|
| - this homogeneity has advantages as people know how certain
| buttons/controls look, but that middle-ground usability will
| not translate well to every application, because not every
| application is meant for that kind of middle ground usage. That
| is why industrial tools used 24/7 have different designs than a
| tool meant for people to be used once a year. The latter needs
| to priorize being self-explainatory above everything else, the
| former needs to priorize other things like productivity,
| covering special use cases, durability, reliability etc. If you
| used the UX principle of the latter on the former you end up
| with something that _looks_ okay or simple to use, but is
| actively torture to use 24 /7.
|
| So me pet peeve with this kind of design is that some designers
| think it is the right hammer to squash every problem with (with
| the incentives laid out above), and that leads to suffering for
| users.
|
| There is a reason why you and me are currently writing on this
| platform, and part of it is it's non-comforming design that
| isn't sleek or anything, but it serves the purpose better than
| any typical design would -- because this site is not meant to
| be just that.
| mdorazio wrote:
| You make a good point, but I think there's a qualifier that
| convergence in this case is convergence to mass-market appeal.
| Everything looks the same because that's the aesthetic that
| most appeals to ~75% of the population. What's missing is that
| there seems to be an increasing lack of alternative designs to
| appeal to the other ~25%.
| davidxc wrote:
| I don't think "most appeals" is accurate. It's the aesthetic
| that results in the most profit, which just means that it's
| optimal in terms of making tradeoffs between level of appeal
| to various consumer segments, price points, cost to
| manufacture, etc.
|
| But maximizing profit and the tradeoffs that result from that
| are definitely not equivalent to most appealing to the
| general population.
| sangnoir wrote:
| The link between sameness and mass-market capitalism is
| obvious to me. I was surprised by its absence in the article
| and comments here.
|
| Alternative designs that cater to a fraction (25%) of the
| population will not have the full benefit of economies of
| scale, so emd up having higher prices and forced to position
| as up-market/luxury products - which imposes another set of
| constraints that also impose sameness (see optional packages
| for luxury SUVs.)
|
| It's _really_ hard for "quirky" products to succeed in the
| world we made as those products will be strangled by the free
| hand of the market.
| thwarted wrote:
| A quirky product that succeeds would cease to be quirky. It
| would no longer stand out. Difference and rarity go hand in
| hand.
| sangnoir wrote:
| I agree, "quirky" sometimes become mainstream: just as
| the Gentrification Aesthetic[1] - now popular on AirBnB
| as noted by the article _used_ to be quirky. However, I
| meant products that stay quirky will not succeed on the
| mass market, almost by definition.
|
| 1. Bare brick, white walls prominently exposed reclaimed
| wood
| ozim wrote:
| Article point is that phenomena described are "negative" and
| that we should look for more expression.
|
| I imagine life where on each step I have to deal with something
| I have never seen. That would be really tiring. I have my own
| venues to be creative, living in a world where everything is
| expression of someone else "creativity" would take all energy
| from me because I would have to work out too many thing every
| day.
| jcanyoh wrote:
| > Sure, you can design electric toothbrush branding that
| "stands out", but it's probably going to result in less sales.
| Because most people don't want to express their unique
| personality via their electric toothbrush, they just want a
| nice slim white object that blends into their sink area.
|
| I'd generally agree with you here but there are exceptions. The
| company 'Liquid Death' is yet another company selling water,
| but due to their branding and viral marketing have made
| drinking water seem 'cool'.
| generj wrote:
| Liquid Death is counter culture, deliberately rebelling
| against the status quo (and collecting a price premium for
| doing so). Even here they lean into conformity - their cans
| are shaped and styled like beer cans - partially for
| marketing and partially because that size of can was already
| made. The lettering on their cans leans into existing tropes
| about rebellious brands.
|
| In one of my marketing classes I learned of 16 different
| archetypes brands mostly fall into. Usually all brands in a
| category use similar archetypes. You look at Liquid Death
| using an atypical archetype for the water category and see a
| unique clever choice. The author of this piece would probably
| decry that they use similar branding techniques to every
| other rebellious archetype brand.
|
| It's challenging but rewarding to buck category archetypes. I
| wouldn't be surprised if there is a niche for an aggressively
| branded toothbrush with an attitude problem.
| efields wrote:
| Yep. I _love_ that I don't have to think about Car. Because I
| don't care about Car. If I'm lucky enough to buy new Car then I
| _know_ Car will work great because we figured out Car.
|
| Interiors, exteriors, etc... great. I'm glad there are building
| codes that make buildings safe, and that ugly poorly made
| furniture is kind of hard to find.
|
| Convergence is a great word for this phenomenon. I'm glad
| humans tend to converge around good ideas; it's gotten us far.
|
| This article is ultimately a ramble with no strong purpose.
| Just like most internet articles. "Convergence."
| a_c wrote:
| It is convergence when evolved independently. Like how
| different crustaceans evolved into "crab" [1].
|
| If everyone is under the same feedback, like the London wobbly
| bridge [2], it is more like reacting to external force, for a
| lack of better term
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31615200
|
| [2]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Bridge%2C_London#Re...
| pastacacioepepe wrote:
| > Can't we just enjoy having nice things? Even if those things
| have converged aesthetically? They've converged because we
| think they're nice.
|
| While convergence sounds like a good thing for an electric
| toothbrush, it's a terrible concept for art and culture, and
| even for consumer goods I'm afraid it's going to stifle
| innovation.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| > The great mistake that this article makes is thinking that
| people need to be constantly expressing themselves in some
| unique way that nobody's ever done before. But the world has
| almost 8 billion people, few things are as unique as you think.
|
| I think you got it wrong. We shouldn't express different and we
| needn't to as ordinary people.
|
| But as creatives, as creators originality it's what should
| define us.
| assafweinberg wrote:
| You're right in that there is a convergence happening across
| everything, and I think it's a product of the increased pace of
| communication facilitated by the internet.
|
| Whether this impending mono-culture is "better" or "worse" is
| really just a matter of values. Engineers, who evaluate things
| on how well they perform, might see the convergence as a good
| thing - the proliferation of winning designs. Designers and
| artists who see creation as having its own intrinsic value and
| variety being the spice of life will lament the trend.
| alkonaut wrote:
| While it's a bit dull and boring, eventually when everyone sees
| what everyone else sees (as we do when we all have internet
| connected devices with cameras) then our styles and tastes will
| also be converging. Which will be the "winning" one will depend
| on context. In some cases it's going to be a boring convergence
| to an arbitrary or bland style, in others it's boing to be simply
| an adaptation of somethin that's objectively good. This isn't
| just about style, it's about everything. If something is
| objectively better (E.g. single faucet with hot/cold instead of
| the UK traditional double faucet) then the better one will take
| over. And that will happen once people realize there is an
| alternative to the status quo.
| nebulousthree wrote:
| Who knew that the primary incentive being economic would lead to
| a convergence of human behaviours?
|
| Every profit-motive champion raved about the variety produced by
| means of competition. Instead, the fear of failure from truly
| distinguishing oneself has driven competitive differences to the
| edge where it remains superficial and unimportant. Alpine white
| or cream white paint? Straight tube or spherical Edison bulbs?
| Nietzche or Camus on the toilet bookshelf?
|
| In fairness, we can say that this incentive has normalized a
| lower bound of acceptable design in terms of function. Yes, it's
| bland, but it works.
|
| But now what? The incentive needs to be transcended. The only way
| to do that actually is to be rich and/or crazy enough to deny the
| potential of economic failure. But who can afford to do that?
|
| This hasn't changed. The Sistine chapel wasn't painted according
| to the whims of the peasantry.
| shadowfoxx wrote:
| Thank you, I was writing out something similar.
|
| I find it intentional on the authors part that they didn't
| include "capital" in any of their observations. All houses in
| the suburbs look the same because its... cheaper to do it that
| way. There's less risk involved. People don't do anything
| interesting to their property because of "property value". Why
| would I want to make my space /interesting/ when this is
| obviously just an investment I'm going to sell and then live in
| my /real/ home. (Which I won't make interesting because => go
| back to square 1)
|
| Its expensive to do interesting things. The majority of
| businesses are not 1B profitable - they need a place to do
| business all the same. So an efficient box it is!
|
| The Art example at the beginning is funny to me. People,
| largely, don't have a lot of ideas about what they 'want' out
| of any given topic they don't have a ton of interest in. I'd be
| willing to bet the people they asked haven't given a lot of
| thought into the art they preferred until they were asked. You
| have to actively look around to discover new things, you can't
| expect newness to be fed to you. Emphasis on the Discovery
| part.
|
| Its all a bit, "Drawing conclusions about the world from zoomed
| out observations instead of actually looking into the forces
| that shape our world".
| einpoklum wrote:
| > The Instagram pictures we post, the tweets we read, the TV we
| watch, the app icons we click, the skylines we see, the websites
| we visit and the illustrations which adorn them all look the
| same.
|
| It sounds like the author is speaking to a clique of their
| similar friends.
| go_discover wrote:
| If you spend some time traveling the world you will see not
| everything is the same. From Tel Aviv to Mumbai to New Zealand.
| They're all different with different people, cultures, coffee
| shops, foods, languages, history, etc, etc.
|
| I am actually developing a web app that highlights these
| differences. Each week a different country is highlighted and
| users can post content about that country.
| hudsonhs wrote:
| And here are 2 songs based on the same People's Choice concept:
|
| The Most Wanted Music is a milquetoast 90's pop ballad:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jId-qaEwuvI&ab_channel=DaveS...
|
| The Most Unwanted Music is nothing short of an avant-garde
| masterpiece:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDh4o0rOvr0&ab_channel=DaveS...
| muyuu wrote:
| there is a clear self-reinforcing loop between A what's offered
| and B what's picked that is based on both A and B looking for the
| trend and only slightly controlled by A and B looking not to be
| too generic and to be somewhat original
|
| the more investment required, the safer people will play it
|
| it seems to me that the examples picked: -
| collectively commissioned art - cars - interior
| design - building design
|
| are all things that have become increasingly taxing investments,
| at least in terms of perception, and the bigger that impression
| is the safer people will play it and the more they will try to
| copy others and look at what's trendy
|
| this is compounded by hypersocialisation and the share economy -
| if you buy a house to rent out, or to show online, you want it to
| be a safely designed house like those that are succeeding and are
| popular, and your particular quirks and tastes, if you have any
| contrarian ones at all, you'd rather suppress them for the sake
| of the business
| [deleted]
| WoodenChair wrote:
| And now all of our text will start to look the same too as we use
| the same LLMs to generate it.
| ctrlp wrote:
| Article neglected to add that all the online writing is the same.
| the_af wrote:
| My knee-jerk reaction to this article was pretty negative, but
| that's because the initial example (the paintings) is pretty bad.
| This experiment was made in the worst possible way: the same two
| artists rendering _their interpretation_ of what different people
| say they want, and the paintings are unsurprisingly similar: the
| same bluish sky, the same tree to the right, the same mountain to
| the left. As an example, it 's terrible and unscientific: it's
| pretty much a statement on these two painters, and not much else.
| It's impossible, for example, that every person interviewed
| wanted a tree to the right of the painting -- that's just what
| the artists themselves preferred. It's also questionable whether
| people actually want what they claim to want in an interview.
|
| That said, it's hard to deny the other examples are spot on. I
| suspect they are cherry picked (surely you can find celebrities
| that do NOT look like those in the example), but I find these
| samey blandness everywhere. It's on the "Netflix look", it's on
| book covers, it's on how malls and supermarkets look, etc.
| abdellah123 wrote:
| I completely agree. Same goes for websites, fashion ... and even
| the way people think. It's too sad
| WorldPeas wrote:
| I fear LLMS/Image generation will only make this worse. I imagine
| many people now type in "please list for me 10 ideas for a mint
| gum tagline" for a spark of inspiration, or will generate mocks
| of art using sketches fed into an image transformer. The thing
| they don't think about when doing this however, is that it's just
| operating on what it's been fed, while if people from another
| brand do the same, they'll also get a similar result. I guess
| we've outsourced inspiration and now have to deal with the
| consequences.
| nazgulnarsil wrote:
| I think everyone is overwhelmed, their attention slammed. So they
| want things that don't activate a lot of cns arousal.
| mfbx9da4 wrote:
| I remember a psychological experiment where they averaged faces
| artificially and the averaged faces consistently would be ranked
| the most beautiful.
| psychoslave wrote:
| What can I say, criticism of mediocracy all look the same:
|
| https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/51961637
|
| https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/104973152110363...
|
| https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/jems.12469
|
| https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1049731520974764
|
| https://revistaseletronicas.pucrs.br/ojs/index.php/revistafa...
|
| http://manuscript.elsevier.com/S004727271500119X/pdf/S004727...
|
| https://epub.ub.uni-muenchen.de/13268/1/286.pdf
|
| https://www.academia.edu/30241852/La_m%C3%A9diocratie_fran%C...
| nwienert wrote:
| They also are comparing like with like and no surprise it looks
| similar. Big cities converge.
|
| I'm originally from Tucson, and the aesthetic of the non-
| downtown area is quite unique. Adobe houses painted in desert
| tones, for example, are very different to east coast wooden
| houses.
|
| It would be easy to parody this article by picking out photos
| of jungles from a distance. They all look the same! Or deserts.
| Or Mediterranean landscapes compared to Northern California.
| Snowy mountains - they're all the same!
| k2enemy wrote:
| The two I looked at were completely different. Or was the point
| that different fields are doing work with "mediocrity" in the
| title?
| livelielife wrote:
| this is very funny, that all criticism of convergent blandness
| when written down converges blandly
| m0llusk wrote:
| Makes me wonder what ChatGPT has to say about all of this.
| sacnoradhq wrote:
| Even some elements of culturejamming approaches boring
| uniformity: Adbusters doesn't interest me because they're often
| a reaction to mass media and rarely present anything different
| or poetically-viral.
|
| I wouldn't lump Banksy full-in on pure anti-corporate, anti-
| consumerist culturejamming because of the insightful socio-
| political commentary performance/works rather than trying to
| sell zines about how capitalism is bad.
| patientplatypus wrote:
| [dead]
| zitterbewegung wrote:
| This article can be described as the age of cherry picked
| samples. Most people really want silver cars (but since they want
| to comply with crash tests and most people want high efficiency
| cars you get the same designs). AirBnBs won't sell if it doesn't
| look like every modernist interior design and asking many people
| to output a work of art will basically look like if you take
| stable diffusion with some boring parameters...
|
| If you want to see exciting cars you have to pay for it. If you
| want to see fun skylines you have to go to unique places (I am
| spoiled by Chicago). If you want a cool place to stay at you
| really shouldn't do Airbnb . Unfortunately using services that
| are cheap or don't have must history then everything looks the
| same.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| > "In nearly every country all people really wanted was a
| landscape with a few figures around, animals in the foreground,
| mainly blue."
|
| Despite soliciting the opinions of over 11,000 people, from 11
| different countries, each of the paintings looked almost exactly
| the same.
|
| I am literally amazed, all that effort. In my modest European
| country, there were kitsch painters offering their "art" by tens,
| for very cheap at resorts near seaside or at mountains resorts.
|
| All were like in the article, mainly blue, with few humans in the
| background and some possible animals in the foreground. Blue
| lakes near the mountains, bluea sea, hut with huge blue sky.
|
| All those kitsch artists never did a study.
| ilaksh wrote:
| Maybe they studied what paintings sold for them.
| xbar wrote:
| This response is completely different from all the others.
| psychoslave wrote:
| So good! Someone have to create a t-shirt brand with it and
| flood the market with it.
| enono wrote:
| Incredible article. I realized this on a subconscious level but
| feel very strange to see it so clearly articulated
| tycho-newman wrote:
| Ehh, pearl clutching over homogeneity in art and architecture is
| par for the course. What the writer needs to do is expand their
| horizons, and possibly, their vertices. There's tons of options
| out there if you take a minute to look outside of -/checks
| notes/- ... AirBnB? Really? Is AirBnB a good place to find a
| representative sample of interior design diversity?
|
| Also, homogeneity is great when properly deployed. Imagine going
| to a city and not having to think about how the street numbering
| system works, or how to navigate the metro, or how to find an ATM
| because of a human-centered design aesthetic that is built around
| routines of daily life, instead of the 9-5 commute.
| stickfigure wrote:
| > Imagine going to a city and not having to think about how the
| street numbering system works
|
| I used to spend a lot of time in Seattle, which makes heavy use
| of numbered streets. Compared to cities with alphabetic street
| names, I found it _harder_ to navigate. It 's too easy to mix
| up a "51st Ave N" with "51st Ave NW" or a Street for an Avenue.
| Humans are just better at reading and remembering names.
|
| These days all navigation is electronic. The verbosity of text
| names acts as a kind of redundant check on the information
| stream. Numbers are more of a hindrance than a help.
| bux93 wrote:
| I don't know if AirBnB is representative, but I clicked on 5
| random airbnb properties from the homepage, and they all had
| white walls! And most had some exposed wood! Admittedly, one
| also had some slate walls. And another had red tiled flooring.
| And one was a log cabin. But if you ignore all of the
| differences, they are strictly identical in every respect.
| Mali- wrote:
| I completely disagree. The article can be viewed as analysing
| the effects of globalisation, the growing homogeneity of spaces
| that _starts_ at AirBnB and cafes and spreads. Something is
| lost if you visit a new country and the layout is exactly the
| same as where you live. If I visit Hong Kong and I see a London
| tube type rail map, I 'm going to be disappointed. There is a
| tradeoff in not immediately knowing how to use the trains or
| immediately knowing how the postcode is layed out - but the
| gain is individuality. I lean towards keeping the individuality
| and not sucking out every drop of exploration into the unknown.
| Isn't that a big part of travelling?
| andsoitis wrote:
| The author showed some skylines from a distance and claimed
| all cities look the same. But that's juts not true. Hong Kong
| and London look, feel, and work very differently from each
| other, even though the latter was a British colony.
| tsunamifury wrote:
| City of London and Hong Kong are very much the same.
| Historical London at large is not. But I think you're
| missing the point on purpose here.
| tycho-newman wrote:
| > the growing homogeneity of spaces that starts at AirBnB and
| cafes and spreads
|
| Like I said, there's options when you look outside AirBnB.
| There is diversity in design if you look outside the haunts
| of the bourgeois classes.
|
| And look, some people want to struggle reading metro maps. I
| am not one of them. I, for one, am glad that Harry Beck
| designed the tube map that would become so influential all
| over the world. Praise be to Harry Beck!
| https://youtu.be/cTLCfl01zuE?t=201
| masswerk wrote:
| But you could go to Paris and have the equally iconic and
| functional _plan illumine,_ and it instantly felt like
| Paris.
| tycho-newman wrote:
| Paris is is the crown jewel of the petit bourgeois.
| staminade wrote:
| Travel back 2000 years and I'd bet you'd find Romans complaining
| that every new villa looked the same and every new toga was in
| the same style. Every era has a dominant aesthetic in art,
| design, clothing and decor, but there's still likely a greater
| variety in the modern era than there has been at any point in
| history.
| johnlocke8 wrote:
| What a bad take. I don't think any Romans were saying the new
| cathedral looks too much like the old one. Art and architecture
| then weren't commercialized the way they are now. People spent
| 600 years working on buildings they would never see complete.
| There were no global demonic companies rushing ugly, non-
| offensive (mass appeal), products out the door in literally
| every industry.
| TheCoelacanth wrote:
| They absolutely were. The Romans had cookie-cutter apartment
| buildings too. They had mass production of pottery, textiles
| and other decorations by slaves.
|
| Granted, the art and architecture that have managed to
| survive for 2000 years is more unique, but that's just
| survivorship bias.
| elzbardico wrote:
| 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.
| jsemrau wrote:
| I am lately strangely obsessed with the decline of modern
| culture as seen in the MCU and Star Wars. This
| 'a-historic'-ness materializes itself in that the author's of
| She-Hulk have apparently never seen the 1970s struggle of the
| original Hulk, i.e., being an outcast on the run. Neither have
| they understood what made the original Star Wars trilogy work.
| Killing off the characters of Luke, Han, Lando, and Vader can
| only explained if the authors never understood the history of
| these characters. Surely, these are all works of fiction, yet
| they are still part of our shared cultural history.
| yobbo wrote:
| There was a fashion in the 70s that seemed to have permeated
| everything.
|
| Avacado green or burnt orange kitchen tiles, furniture, thick
| brown window drapes, and so on. Side burns. It must have felt
| like everyone/everywhere looked the same.
|
| Later it became ridiculed and despised.
| trgn wrote:
| 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).
| GalenErso wrote:
| I want to think that my growing collection of books about
| nuclear weapons, nuclear war, and nuclear strategy allows me to
| tick the quirky box among my fellow Millennials/Zillennials.
| hoseja wrote:
| *Zoomers
| mromanuk wrote:
| 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.
| apozem wrote:
| That is quite a sweeping theory. Do you have any systemic,
| large-scale, non-anecdotal evidence to support it?
| [deleted]
| pveierland wrote:
| An interesting perspective on "user generated content all being
| the same" is the research "Time-lapse Mining from Internet
| Photos" where time-lapse videos are reconstructed from the
| variations in the pictures of the same scenery being extracted to
| show the actual changes made over time. Even if changes in
| content may seem minute, it still does communicate samples of the
| underlying information distribution and its changes over time.
|
| https://grail.cs.washington.edu/projects/timelapse/
| jstummbillig wrote:
| What a strange article. Alternative title: "How to cherry pick
| your data to make any point"?
|
| (By the way, I am not even concerned with the observation being
| more truthy than false. It's just so blatantly written to drive
| home the conclusion that they missed their chance to add anything
| of interest to answer the question).
| fwlr wrote:
| 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.
| lvoudour wrote:
| 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
| ryandrake wrote:
| 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.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| 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.
| tsunamifury wrote:
| 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.
| bluetomcat wrote:
| 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.
| davemp wrote:
| This seems somewhat cherry picked, and lacking real insight.
|
| Sure we can agree on the obvious conclusions that mass production
| is going to try for mass appeal and thus "saminess".
|
| But my house certainly isn't white with wood tones. That's
| because I've been putting in the work to select and restore
| beautiful furniture from decades past and gradually building
| towards a more unique aesthetic.
|
| Let me tell you it is expensive in both time and money.
|
| - Just selecting a non-neutral wall color is very difficult and
| pretty much locks you into certain furniture.
|
| - If you want to commission the perfect dining room table it will
| cost you $5-20k easily depending on your tastes. Or it will cost
| weeks of labor to DIY (assuming you've already devolved the
| prereq skills). Mass produced pieces will be your only option.
|
| - For architecture, you don't really get a choice. Custom
| building a home is hugely expensive and you'll need a huge amount
| of skill/stress capacity to GC it yourself or pay $$$ for someone
| with a reputation.
|
| I guess I don't get the point of articles like this. I don't
| think they're entirely wrong, but I'm also pretty sure it's
| always been like this. You don't just get beautiful and unique
| things for free. It's just when we look back on history we're
| usually blinded by survivorship bias of the beauty that has stood
| the test of time.
|
| Look up some of Brent Hull's content about historical
| architecture. You'll see that even though he rags on modern
| buildings, he'll describe how the different architectural forms
| were massively influenced by the industrial capabilities of the
| time.
| bluetomcat wrote:
| > I don't think they're entirely wrong, but I'm also pretty
| sure it's always been like this.
|
| It hasn't always been like that, if you put down the US-centric
| lens. Every shopping mall in a bigger city anywhere in the
| world now looks similar to a US shopping mall. Fast-food venues
| across the world resemble US venues, even if it's not a
| franchise under a US brand. It's a cultural hegemony that is
| exported through consumer products.
|
| It used to be that every region had its own distinctive "malls"
| with mostly locally-made products, and now the whole world is
| stuck with Chinese-made products tuned primarily for the US
| taste.
| pixl97 wrote:
| 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.
| ssnistfajen wrote:
| 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.
| yowzadave wrote:
| This effect will only be exacerbated by the ubiquitous use of AI,
| which by design is trained on everything humans have already
| produced, and will trend toward the average in the results it
| produces. Perhaps this is the key advantage that humans have: the
| ability to be different?
| sakex wrote:
| One example that is missing but would actually have been more
| obvious is the smartphone. They basically all look the same.
|
| It seems to me that some winners emerge, which makes other
| competitors want to replicate the winner's formula. Over time all
| products end up the same. Trying to deviate from that sameness
| will either result in customers not being interested or everyone
| copying you. This may be bad for innovation.
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| You could just as well ask why do keyboards all look the same?
| There is always convergence in user interfaces because
| consumers don't want to relearn every time they buy a new
| device.
| sakex wrote:
| Sure, the overall shape doesn't give a lot of leeway for
| design. But other details like the home button (early
| iPhones), absence of jack sockets, disappearance of
| navigation buttons (like early Samsung Galaxys), etc. follow
| the same trajectory.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| Images are cherry-picked to support the argument.
| [deleted]
| artursapek wrote:
| It's called globalism, and it's depressing!
| denton-scratch wrote:
| > We like to think that we are individuals, but we are much more
| alike that we wish to admit.
|
| Unusual, eccentric or otherwise interesting opinions aren't going
| to show up in a market researcher's poll. What were they
| expecting?
| ggregoire wrote:
| This made me think of https://www.reddit.com/r/battlestations.
| fbn79 wrote:
| Architecture all looks the same because try to address the same
| requirements with the same technical limits. This is true now as
| 5000 years ago https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-
| qimg-3117455a884d3088101e1...
| greenhearth wrote:
| Is that Jesus in one of the paintings?
| fvdessen wrote:
| The coworking space where I work took the exact opposite
| approach. For each new location they hire an artist and let him
| go wild on the decoration, they have an in-house team of
| architects to make it happen. It makes for interesting social
| dynamics since people with similar taste tend to gather at the
| same place, and the variety also encourage people to move
| location to see something different. But it has another more
| pragmatic benefit for the coworking company; the locations will
| not go out of style at the same time and so they don't have to
| renovate all locations simultaneously.
|
| You can see some examples of their interior designs here:
| https://silversquare.eu/en/coworking-locations/brussels
| anfelor wrote:
| On the contrary, I think this is a great example for how
| similar co-working spaces look. Even though this company
| apparently tried hard to make them look different, the pictures
| are so similar:
|
| - All the ceilings have exposed "industrial" elements such as
| ventilation pipes, cables or unpainted metal.
|
| - They are all very spacious with lots of exposed floor but no
| carpets (to make them easier to clean I assume)
|
| - Modern, minimalist furniture
|
| - The occasional plant here and there, but potted as to not
| introduce any dirt
|
| - Non-distracting and almost bland color scheme. Notice how
| even the painting on the wall fades into the background.
|
| How could this look different? Consider for example NeueHouse
| or Soho House from
| https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/top-coworking-spac...
|
| They have more vibrant colors, more contrasts, less open space
| and more furniture overall. There are bookshelves and many
| unneeded but beautiful items like vases or small paintings. The
| ceilings have exposed wood and the floors are covered by
| carpets or are at least patterned.
| slindsey wrote:
| 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.
| SamBam wrote:
| I figured people were going to take issue with the opening
| anecdote about art, but that was simply the author trying to
| frame the story in an interesting way. The rest of the article
| was more compelling.
|
| The ubiquity of the 5-over-1 architecture in the US is very
| striking. The NY Times had an article recently called "America
| the Bland" [1] which challenged people to tell if apartments
| were in Nashville, Seattle or Denver. All I could think looking
| through it was "These look exactly like all the apartments near
| me in Boston and Cambridge.
|
| 1. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/20/realestate/housing-
| develo...
| yt-sdb wrote:
| > 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.
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| Damogran6 wrote:
| 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.
| sheepybloke wrote:
| 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.
| joelcollinsdc wrote:
| 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.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| 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.
| anthomtb wrote:
| I'm no expert but sewage seems rather simple in a tall
| building. You have gravity on your side so you "just" need
| longer pipes.
|
| Its getting the fresh water up that should get
| exponentially more difficult as building height increases.
| unavoidable wrote:
| 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.
| TheCoelacanth wrote:
| 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.
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| 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.
| SamBam wrote:
| 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.
| spankalee wrote:
| 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.
| wongarsu wrote:
| 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
| [deleted]
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| All housing waves produce cookie-cutter housing. Victorians
| all look like other Victorians, dingbats look like other
| dingbats, and brownstones look like other brownstones.
| uhtred wrote:
| 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.
| pier25 wrote:
| It's the same that has always happened. Human groups tend to
| become homogeneous because this helps survival.
|
| The difference is now the cultural bubble is global and of
| course it's completely irrelevant for survival.
| tsunamifury wrote:
| 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.
| ryandrake wrote:
| > 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.
| pier25 wrote:
| > _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.
| nonbirithm wrote:
| 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.
| pier25 wrote:
| Yes this exactly.
| [deleted]
| helloplanets wrote:
| Yep. This article is a good example of how to not do science.
| Not a single counterexample is provided from another decade.
| Not to even talk about actually trying to prove the same point
| for the 50's etc, with pictures.
|
| > Before long, the designer had stumbled on the perfect
| research tool: AirBnB. From the comfort of her home the app
| gave her a window into thousands of others. She could travel
| the world, and view hundreds of rooms, without leaving her
| chair.
|
| AirBnB the perfect research tool for interior inspiration?
| Well, it is if you wish to cherry pick for the specific topic
| of things looking the same.
| sparsely wrote:
| 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.
| bmicraft wrote:
| Especially when many AirBnBs are also interested in
| international customers
| Ekaros wrote:
| 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.
| sparsely wrote:
| 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.
| mmkhd wrote:
| > look at listings of new apartments
|
| 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.
| gizmo686 wrote:
| 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.
| ElevenLathe wrote:
| 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.
| bmicraft wrote:
| To add to that, the author completely ignores the fact that the
| differences from one person to the next might be much more
| significant than averaged differences inherited from their
| country's culture.
| heywhatupboys wrote:
| Meh, you see the Danish flag in one of them. Danish people love
| their flag in art, celebrations, etc. So clearly it was desired
| by them.
| Mizoguchi wrote:
| Agree.
|
| The author seems to be experiencing a case of what's known as
| Baader-Meinhof phenomenon.
|
| There may be such thing as the AirSpace look, but this may be
| driven by cost cutting more than actual style.
|
| Exposed brick, exposed air ducts, reclaimed wood, brass
| plumbing pipe lamps with Edison bulbs...
|
| All this is DIY stuff you do when you want to keep your
| expenses at the minimum while making the place look nice, and
| it accomplishes that very well, if donde right, I think.
|
| But I bet most people would go with a $50K custom Italian
| kitchen instead of exposed shelves if they could afford it.
| hindsightbias wrote:
| It's not the age of average, it's the age of utility.
| hoosieree wrote:
| Eventually all the good wood will be "reclaimed" and you'll
| start to see synthetic replicas and "genuine reclaimed wood
| look" hollow plastic panels.
| masswerk wrote:
| 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.)
| stereolambda wrote:
| 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.
| burlesona wrote:
| One thing that a lot of people don't notice is that this is the
| result of mass manufacturing replacing craft. People want good
| products that are cheap, and mass manufacturing creates them.
| Things made in a factory at scale are always cheaper and can even
| be better quality than low-scale goods. But once companies have
| sunk the capital into the factory that can churn this stuff out,
| they want to keep making the same stuff, not retooling and
| redesigning the factory. So minor changes occur but the basic
| template becomes very rigid. Once you start looking for it the
| factory-goods stubbornness to change is everywhere.
|
| I think this is just the consequence of making things at scale.
| Society as a whole benefits: most people have more and better
| stuff relative to their wealth level than people in the past. But
| craftsmanship disappears or becomes substantially more expensive,
| and with it the diversity and range of design fades away.
| trgn wrote:
| I agree to an extent.
|
| To use Loos's example, the original mass manufactured table was
| sturdy and practical. Its simple design meant that it would not
| to the fickle changes in fashion. This was the positive promise
| of mass manufacturing.
|
| There's no natural law that scaling up production should imply
| that things are of lower quality. Yet, that's where we are.
| hiidrew wrote:
| Another blogger notes similar trends and labels this 'refinement
| culture' - https://lindynewsletter.beehiiv.com/p/refinement-
| culture
|
| I appreciate the original poster's conclusion though - average is
| an opportunity for distinction. The takeaway seems to embrace
| uniqueness instead of trying to make your product look like
| everyone else's.
| didgetmaster wrote:
| The article purports to be an investigation to find out what
| people like; but feels much more like they started off with a
| conclusion and then went looking for evidence to support that.
|
| This seems very similar to many news stories or scientific
| studies these days. Start off with a narrative. Highlight
| anything that supports your narrative. Ignore anything that
| contradicts it.
| meghan_rain wrote:
| Old man yelling at cloud on...a generic blog
| grose wrote:
| Carles, of Hipster Runoff fame, wrote a series in 2015 (IIRC)
| about this aesthetic, which he calls contemporary conformism.
| https://tykoblog.wordpress.com/2016/09/02/the-contemporary-c...
|
| I think about this article a lot, he was dead on. He deleted his
| blog but it's floating around in the internet archives
| (carles.buzz).
| chasing wrote:
| Yes, things cherry-picked to look the same look the same.
|
| And things that are expensive to produce and must appeal to a
| wide-range of customer tastes tend to look fairly neutral.
|
| And some things "look the same" because everyone's converging on
| a common (evolving) set of best practices, not average ones.
|
| And those cities don't look the same.
| strken wrote:
| I like this criticism. When we optimise for any metric we lose
| diversity, and the value of what we lost can be more than what we
| gained.
| Fauntleroy wrote:
| Ironically, it's "another" one of "those" articles that populates
| the popular landscape.
| francisofascii wrote:
| The reminds me of what I think it is an established product
| marketing concept: people generally want something that is the
| "same", but with a new twist to make it slightly different.
| protoman3000 wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| globular-toast wrote:
| Are people entitled to be valued by others?
| trgn wrote:
| Certainly, it's called the golden rule.
|
| Also, rejecting love and affection is the dumbest thing a
| person will ever do (not to speak to GPs example specifically
| of course, i don't know the situation).
| nomdep wrote:
| I'm pretty sure most of these girls are doing the same with
| your brother. Not every relation should end in happily ever
| after
| mrwnmonm wrote:
| LOL. I love this comment, although I think you are
| responding to the wrong person.
| TsukiZombina wrote:
| Not in my country
| toss1 wrote:
| And now the convergence is going to be massively accelerated by
| LLMs and generative art/video and code tools.
|
| Because these work best (actually only work at all) in the middle
| lane of the masses of text/images/code that they ingest, and from
| which they generate their output.
|
| They generate the _most likely_ output to result from the given
| input. This necessarily homogenizes out any surprise or highly
| valuable information. We get the most average output
|
| (which, to be fair to their creators, is an average of the above-
| average human inputs, since they are training on the output of
| skilled humans in each field, and e.g., that grammar of GPT-4 is
| noticeably better than almost all current journalists, even when
| it is hallucinating an answer)
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| Turns out if you go looking, you can find lots of things that
| look the same. Who knew. That's how subsets work.
| zorrolovsky wrote:
| It's hard to disagree with the fact that brand identities are
| being stripped back of personality (aka all look the same). I
| wonder if there's a cause related to our social context: - It
| could be that this is the moment in history with the most visible
| amount of brands out there. It's inevitable that two designers
| land on a very similar solution without knowing about each
| other's work - It could be intentional: we live in the era of
| information noise. Brands are happy to strip back their
| personality and identity so that the message (their ads) can take
| the spotlight - Visuals are being dumbed down to increase
| usability: consumers are tired of making sense of strident
| brands, so they appreciate keeping it simple
|
| ... or maybe I'm just inventing things.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| Congratulations, you've found fashion.
|
| The reason why things were more varied in previous generations is
| the speed of communications. it took much longer for fashions to
| permeate through society, this mean that more local variations
| happened.
|
| Now, fashions are almost always global, but they still change at
| the same rate. The difference being is that they change much more
| in unison across the globe.
| iakov wrote:
| Do they really change though? The car example from the article
| feels stale, yet every single new car looks exactly like the
| cars on the picture. The stupid instagram face has been a thing
| since before covid. The movie posters go back to 2001, and I've
| seen a fair share of bleeding, crying, creepy eyes on the
| horror movie posters since then.
|
| It feel like we're stuck in a global, homogenized, test-group-
| approved fashion loop.
| IshKebab wrote:
| To a certain degree is _isn 't_ fashion; it's optimisation.
|
| Of course cars are going to look mostly the same. If you
| change anything too much (e.g. cybertruck) you're just
| straying from a highly optimised design.
|
| Look at bicycles. Before the invention of the safety bike
| there were lots of different designs. But the safety bike is
| such a good design you can't really get away with it.
|
| Or phones. Everyone complains about glass rectangles and
| where are the sliders and flip phones? They don't exist
| anymore because the glass rectangle is such a good design.
| masswerk wrote:
| 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.
| derbOac wrote:
| There was a piece going around awhile ago about the haunted
| Victorian mansion that seems relevant to me.
|
| E.g., https://www.washingtonpost.com/home/2022/10/27/why-
| victorian...
|
| The idea was the world went through a drastic change with
| WWII and the Victorian mansion started seeming like a ghostly
| remnant of the earlier age.
|
| Antiques Roadshow had a similar podcast where they discussed
| the "brown is down" phenomenon.
|
| Did the fast-changing fashions of the postwar era reflect
| something about normal trends, or was it a sort of
| equilibrating phenomenon, and now we've returned to some
| normal again, that we haven't seen in over 100 years?
|
| I wonder if you were to travel pre-world-war era if you'd
| come to the same conclusion about the speed at which fashions
| change. Maybe but maybe not.
|
| Coincidentally I was talking to my spouse last night about
| how if you look through architecture and design websites and
| magazines, the stuff you see is different from what we were
| referring to "real estate style" and here was referred to as
| "Airbnb" style. In architecture and design circles there's
| less uniformity and more color and contrast.
|
| The problem with this I've found is that it's difficult to
| find something different, of the sort in architectural
| circles. So if you want some of this stuff you often have to
| have it custom made, or made by a single boutique
| manufacturer, which is expensive and difficult.
|
| So some of this uniformity in style I think is international
| economies of scale, which creates supply constraints and a
| sort of monopsony of sorts. This might be reinforcing in
| turn.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| The world before WWI was the one of art-nuveau and the
| first era of innovation.
|
| 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.
| derbOac wrote:
| 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.
| masswerk wrote:
| 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".
| masswerk wrote:
| > 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.)
| superb-owl wrote:
| > Now, fashions are almost always global
|
| This has only been true for a few decades. It's a very new and
| foreign thing!
| SteveDR wrote:
| 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.
| masswerk wrote:
| Fashion used to have an important social and cultural
| function as it provided signals and markers for group
| alignment in society. As these kept changing periodically,
| this also gave a chance for realignment and reconsideration.
| (Compare this to the increasingly-caught-in-the-bubble
| phenomenon that we experience nowadays.)
|
| E.g., just compare major fashion trends in the 1970s (from
| mini to maxi, to bell-bottoms, to pants and tube socks &
| disco attire, to clogs and para jackets, to college look vs.
| punk) to the major fashion trends of the last decade (slim
| fit). This variation from season to season, while, of course,
| invented as a vehicle for marketing, actually provided a
| vehicle for repositioning in a varying landscape of tribal
| subcultures that was typical, then.
| caddemon wrote:
| 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.
| quadcore wrote:
| _Distinctiveness has died_
|
| Always was like that and I'll tell you why to the core.
|
| We often speak about how our behaviours are shaped so we could
| initially survive the saber-toothed tiger - or wild animals. But
| it's a huge misconception when it comes to the human race. We,
| human, never feared much the saber-toothed tiger simply because
| our brain is especially good for planning. So we always planned
| and hunted the saber-tooth tiger. We dont really fear wild
| animals that much, there is no need for confirming that simple
| fact.
|
| So the question is: what does human trully fear? What, would
| easily kill you? Like really really easily?
|
| We fear being rejected by the group because nothing kills you
| faster than being rejected by the group. Once you're rejected by
| the group there is two outcome 1) you're dead already because the
| group proceeded to beat you to death or 2) you are banned - and
| now, not only will you face the saber-toothed tiger alone but you
| will meet other groups that will get socially stronger hunting
| you.
|
| Get rejected by the group and just like that, you're chance of
| survival has drop to zero. Or close to it. In the snap of a
| finger.
|
| And that's what shape our behaviours the most. People fear
| nothing - nothing - like being rejected. They will lie to not be.
| They will deny truth, they will mate with anything as long as
| it's socially strong.
|
| It's not like "we are social", no, it's _you die_ if the group
| doesnt accept you. Still true today.
| eagleinparadise wrote:
| This article is silly. Look at anything over the course of
| history. All buildings built in 1920 look the same. Everyone
| dressed the same.
|
| The author cherry picks stuff that is popular in Western culture.
| Of course it looks similar... it's popular.
| OOPMan wrote:
| This seems pretty cherry picked to me.
|
| It's not completely wrong but it's not super honest either.
| Balooga wrote:
| This is a great podcast that discusses the topic of body size as
| it relates to sizing of clothes, sizing equipment for the
| military (cockpits, etc.);
| https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/on-average/
| duiker101 wrote:
| Related: Vemodalen https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ftDjebw8aA
| pizzaknife wrote:
| and in the 1700 and 1800s - peasant farmers all wore the same
| thing. whats with all the wigs and makeup in that same eras
| aristocracy? AND WHATS THE DEAL WITH AIRLINE PEANUTS AM I RIGHT?!
| trgn wrote:
| 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.
| JohnBooty wrote:
| On why automobiles all look the same:
| dimensions are agonisingly chosen to please the needs of
| the wind tunnel, to adhere to government safety
| regulations, to properly accommodate the average
| American family's collective weight of 78,000 lbs., and
| to allow for enough cargo space for all their
| crap
|
| Look, I know we have an obesity problem. But the collective
| weight of the average family is not 78,000lbs!
|
| I'm thinking they meant 780lbs (354kg) although even that seems a
| bit high.
| dimal wrote:
| 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.
| zacharyvoase wrote:
| Why do you think there was a golden age when there wasn't
| mediocrity, average-ness, simple and cheap and utilitarian
| designs?
|
| Is it because the bland cars and houses and advertisements from
| back in the day weren't nice enough to get preserved into the
| historical record? Maybe the people who owned those things
| weren't rich enough to take and keep pictures or videos of them,
| or weren't considered important enough to have aspects of their
| existence celebrated in media, media that were saved for
| posterity?
| 7yundao wrote:
| only the western main stream culture is converging _cough_
| _cough_
| spankalee wrote:
| This is silly. Every era's art, architecture, and fashion look
| similar. That's why you can even identify categories like
| Victorian houses, Mid-century Modern design, or expressionism.
| It's why you can throw a 70's party and people show up looking
| the part. And it's why truly great art stands out - it either
| creates the trend or bucks the trend.
| larve wrote:
| The good thing about living in today's world is that nothing is
| as easy as escaping the blandocracy. You don't want big franchise
| video games? There's a googol of indie video games on itch and
| steam and co. You want weird ass looking appartments. Guess what,
| they're on airbnb too. You want music? Books? Software? The
| weirdest communities? A text-mode orange website? They're all out
| there for you to use and discover.
| mrwnmonm wrote:
| I came across an article a year ago, but I can't find it now. It
| shows the difference between ancient archtictures and modern
| ones. Like churches, masjids, temples, and houses. Then shows how
| modern buildings looks like a lego in the middle of nature. Does
| this description reminds anyone here with a similar article?
| anthomtb wrote:
| I'm sure there are 10 more articles that, shrunken and laid out
| in a grid, would look very similar to TFA.
| SilverBirch wrote:
| >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.
| unnamed76ri wrote:
| One area not discussed: the jokes are all the same.
|
| It's gotten to the point that I rarely use social media react
| buttons at all when I see friends sharing memes. I know they
| didn't come up with it themselves and I grow tired of endless
| memes that cover nearly identical ground.
|
| I enjoy making people laugh if I post something on Facebook but
| it will be something I experienced myself. Not some meme whose
| author I couldn't credit if I tried.
| bobbyasdfasdf7 wrote:
| [dead]
| mekoka wrote:
| So this is what we have to look forward to in the age of AI-aided
| copywriting?
| coldpie wrote:
| Sadly, I think a real person actually spent time writing this
| drivel. Using an AI would've been a better use of everyone's
| time.
| nigamanth wrote:
| Everyone will start to use AI, so simply, don't.
| Hoasi wrote:
| Being out of date will become your edge.
| mberning wrote:
| It's not surprising that things evolve to a "best fit". Airplanes
| and cars are a good example. Is the reason they all look similar
| due to a lack of imagination, or is it due to them all converging
| on a form that provides the best "bang for the buck"? It is
| surely the latter.
| itissid wrote:
| Cities like Paris, Constantinople, Rome, Jerusalem, New Delhi
| look nothing like each other.
| vishnugupta wrote:
| I skimmed through the article and I could immediately correlate
| it with another article[1] that I could relate a lot with.
|
| My frustration is primarily because of lack of good movies coming
| out of Hollywood which has been churning out remakes after
| remakes or some decade long running sequels. I guess a question
| worth asking as we stand on the cusp of first quarter of the new
| millennium is, what are the lasting cultural artefacts that we
| are building? What is it that we can call truly as our own? Could
| be a music form, architectural style, painting form etc.,
|
| [1] https://areomagazine.com/2023/01/18/the-great-reboot-in-
| memo...
| drewcon wrote:
| Isn't this just...Darwinism?
|
| We could say the same thing about biological convergence in
| animals.
|
| The average vertebrate animal...
|
| Two eyes, two ears, one mouth, one brain, two sexes, five digits,
| moving around on appendages.
|
| It converges because it works.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| Your vertebrate example is not convergence, it is non-
| divergence plus common origin. There are biological examples of
| convergence (e.g., everything is crab [0]), but that's not one
| of them.
|
| [0] https://www.popsci.com/story/animals/why-everything-
| becomes-...
| a_c wrote:
| I think what the article describes is true.
|
| We are fed with ocean of information, the same bundle of
| information, with historical speed. If you are looking for e.g.
| interior design ideas, SEO, instagram, twitter, or whatever
| search channel du jour, including LLM, dictates what you are
| going to read.
|
| We are also living in the most globalized era, having access to
| products unmatched in our history, the same bunch of products.
| Don't remember which book I read from, our supermarkets have more
| product, but all supermarkets are having the same kind of
| products.
|
| Our working culture is also getting more homogenized. All
| companies are sharing the same kind of corporate talks. Everyone
| is taking the same style of profile picture, smiling, beaming
| with positive energy, with a uniform background colour. Think for
| example, your company tells you the company is cutting cost, what
| do you think the action will be? Why is that?
|
| Software engineering is about using latest hot tech, not so much
| about understanding problems.
|
| "We are all different", he said. [1]
|
| 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVygqjyS4CA
| pixl97 wrote:
| >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.
| hot_gril wrote:
| No comment on the argument. All I did was scroll through the
| pictures. Was hoping to see the "corporate memphis" example or
| AAPL, GOOG, MSFT, and probably others all using the same branding
| colors.
| ak_111 wrote:
| See also: movie trailers and SaaS website design.
| JoeJonathan wrote:
| Three things:
|
| 1. The author's entire brand identity follows this format. ("Hi.
| I'm Alex Murrell. I'm the Strategy Director at Epoch. And I make
| the complex clear.")
|
| 2. This is not a new observation. Apart from the articles he
| linked to, this is an old conversation, especially among
| urbanists. Already in the early twentieth century, Frankfurt
| School critical theorists were worried about the commodification
| of cities, with buildings becoming as ephemeral as consumer
| goods. More recently, Paul Connerton described modern space as
| "space wiped clean."
|
| 3. I know the author works in marketing, but I find the
| conclusion that "bold brands and courageous companies have the
| chance to chart a different course. To be different, distinctive
| and disruptive" shockingly bland.
|
| I know everyone in comments is griping about selection bias.
| Sure. There are local differences in commercial establishments,
| and you'd have to be deliberately dense to deny that. But I also
| think you have to be willfully blind to not see the convergence
| in international design trends, which are an obvious consequence
| of globalization. There are some obvious reasons for this,
| particularly when it comes to architecture. Lots of these firms
| are multinational, and homogeneity is an artifact of efficiency.
| This is not necessarily a bad thing: as someone in an HCOL city,
| I would happily take "bland" buildings if it meant affordable
| housing.
| megmogandog wrote:
| Sure, these types of critiques have been around since the
| Frankfurt School, but I think that just shows how ahead of
| their time the members of the FS were. Adorno gets criticized
| for painting with too broad a brush, but I feel like he was
| just making the right points too soon. For example, his remarks
| on the film industry make perfect sense in the context of
| contemporary superhero movie trends, even though they might
| have been exaggerated at the time. And clearly the message
| hasn't gotten through.
|
| On your last point, are the hideous 5-over-1s being built in
| your HCOL city affordable? Because the ones I'm seeing
| certainly aren't. Ugly, undistinguished, cheaply built, and
| still expensive!
| LesZedCB wrote:
| if those apartments were $1000/mo for the quality of
| construction, you pay an extra $1500/mo on top for the
| surplus enjoyment of living the _lifestyle_ which is
| intrinsically instagrammable.
| littlelady wrote:
| The author is the strategy director at the same type of
| shockingly bland company that would have this website:
| https://www.epochdesign.co.uk/
|
| All of the pages contain a vague paragraph with the invitation
| to "drop us a line" for actual information.
|
| I don't think a blog post has to have a brand new thesis--
| that's setting the bar a little high, but it should at least
| have some unique insight.
|
| Talking about the convergence of global brands in the digital
| space and how that affects the physical spaces we occupy would
| have been really interesting way of framing trends. Especially
| regarding how a brand can stand out in a homogeneous world that
| seems to favor the known. But what do I know?
| JoeJonathan wrote:
| Fair point on a unique insight being sufficient for a blog
| post. I should also give the author credit for writing
| clearly and for his photo montages--problems with the
| approach aside, it's at least superficially effective.
|
| This is a bit of a tangent, but I strongly suspect the design
| trend will swing toward hoarder chic. Almost 10 years ago
| now, I drove from Austin to San Antonio to buy an old stereo
| for $50. The owner's house was fascinating. He had two large
| rooms full of stereo equipment that he collected but had
| little interest in selling. Every item had a story: where got
| it, what a deal it was, what he traded for it. The stories
| evoked different times and places in his life. There was a
| whole biography there, in stereo(s).
|
| Unless a cafe were really driven by the personality of its
| owner, it would be hard to reproduce that kind of thing in
| any meaningful way. But I think designers will at least try.
| We're obsessed with old things as indices of authenticity,
| and as the aesthetic pendulum swings, interior designers will
| differentiate themselves by making spaces marked by
| superfluity. This kind of thing already exists, of course--
| largely in bars filled with vintage stuff. In homes,
| something like it gets called "grandmillenial" or "grandma
| chic." But it'll ultimately be just as vapid as contemporary
| design language, because it'll be a simulacrum of something
| more authentic.
|
| My sister-in-law is a successful interior designer, and her
| house is the epitome of AirSpace. It is as ephemeral as the
| Airbnb guest, changing every few months in the name of
| perennial "updates." It is the most heartless home I've ever
| been in.
| loveparade wrote:
| You know what's also the same? All the products in the same
| category on Amazon.
| eutropia wrote:
| This rhymes with a few other articles and blog posts:
|
| Wither Tartaria? https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/whither-
| tartaria
|
| > Imagine a postapocalyptic world. Beside the ruined buildings of
| our own civilization - St. Peter's Basilica, the Taj Mahal, those
| really great Art Deco skyscrapers - dwell savages in mud huts.
| The savages see the buildings every day, but they never compose
| legends about how they were built by the gods in a lost golden
| age. No, they say they themselves could totally build things just
| as good or better. They just choose to build mud huts instead,
| because they're more stylish.
|
| Colors: Where did they go? An investigation.
|
| https://www.vox.com/culture/22840526/colors-movies-tv-gray-d... >
| Why do so many TV shows and movies look like they were filmed in
| a gray wasteland?
| pdar4123 wrote:
| Just think how much worse it's all going to get with the ubiquity
| of AI
| 11235813213455 wrote:
| The age of surconsumerism*
| ravenstine wrote:
| Am I the only one who thinks that this phenomenon has pretty much
| _always_ existed? The only difference today, as far as I can
| tell, is _globalization_. Things are simply less exotic now
| because homogeneity is becoming less localized.
|
| If I were to really grasp at straws to defend the other position,
| maybe the contemporary aesthetic has become overly minimalist and
| utilitarian, as opposed to being style oriented. Restaurants are
| now cement cubes, all new apartment complexes look like hotels
| with a white|beige|gray palette and are also cubic, modern cars
| are all white and bulbous-looking, skyscrapers are either cubic
| or (ironically) overly whimsical in architecture to the point
| where they appear to have no obvious function. Perhaps if
| standard designs and architecture were less boring, people
| wouldn't care so much about homogeneity.
| hindsightbias wrote:
| Maybe some things need to be utilitarian to extremes.
|
| I could live in THX-1138 world as long as I get to drive a Lola
| T70 through the BART tunnels.
| agys wrote:
| Exactitudes (1994--ongoing) comes to mind:
|
| https://exactitudes.com
| qwertfisch wrote:
| Most comments lean onto the unscientific results about fashion
| and design, which follows fashion. But the article also displays
| one categorie that should be independent of fashion and solely
| rely on creativity: media.
|
| This chapter proves the premise with statistics about film
| grossing and the increasing unoriginality that influences movie
| plots. When I was a teenager or years 20 to 30, I went to the
| cinema up to a dozen times per year. Almost no matter what genre,
| there was always an interesting movie with a fresh plot or story
| background. But since 2010 I visited less and less, and (also
| pandemic-related) the last movie I watched in the cinema is from
| 2018. But also at home I got the feeling there were less
| interesting movies. I thought maybe I am getting old. But these
| statistics tell me, this is not a feeling, it's a machinery of
| permanent repetition without being creative AT ALL. And why is
| that? Because people still watch these repetitions and seems to
| not get tired of them.
|
| Yes, I watched the phenomenal 22-movies-Marvel-universe with a
| great finale. These are of course part of the repetition
| statistic, but it was a new idea at the time, and Marvel clearly
| went to the success lane with this movie-spanning story. But now?
| Story's over, they still produce new mediocre (but still visually
| pleasing) action movies which do not have any hint of a new
| spanning plot, and people STILL go watching them and create giant
| revenues. If people just would boycott any one of these movies,
| the financial desaster (200+ million dollars of cost per movie!)
| would end this at once.
|
| So ... is it a problem of the society that they expand fashion
| also to creative things and seem to be happy with any different-
| but-same movie? I am tired of these movies, I am also tired of
| TV/streaming series with the same plots again and again. There is
| more film material produced than ever but for me there is much
| less to watch than say from 20 to five years ago.
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| Film is much less creative. But look at television and you see
| a different story. We have far more creativity and variety than
| ever before.
| fullshark wrote:
| I don't see any novel TV. The last truly novel TV format was
| probably the different reality TV formats which exploded 20
| years ago and kind of took over everything. Netflix which has
| dropped billions of dollars on TV basically decided to just
| copy every format which was successful on cable TV, and has
| invented nothing novel as far as I can tell except for the
| interactive TV specials
| (https://help.netflix.com/en/node/62526) which didn't really
| seem to take off.
| duckmysick wrote:
| Releasing the whole season all at once (instead of
| weekly/daily) is a novel format to me.
| michaelt wrote:
| If you expand TV to include youtube and other streaming
| services, _in a sense_ we 're in an age of unprecedented
| choice.
|
| You want to watch someone building a robot? Or building a
| sailboat from scratch? Smelting iron in a furnace they
| built themselves out of clay? Blacksmithing? Welding?
| Reviewing PC-98 Visual Novels? Taking apart LED lights?
| Picking locks? Shooting antique firearms? Using a tatoo-
| removing laser on themselves? Restoring classic cars?
| Fitting powerful rally car engines into classic cars?
|
| We've got all of those, completely free and available on
| demand.
|
| Back when there were only 4 TV channels, content had to
| have much wider appeal - requiring both mainstream topics,
| and keeping things simple enough to be accessible to almost
| anyone.
| fullshark wrote:
| Great point! But even those services seem to have
| stagnated after an explosion in their growth phase maybe
| 10 years ago with novel attempts to capture eyeballs, and
| are becoming relatively samey in terms of content. The
| article even talks about the phenomenon of "instagram
| face" and "UGC all looks the same."
|
| One of the weirdest to me is twitch, before
| twitch/justin.tv existed did you think a platform for
| live streaming by anyone on the planet would be used
| largely for watching strangers play video games?
| pixl97 wrote:
| Why would the services not stagnate?
|
| When a new medium is presented, especially one with lots
| of access, people try lots of new things on it, some
| succeed and some fail. People pick up on trends and fads
| and tend to follow them, so those things become the thing
| you're more apt to see if you pick at random. Those
| trends evolve over time. If you're looking around you can
| find the 'different' thing that will become the new
| trend, and many more things that will die off.
| omginternets wrote:
| Is it? What do you have in mind?
|
| There's certainly more television than ever before, but I
| haven't seen anything truly novel in a while.
| watwut wrote:
| "Truly novel" is kinda difficult to define requirement.
| With literally any movie, you can argue for hours whether
| it was truly novel or not. But for me, just browsing netfix
| got me much bigger variance then what was available to me
| 20 to years ago.
|
| Back then, all films were the same action movie plus some
| comedies, basically. They all ended well. There are good
| and bad characters, no nuance and good ones win. The
| structure was also the same and formulaic.
|
| You could go to indie theater and see something else once
| in a while, but that was it. I have seen more novel things
| (at least novel for a movie). Not all of them were well
| executed, but the writers at least tried a new idea here
| and there. Twin sisters that switch families every year for
| example. It was not too good, but was not too bad and
| mainly it was something different.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| > But also at home I got the feeling there were less
| interesting movies.
|
| I manage maybe 30-35 new movies per year (and usually pick up a
| few more from that year by about two years out from its end)
| and I'd say a solid 80% don't suck, and about half are pretty
| damn good. Usually there are another ten or so that I know
| about and wanted to watch but never get to, and there are
| surely a bunch more good ones that I miss entirely. 2021 was a
| bit of an exception because Covid fucked with productions quite
| a bit and made the movie scene that year kinda weird (though
| there were several _really good_ small-cast-small-crew films
| released that year!) but otherwise, consistently, there are
| roughly mid-tens of good movies released every year, not even
| counting local indie scene stuff.
|
| Now, assessing it this way does require 1) looking at more than
| just what's heavily advertised, and 2) having pretty broad
| taste in genres and being willing to meet a movie where it is,
| and at least having the capacity to enjoy what it's trying to
| do _assuming_ it pulls it off reasonably well--me, I 'd say
| _Beyond the Black Rainbow_ and _Guardians of the Galaxy_ and
| _One Cut of the Dead_ and _Logan Lucky_ are all good movies,
| so... I 'm capable of enjoying most genres and both "high" and
| "low" art, so the set of films that I might like is pretty
| large, which helps a lot.
| bhk wrote:
| https://twitter.com/culturaltutor/status/1551976063483482115
| carapace wrote:
| > all people really wanted was a landscape with a few figures
| around, animals in the foreground, mainly blue.
|
| How is that possibly surprising!? A sparsely populated coastline
| with abundant game? That's our evolutionary niche! _Of course it
| 's what we want!_
| precompute wrote:
| I can't find the link to it right now, but there's an article /
| post that says a lot of the blandness in our surroundings /
| houses is because we subconsciously try to balance it out with
| all the color we have available on our digital screens. Walls are
| bland white / gray because we have televisions, everything else
| is bland because the entire world is in our phones.
|
| And yes, globalization is yet another reason why. Even travelling
| to places is pretty boring now, it's just the same things. It
| takes a while for the reality to sink in, but our entire economy
| is now based on being bland. To the extent any country deviates
| from the USA it is deemed "undeveloped".
|
| Edit: found it -
| https://old.reddit.com/r/Anticonsumption/comments/10njiwd/co...
| KRAKRISMOTT wrote:
| Wait till she learns about web development and Corporate Memphis.
| splitstud wrote:
| [dead]
| gampleman wrote:
| This somehow seems to really fit in with the upcoming
| "creativity" of LLMs, which is also a relatively shallow remixing
| of existing content.
| pelasaco wrote:
| There possible many reasons for that. One of them (specially
| cars), cost is a real factor here. Normally some company develop
| a car framework and the other vendors, buy it and just tweak it
| for its own market.
|
| Other point that worth to mention is that today, people are
| consuming same media, culture and having the same idols,
| regardless of their physical location.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Interestingly, this may not be the first time when this has
| happened.
|
| In the ancient Roman Empire, important buildings, fora,
| aqueducts, amphitheathers ... were remarkably similar across vast
| stretches of territory, even though there was no instant
| communication and no photography, only hand-drawn sketches on
| paper/papyrus.
| dghnn wrote:
| I'm surprised that the author didn't mention LLMs. Their power is
| not in their ability to write---they are simply not at a literary
| level. However, they write average prose (which is often
| grammatical, as the deviations considered non-grammatical tend to
| cancel each other out) very well and very fast. You could say
| they are not MOC, but they are Paul Graham. And that's scary,
| because even the Paul Graham level is good enough to mount a
| disinformation campaign, as the success of Y Combinator literally
| proves.
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