[HN Gopher] The age of average (2023)
___________________________________________________________________
The age of average (2023)
Author : synergy20
Score : 227 points
Date : 2024-12-13 04:50 UTC (18 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.alexmurrell.co.uk)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.alexmurrell.co.uk)
| joegibbs wrote:
| The "International AirBnB Style" isn't of a place but it's
| definitely of a time, and that time was probably ten years ago to
| now. I think it's fading. It always feels like styles will be
| eternal until they go out of fashion. Probably by 2035 it will be
| completely uncool and replaced by something different, maybe
| local. Maybe not, since we're more interconnected than ever, so
| styles end up propagating fast and wide. In 2050 though, it will
| be cool again, like all the other things that went out of
| fashion.
| dogboat wrote:
| AirBnB is profit driven. So buy Ikea stuff or similar, paint
| the walls white, make it feel middle class for the $ but at the
| same time easy and cheap to maintain.
| hsbshs wrote:
| I had a weird boss once, who would reframe every prob or
| discussion into an explore-exploit tradeoff and how to "push" the
| ratio between the two towards more explore.
|
| So for example he would say things like okay we have 10 ppl in
| explore mode and 90 ppl in exploit mode. The exploiters are
| generating enough cash to sustain org carrying capacity of
| explorers, how do we increase carrying capacity?
| defrost wrote:
| He'd _love_ Diggers & Dealers:
| https://www.diggersndealers.com.au/
|
| An entire yearly event devoted to the trade offs twixt
| exploration and exploitation.
| seydor wrote:
| Global optimum
| DiscourseFan wrote:
| There has been discussion on this topic for about 100 years, but
| the most prominent is in the books _Dialectic of Enlightenment_
| by Theodor Adorno or _One-Dimensional Man_ by Herbert Marcuse.
| They are a bit heavier than this article but they go into the
| problem with far more depth.
|
| The Frankfurt school in general deals with this problematic of
| Capitalism losing its revolutionary potential and becoming a
| stagnant, homogenous, unchanging system. Walter Benjamin, the
| spiritual father of both the above authors, in fact did extensive
| work attempting to uncover the wondrous possibilities of early
| high capitalism before it collapsed under the rule of Louis
| Bonaparte, which was the subject of Marx's quite famous article
| _The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte_. Disagree with Marx
| if you want but he did believe that capitalism, if left to run
| wild, would produce a new form of hypermobile, freely associating
| society, but when that gets close to happening in times of crisis
| a certain section of elite seize power for themselves and prevent
| the revolutionary social changes from occuring, thus producing
| this endless mediocrity.
| telesilla wrote:
| How prescient
| DiscourseFan wrote:
| What we're experiencing today has happened many times before
| in modern history, but those moments only become legible in
| times of crisis
| EarthBlues wrote:
| Even before them, in Guenon and Vico.
|
| While it's mostly a laugh (a shock?) to read Guenon and Marcuse
| side by side, I think Vico is really misunderstood and under-
| appreciated in our present cultural moment and I think a lot of
| good could come from a revival of his thought. He's influenced
| a diverse array of characters, from Marx to Rosmini-Serbati,
| and I see a lot of his thought in Horkheimer and Habermas
| (I.e., the side of the Frankfurt school that rediscovered the
| big questions in a non-reactionary, non-nostalgic way).
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| Not all, but a ton of these have everything to do with the profit
| motive and how everything is being cost cut to the bone.
|
| - Simplified, bland corporate logos can be endlessly copied,
| moved and placed on canvasses and into a variety of mixed media.
| A bland, simplified logo is just at home plastered across
| packaging as it is painted on a piece of glass as it is cast in
| plastic and used as a decoration as it is floating atop stock
| footage as it is embossed in plastic on the side of a product.
| Design once, use everywhere, refresh occasionally.
|
| - Five-over-ones are a response as outlined in the piece to
| building codes and space constraints. It's the tallest you can
| safely build a structure without using any steel, and the
| principle materials are concrete and wood which are very cheap.
| It can be configured as a mix of residential and commercial
| properties which means you have an inherent diversity in your
| investment as a landlord, or just as easily be 100% of either
| without many foundational changes.
|
| - Corporate campuses have homogenized because of deregulation in
| corporate taxes and payment schemes, which incentivizes less
| investment in "cool shit" for your business. Why spend tons of
| money on a fancy headquarters with the top end of everything when
| instead you could just as easily give yourself all that money via
| stock buybacks, and then spend it on a yacht? And it's not like
| your competitors or customers give half a shit anymore, they all
| work in equally boring and dull campuses.
|
| - To most people unfortunate enough to live in areas where cars
| are a necessity, they are at best, a convenient alternative to
| walking and at worst, an ongoing tax on their livelihood that
| must be paid. Your average Joe or Jane cares that a car is
| reliable and gets good fuel economy. The only people who care
| about looks are those that are status obsessed, and to them, the
| logo means far more than anything on the actual bodywork. Most of
| the status enabled vehicles are also identical to the cheaper
| ones, differed only by badges. It isn't even just platforms as
| the article says; tons of vehicles are outright _the same damn
| vehicle_ being sold under a number of brands and models...
| because it 's cheaper.
|
| And as for less obvious things like AirBnBs and Coffee shops,
| it's just cheaper to imitate what's already working than doing
| any work to see what might be more interesting. Yeah those
| particular looks won out, but odds are that's less because of
| anything inherent to them, and more because it just... did, a no
| more consequential decision on the part of the universe than
| which specific fish happened to get legs right the first time.
| But for it being a different fish, maybe we'd all have legs that
| curved backwards instead of forwards at the knee.
|
| And instagram face is what it is, as the article says, because of
| Kim Kardashian. Because she certainly didn't originate the
| concept of being famous for being famous, but she did perfect it,
| utterly buff it to a mirror shine, and what is being an
| influencer if not that?
| nextlevelwizard wrote:
| At least with the "f*ck" books this is just a money grab. Subtle
| art was a hit - I also remember enjoying the book - and it sprung
| bunch of copy cats with no originality. I also got suckered into
| this, picking up another one of these books thinking it was a
| sequel, but it was the most boring non-sense and I dropped it
| almost immediately.
|
| I suspect money drives most other of these trends. You want to
| builds homes to look away that is proven to get highest sale
| price. You want to make the car look like the model that has sold
| most over past decade. You want to make your coffee shop look
| like what a successful coffee shop looks like to attract more
| customers. You want to make you influencer account look like
| every other influencer account to get as much sponsor and ad
| revenue as possible.
|
| This is the same reason why we see reboot after reboot and if it
| isn't a reboot it is a sequel or prequel or reimagining of some
| sort, since all of the arts are now investments and need to make
| profit, no one wants to take a risk on unproven idea.
|
| As for why even my home has white walls? Most people don't change
| the default. I don't care enough about the wall color and I know
| that I will be selling at some point and would have to paint the
| walls white again.
| whilenot-dev wrote:
| > no one wants to take a risk on unproven idea
|
| I think this one's the gist of it, and the big irony we'll all
| suffer from: While it gets cheaper to produce new things, not a
| lot of things will be original anymore.
|
| I once heard that the 90s were the decade of references, and
| that might have just stuck a bit for too long: The boom of
| second-hand, mid-century furniture, the "industrial" look,
| rounded edged everywhere. Hell, even smartphones are just a
| reference to Sci-Fi flicks from the 60s (the case was Apple VS
| Samsung, I think). On demand services and the easy piracy of
| digital goods... I feel while there has been an perceived
| increase in quality for each individual at first, all these
| things helped everything to converge into "the average" for
| everyone.
|
| We still see originality here and there, but you can just feel
| their competition against big budget productions. The movie
| _Mandy_ (2018) was great, so was the show _Scavengers Reign_
| (2023), _Breaking Bad_ etc. _Landscape FM_ produce really
| interesing audio gear. I 'm sure Open-Source (Hard- and
| Software) makes a lot of this possible, but for small and big
| equaly alike - depending on business practice, small might even
| be in danger to suffer from it.
|
| I'm sure we all have our gems, but they just feel rare in this
| huge landscape. I just wish it would be a more common practice
| to support local artists and individials that take this
| mentioned risk, without having to turn it into a growth hacking
| startup idea.
| ozim wrote:
| Not only profit but convenience.
|
| I do have enough stuff going on in my life.
|
| Everything that is custom needs additional maintenance or care.
|
| If someone is rich enough not to work they can dabble in some
| customization or they have enough money to hire someone to care
| for that custom stuff.
|
| Having a boat for example sounds awesome - but it sucks money
| out your pocket at insane rates.
|
| Most people are not rich enough don't have enough time to go
| fancy so they stick lowest common denominator.
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| > _it sucks money out your pocket at insane rates_
|
| boat life hack: choose fibreglass, not wooden
| ben_w wrote:
| Better boat hack: register your dog as a boat.
|
| * Self-cleaning
|
| * Self-repairing
|
| * Is a von-Neumann self-replicator
|
| * If anyone steals your dog, it's now considered an act of
| piracy
|
| (I know someone who has done this, and have seen both the
| registration certificate and the dog).
| DoingIsLearning wrote:
| You can write 'fuck', tik tok is not policing the whole
| internet.
|
| No point in self-censoring, just make the discussion
| constructive. [0]
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
|
| edit: shit, fuck, shit.
| nextlevelwizard wrote:
| That is the spelling used in the genre of those books, which
| is why I put it in quotes
| camillomiller wrote:
| This is a byproduct of capitalism, which is fundamentally driven
| by optimization and efficiency. The most efficient way to
| optimize is to homologate. Funnily enough that's an endgame that
| resembles closely what realist socialism would impose from the
| start, in order to distribute equally (whereas in capitalism this
| also led to increasing inequality). Globalized capitalism now
| resembles a lossy compression algorithm applied to the world.
| That said, the one shown by this article is also a very, very
| Western view of this issue. A stroll through Asian smaller places
| and you'll see the difference popping up. There are also
| interesting Western holdouts, where usually tradition still
| defies optimization. Italy is a good example of that.
|
| Edit: every time I mention a critique of capitalism on this forum
| it gets absolutely zero traction and even downvoted. Why is this
| the reaction, instead of maybe even telling me why this analysis
| is completely worthless or wrong in a proper argumented comment?
| Change my mind! But be also open to see more structural issues in
| the way we all live, maybe?
| panstromek wrote:
| > every time I mention a critique of capitalism on this forum
| it gets absolutely zero traction and even downvoted. Why is
| this the reaction, instead of maybe even telling me why this
| analysis is completely worthless or wrong in a proper
| argumented comment?
|
| I'll break the silence to give you at least my view on it.
|
| I find the "blame it on the capitalism" rhetoritc somewhat
| annoying, to be fair. It sounds like an escape hatch you can
| always invoke, and since we don't really have a significant
| example of a non-capitalist society, it's unfalsifiable. It
| often seems to me, that people use this argument as
| psychological escapism - a simple solution to a complex
| problem.
|
| Specifically, I see the "capitalism is bad" argument often used
| on examples that are not really specific to capitalism and are
| instead a result of some general principles.
|
| For example, it seems to me that this article just describes
| preferential attachment process (rich get richer) in various
| fields.Another common one is multipolar trap (or tragedy of the
| commons or collective action problem). Those things tend to
| happen absolutely everywhere, because the conditions for them
| are very simple to satisfy.
|
| We shouldn't be suprised to see them in capitalism, and we
| should expect them to arise in different forms in practically
| every system.
| jarjoura wrote:
| I can't tell if this article is trying to make it seem like a
| negative or not.
|
| Every decade defines is own unique style and it spreads until
| it's no longer distinct.
|
| 3rd wave coffee shops all look like that because they started
| during peak farm to table aesthetic. It's funny because it was
| born out of the answer to 1990s strip-mall sameness where you'd
| find Chilis and Starbucks. I remember designers losing their shit
| when they found wood planks of fallen down barns they could use
| in their interiors.
|
| Now that people are getting bored of farm to table, it'll be on
| to something else. When we look back in 50 years, all of this
| "sameness" the author is pointing towards will mostly just be
| here to define 2010-2020, with whatever name historians decide to
| call it.
| pointlessone wrote:
| Exactly. This is how you can place in time things like TVA in
| Loki and the office in Severance even though they do not belong
| to that time canonically.
| msoad wrote:
| There is a trend towards less colors overall. Something is
| changing
|
| https://lab.sciencemuseum.org.uk/colour-shape-using-computer...
| rrr_oh_man wrote:
| Millenial Gray
| beezlebroxxxxxx wrote:
| 1. It's cheaper.
|
| 2. Design values and aesthetics are ossifying around certain
| "hard" rules.
| ben_w wrote:
| I suspect that's the demographic shift towards older average
| population.
|
| I've only got anecdotal examples of old people preferring
| blander colours, hence "suspect" rather than "think".
|
| When my dad died, my mum replaced all the furniture and
| carpets with blander versions of the same -- in particular
| replacing the bold orange living room carpet and dark green
| patterned hall, stairs, and landing carpets with mild off-
| white.
| bigthymer wrote:
| > I suspect that's the demographic shift towards older
| average population.
|
| I agree. The downside is that this is a sort of
| permanent\long-term shift since the world is generally
| getting older and we are reproducing at below-replacement.
| wvh wrote:
| Maybe we are overstimulated by visual content and attracted
| to otherwise less visually striking objects, either to find
| some peace or to not be distracted from that content?
|
| At least for me, visually minimalist objects and environments
| are appealing because I generally feel overstimulated in
| modern society and by modern technology. I might feel
| different if I were to spend my days on the field doing slow,
| repetitive hard work.
| tananan wrote:
| I don't really buy this line of reasoning. Nature can be
| immensely colorful yet soothing to all the senses. You
| don't need to stuff your house with psychedelic rugs,
| tapestries and color-changing LEDs for it to have color.
| Including color does not mean that your space is cluttered
| or maximalist in style.
|
| We got a designer for a flat that was being renovated, and
| I realized that I needed to seriously involve myself in the
| project if the result was not going to turn out a lifeless,
| gray-white-beige soup.
|
| Now the flat is full of green, (warm) wooden, peach and red
| elements, giving it a cozy autumn-y vibe. And I don't need
| to stuff it with props that "pop" to add personality - it
| has one of its own.
|
| The prevailing wisdom seems to be "Make it all greige, and
| introduce life with (often pointless) colorful props". I
| feel this is _more_ offending to the senses than having a
| tastefully colored environment where you don 't need to
| "add" anything.
| Bjartr wrote:
| In some markets at least, like cars, this blandness is a
| sales optimization. Strong distinct colors are more likely to
| block a sale than bland generic ones.
|
| It may not be exactly the same in other markets, but there's
| still a cost to offering additional color variants. It's a
| cost optimization to offer the fewest colors that are
| appealing, or at least aren't objectionable, to the widest
| range of potential buyers.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| > can't tell if this article is trying to make it seem like a
| negative or not
|
| It left no ambiguity for me. Both the project (which is great
| art in itself) and the commentary opens a door for a hard
| truth, and new questions emerge,
|
| In tech, might we learn from this?
|
| from TFA: "Looking for freedom, we found slavery."
|
| Every parent. Every patrician, condescending patron. Every
| "elite". Each have their idea of what "freedom" is best for
| others.
|
| And the people say: "Boaty McBoatface!"
|
| In cybersecurity we want people to be safe. But the people say;
| "Give me TikTok, Microsoft...."
|
| Would Rousseau want us "being forced to be free"?
| astrobe_ wrote:
| > Would Rousseau want us "being forced to be free"?
|
| Probably. The French revolution actors were inspired by his
| work, and the French revolution led to the declaration of the
| human rights, which states that all people are born free and
| equal. If you take this claim as universal, then your moral
| duty is to make it happen.
|
| So yes, do free people even if they believe their situation
| is fine. Perhaps for instance because they've been
| brainwashed into believing it is, or perhaps they don't even
| know what freedom is.
|
| Unfortunately countries/organizations/persons that claimed to
| do that too often also had ulterior motives.
|
| The phrase "looking for freedom, we found slavery" is
| interesting because if there's slavery, then there's a
| master. The master we are talking about is "norm" or
| "convention". The term "slavery" can be apt in some cases,
| but generally is excessive.
|
| "Anticonformity" was somewhat a dismissive word in my country
| up to some point, but I have not heard it in that way for
| while, which suggests that people accept more easily
| "abnormal" people. When you want your freedom and you can
| have it, then there's no slavery nor tyranny.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| You've inspired me today.
|
| It's odd that in almost all walks of life, freedom comes
| from non-conformity. In arts, and in science, "progress" is
| a movement away from wherever we are. We may not like non-
| conformists, but we absolutely rely on them to move
| forward.
|
| Yet totalitarian technological social systems are the only
| creation that make those who conform "more free". By design
| they limit options at the margins while enabling those in
| the middle of the mediocrity curve. Slavery is freedom. And
| thus, since time stops for no man or machine, systems
| invite their own inevitable destruction.
|
| Technology is not just "a way of not having to experience
| the world" (Max Frisch), but a way of not having to
| experience _change_. And I think the "master" that you
| speak of is fear (fear of things changing).
| glimshe wrote:
| For the very same reasons you point out, there is also a style
| shared by the servers who work at these coffee shops. We would
| expect young people from the same generation to adopt similar
| hairstyles, facial hair choices etc.
|
| When we look at 70s interiors full of leather upholstery, wood
| panels and with a desaturated look from old film camera
| pictures, they feel outdated. It's hard for me to imagine
| looking at these white, clean HD interiors and saying "oh this
| feels so outdated" - but I bet that's exactly what people will
| think decades from now.
| sethammons wrote:
| What looks modern is as arbitrary as what looks futuristic
| dang wrote:
| Discussed at the time:
|
| _The age of average_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35355703 - March 2023 (474
| comments)
| LoganDark wrote:
| I've noticed this in many categories, where almost everything in
| the category converges extremely specifically on qualities that I
| simply... do not like, at all. For example, laptops and the "thin
| and light" fad.
|
| I may have different needs from the average person, but why does
| nobody else have these needs? Am I the only autistic person on
| the planet, the only software developer on the planet, the only
| person on the planet who likes to be productive on a laptop? The
| only person on the planet who practically lives in their laptop?
|
| I think hopefully not, but this is like... probably under 1% of
| people. And you know, almost nobody caters to this niche because
| if you cater to the 99% (or more) instead, you make so much more
| money!
|
| I fucking hate having special needs sometimes.
| Terr_ wrote:
| Uhm, I really don't think that the market-segment of "people
| who prefer other laptop aspects more than portability" is best-
| described as "autistic."
|
| Late-P.S.: The opposite direction seems iffy too, assuming the
| word isn't being used in a 4-chan-esque broad online-person
| insult sense.
| LoganDark wrote:
| It's autistic for the computer to be an extension of your
| brain. For you to think in computing, for the performance of
| your computer to be central to the performance of your
| thought. Access to powerful computers has shaped the way I
| think and work to the point where I practically live online.
| I'm not a hacker in the traditional sense, but the computer
| is my world, the internet is my home. Not in the shallow,
| social-media sense, like today's "influencers", but in a deep
| fundamental way. I don't even identify with humanity; being
| online allowed me to create my ideal self from scratch.
|
| There are so many niches here I don't even know how to start
| listing them all. I am a unique type of person. I have not
| yet found even a single other person like me in this way. I
| have found a total of two other people who share my neurotype
| but none that share my attitude. That is how lonely it is.
|
| Sure looking for certain things in a laptop is not
| necessarily autistic. But think of the reasons why people
| would look for these things. Normal people don't care as long
| as it works and is good enough for them. Because I live on
| this computer, every detail of how it works needs to be
| right. I need something that is perfect for me. I need a
| perfect screen, perfect keyboard, _and_ high performance, all
| at the same time. Every machine with that perfect screen and
| perfect keyboard tends to get it mixed up with being "thin
| and light" and all that performance goes away. I _hate_ that.
|
| I can get used to some deviation. A lot of my preferences are
| simply resistance to change. But a lot of them are because
| I've tried anything else (possibly for years) and I hated it.
| There are things that I genuinely consider better and they're
| practically not available in a package that works for me.
| thom wrote:
| What features are you seeking that aren't available? There are
| many powerful, heavy laptops. There are many 16+ inch form
| factors. My current laptop has dual screens!
|
| I agree it can be frustrating when the mainstream focuses on
| things you don't like, but that doesn't always exclude the
| things you do. I don't like pop music but there's more music I
| like now than when I was young.
| LoganDark wrote:
| > What features are you seeking that aren't available? There
| are many powerful, heavy laptops. There are many 16+ inch
| form factors. My current laptop has dual screens!
|
| Sure, there are many powerful, heavy laptops. Almost none
| with a HiDPI screen, though. And almost none that lack a
| numpad (and off-center trackpad). And almost none with half-
| height arrow keys, even among the ones without numpad.
|
| To find one with all three of those? You may as well not even
| try. I have more requirements, but nobody really cares even
| about the most basic ones, so there's no point in hoping for
| the more complex ones.
|
| Even among laptops with 4K screens they're bound to have
| "full-size" keyboards with a numpad. If no numpad, the arrow
| keys are still likely to be full-size, and there are probably
| dedicated Home/End/PgUp/PgDn buttons, which are always stupid
| compared to putting them into Fn+Arrows.
|
| I get it, portable workstations are designed to be desktops
| in a laptop form factor. They're not designed to be laptops.
| But maybe something out there should be. Maybe there should
| be even a single laptop on the planet that is actually
| designed like a premium laptop, with workstation-class power
| inside.
|
| There probably won't be, though - far more likely for
| everybody to tell me my expectations are completely
| unrealistic. (It'll happen any second now, probably.)
|
| > I agree it can be frustrating when the mainstream focuses
| on things you don't like, but that doesn't always exclude the
| things you do.
|
| The Framework Laptop 16 is one of the first Windows laptops I
| have ever seen that checks many of those boxes, but
| unfortunately it's still thin and light (and also AMD).
|
| I recently got a Apple 16" MacBook Pro and it's okay. Really
| many of my requirements were inherited from the Mid-2015 MBP
| being possibly the best machine I'd ever used, but then Apple
| became terrible for a while, and nobody else (not even Razer)
| did a good job of replicating what I liked about that
| machine.
| nottorp wrote:
| Wait. Macbook pro's _are_ thin and light.
| LoganDark wrote:
| The new Apple Silicon machines outperform full-size
| desktop workstations. I'm OK with that.
|
| (According to Geekbench, this machine outperforms my
| desktop 12400F by 20% in single-core and over 100% in
| multi-core, and it's also less than 5% behind my RTX 3090
| in GPU performance... in practice though, I've noticed
| certain work tasks drop down from taking over 10 seconds
| to under 3 seconds.)
|
| The reason I don't like thin and light Windows laptops is
| because _they freaking don 't_.
| panstromek wrote:
| You might be an exception. I, as a developer, really want "thin
| and light" laptop to make it as efforless as possible to carry
| it around and use anywhere. I've made the mistake of buying a
| heavy powerful one, and I basically never carry it around,
| because it's just too impractical.
| botanicals6 wrote:
| Nice article, you also see that in content - creators using the
| same hooks, transitions etc. It gets tiresome after seeing the
| same "stop doing X this way/try this one trick/top ten" after a
| while.
|
| Besides profit motive, there are fundamental and evolutionary
| reasons for the convergence - humans are naturally attracted to
| pleasing composition and natural light in AirSpace, have our
| attention easily manipulated by unconventional titles etc. So
| companies are just exploiting our penchants and preferences.
| forgotusername6 wrote:
| Yes everything looks the same now. But hasn't that always been
| the case to a certain extent? The world is a lot smaller now and
| that leads to ideas spreading quickly. This doesn't necessarily
| mean that things stay the same though. What is in fashion changes
| and generally only the best of each fashion trend stays around.
| Where I live there are a number of old buildings with exposed
| timer frames. At some point, most of the town would have looked
| like this, but now only the finest examples remain. I'm sure the
| same thing is true for fields other than architecture. I'm sure
| the past was full of generic imitation like it is today, though
| just more localised.
| ccppurcell wrote:
| In some areas probably you're right. Pictures of men in certain
| eras all wearing identical hats spring to mind. On the other
| hand the film industry is a stark example where it really did
| used to be more varied. The article mentions it, before 2000 3
| in 4 big films were original. Now it's getting close to zero.
| dsign wrote:
| And the music? Film music for everything popular seems to
| have come from the same music box.
|
| But popular music itself is to a high degree very same.
| That's not to say that there is no original music anymore.
| There is a big amount. It's just people tastes that decide
| what becomes popular, and everybody wants to hear the same.
|
| And yet, fashion and taste change. It's just a matter of
| time.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| >It's just people tastes that decide what becomes popular
| //
|
| What becomes popular seems to be whatever we get
| brainwashed with, ie what we get advertised.
|
| It seems to be less driven by social changes than it is
| driven by profit motive of those able to feed most of us
| 10-15 minutes of advertising within each of the several
| hours of media consumption most of us partake of each day.
| rufus_foreman wrote:
| He covers music in a follow up article,
| https://www.alexmurrell.co.uk/articles/the-age-of-average-
| en...: "Chart topping tracks are becoming shorter, less
| melodically diverse and more lyrically repetitive".
|
| According to him, it is not just tastes, it is the way
| musicians get paid:
|
| "Streaming platforms pay artists each time a track gets
| listened to. And a "listen" is classified as 30 seconds or
| more of playback. To maximise their pay, savvy artists are
| releasing albums featuring a high number of short tracks."
| caseyohara wrote:
| Could this be an effect of the novelty of a new art medium?
|
| When films first became a thing, no one knew how to make
| them. The proven template didn't exist. There was more
| variety because there was more experimentation, and
| eventually what was once pioneering experimentation becomes
| mainstream commodity and the novelty wears off.
|
| The same thing happened with music when the synthesizer was
| invented; no one knew how to make music with a synthesizer so
| it was all experimentation. It still happens today in
| burgeoning subgenres of electronic music. A new sound is
| invented (or rediscovered, more recently), music producers
| flock to this exciting new frontier, eventually it reaches
| mainstream, and by that time it is no longer novel or
| interesting. Rinse and repeat.
| bsder wrote:
| > Yes everything looks the same now. But hasn't that always
| been the case to a certain extent? The world is a lot smaller
| now and that leads to ideas spreading quickly.
|
| Most of what the article is complaining about is because the
| economics has led to monopolization.
|
| At least back in the 1960s and 1970s, you had _some_
| individuality which would poke up. A department store _wanted_
| different clothes from the other department store to draw you
| in. A radio DJ _wanted_ different music to get you to listen to
| their channel. etc.
|
| However, once everything is a monopoly, there is no need to
| spend any money to be unique since there is nowhere different
| for anybody to switch to.
| tayo42 wrote:
| Ive never stayed in an airbnb that looked like any of those. Ive
| heard of this phenomenon but never experienced it. In the last
| few years ive been in airbnbs in Italy, hawaii, puerto rico,
| colorado, el salvador and none look like that style.
|
| Some of this article seems to be about trends, which we always
| had? They come and go don't they? No ones doing barn doors
| anymore are they?
| krembo wrote:
| I find myself really missing Winamp and the ability to
| personalize the app using skins. This gave the user the ability
| to distinct the Ui using libraries of thousands of skins
| littlestripes wrote:
| https://audacious-media-player.org/ I'm still gleefully using
| Winamp skins to this day thanks to these fine people
| armchairhacker wrote:
| There's something profound in that people like _almost_ average,
| but don 't like average. There are two ways this is true:
| categorization and imperfection.
|
| Everything subjective has genres, then sub-genres, that a smaller
| group of people like, down to the individual. If something is
| very popular and/or mainstream in its sub-genre it becomes
| popular in its genre, and if very popular and/or mainstream in
| its genre becomes popular mainstream.
|
| Everything subjective has "guidelines" it must follow in order to
| be popular, and the genres and sub-genres have further
| guidelines. But it can't follow _every_ guideline or it won 't be
| popular. At minimum people become desensitized, also some stated
| "guidelines" are wrong and the inherent "guideline" is different,
| because people don't completely know what they like. Because
| people don't completely know what they like, there are also "rare
| guidelines" that nobody follows or states but would create
| something especially popular, and rare guidelines create new
| genres.
|
| For example, music. Almost every song (even non-traditional) has
| these common components: 12-tone equal temperament, simple time
| signature, "melody" "harmony" and "rhythm", etc.. Jazz, rock,
| electronic, etc. and have their own guidelines. Perhaps jazz was
| created because jazz chords used to be a rare guideline. But no
| song, even pop music, follows 100% of the guidelines. At minimum,
| instruments don't produce pure sine/square/triangle waves, melody
| has accents or modulation, etc. And the most popular songs do
| something novel (either completely novel, or they take something
| novel from a less-popular song and do better in other areas).
|
| So how does this relate to the age of average? People know what I
| said above. AirBnB hosts, directors, etc. whose art is a business
| know the guidelines, both reported from others and inherently.
| But they don't know everything, and in particular, they either
| don't know how to break the guidelines in order to create
| something better, or they do know a way but don't believe it will
| work. So in order to create something that is the most likely to
| be the most popular, they follow the guidelines. What they create
| is at a local maxima, OK but bland, because it fits nobody's
| niche genres and there is no imperfection. Over time, it becomes
| less OK and more bland because everyone else follows the same
| guidelines, until some trend-setter reveals new guidelines that
| break the old ones and are more popular, then everyone follows
| those.
|
| In order to be more successful than "OK" you have to know how to
| break the guidelines and follow rare ones, and the less other
| people who know the rare guidelines the more you'll be
| successful. But this requires 1) rare knowledge and 2) risk.
|
| If everyone broke more guidelines, the world would be better,
| because to any individual, even though there would be more ugly
| AirBnBs and movies, there would be a few that are better than
| those we have today. And anyone who followed all the guidelines
| would create something that nobody wants, because although if you
| averaged everyone's ratings it would rate the highest, it would
| always be below first place. But since most people are following
| most of the guidelines, if one person breaks them, they get a few
| happy customers and less customers overall, so they give up or go
| out of business.
|
| The former system, where everyone is following different
| guidelines, exists when people first discover an entirely new
| genre, and don't even know what the common guidelines are. But it
| transitions into the latter system, because every time someone
| discovers a rare guideline that captures enough of the market,
| the option that captures the most of the market is to follow the
| remaining common guidelines. We as a society can transition back
| into the former system and would remain until someone discovers a
| new rare guideline, but that takes cooperation which we don't
| have.
| bux93 wrote:
| To be fair, books all used to look the same. Orange cover with a
| black-and-white penguin on them. My mom had a bookcase full of
| them.
| justincormack wrote:
| Only if you bought all your books from one publisher. This was
| Penguins distinctive brand. They also had the turquoise Pelican
| brand. They were cheap compared to traditional publishers.
| alentred wrote:
| I respectfully disagree. Things look the same only if you look at
| the same things.
|
| Fashion and trends where always a thing. They spread faster and
| more globally today because the communication is rich and easy,
| and of course there are a lot of followers of any trend.
|
| But, not everything is "average". That bell curve is probably
| very high today, but there is a lot beyond the +-s , just need to
| look there.
| mihaic wrote:
| > there is a lot beyond the +-s , just need to look there.
|
| Of course, the world if large and kaleidoscopic. But the rate
| of homogeneity in the middle 80% is higher than it's even been,
| and that really affects everyone. I actually want diversity in
| the mainstream, since some projects are only enjoyable if you
| can share them with others and if they get the most talented
| people to work on them.
|
| The fact that nobody would make a Doctor Zhivago or even a Back
| to the Future today is not something I can fix with all my
| searching.
| ben_w wrote:
| > The fact that nobody would make a Doctor Zhivago or even a
| Back to the Future today is not something I can fix with all
| my searching.
|
| What do you mean by that?
|
| I'm not familiar with Doctor Zhivago so I had to look it up,
| the 1965 film is based on a 1957 novel, which seems to match
| just fine with the pattern of The Martian, The Three Body
| Problem, Game of Thrones, Fifty Shades of Grey, etc.
|
| Back to the Future is a fun trilogy, but the first film was
| mostly set in 1955 (so if it had been done today the past
| would have been 1994, compare to Captain Marvel being mostly
| set in 1995), the second film was 1985's idea of 2015 (and we
| still get plenty of what-if fiction in the near-ish future,
| e.g. Blade Runner 2049, Cyberpunk 2077), the third was _yet
| another wild-west Cowboys-and-Indians gunslinger_ (1885) --
| but if you mean to focus on the more playful and fun aspects
| of how it was put together, or the positive vibes of good
| people working to solve problems and where it 's clear who
| the goodies and baddies are, BttF reminds me more of The
| Orville or Lower Decks. (And _The Martian_ if you want to
| consider the environment /time travel itself, rather than
| Biff, to be the problem).
| mihaic wrote:
| I don't mean in broad genres, but more in terms of the
| range of emotions and thoughts that the top movies of the
| year evoke. The Martian is great movie, and does thankfully
| hit a different spot than the generic dystopian Sci-Fi, but
| there still seems to be a compression of that range, one
| which unfortunately nobody can quantify so that's why it's
| mostly opinion here.
| ben_w wrote:
| Ah, I think I see.
|
| For that issue, I think that as any medium ages, it
| transforms from "explore" to "exploit", which is also why
| films have a lot more sequels and reboots.
|
| So, if you want more range, explore new media: games,
| youtube, etc.
| bluetomcat wrote:
| There used to be more regional diversity, though. Things had
| distinctive characteristics that could easily be associated
| with the culture that produced them. A German car looked
| restrained and taut and had no cupholders. A French car looked
| kinda unusual and Avant-garde. Now everyone is driving the same
| blobby thing with several cupholders decided after a customer
| survey among Americans driving through McDonalds.
|
| The concept of "McDonaldization" (coined in 1993) sums it best:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonaldization
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| McDonaldization = globalization? The world is smaller now
| than it was in the 80's, and even then there were trends in
| design and fashion that spread across the world.
| bluetomcat wrote:
| They are not quite the same idea. In a globalised but
| diverse economy, a Japanese buys a Swiss watch and a Swiss
| buys a Japanese air conditioner. McDonaldization refers to
| the incessant urge of Western societies to over-rationalise
| every aspect of the economic and cultural life, resulting
| in bland uniformity. It is a progression of Max Weber's
| ideas on bureaucracy and rationalisation.
| t14n wrote:
| +1
|
| there are a million million subcultures with pretty stark
| differences in taste/aesthetics that you can dig up on the
| internet. looking at what's grossing in mega-dense populations
| of millions of people then yeah, perhaps in aggregate at large
| N, things their individuality -- surprise?
|
| there are parts of every major city that feel the same, but if
| you're willing to take a train out 45 minutes in any direction
| without google maps, i'm willing to bet you get into spaces
| that are incredibly local!
| FlyingSnake wrote:
| Wild thought, but I think it might point to something deeper
| about us as a species.
|
| In the animal kingdom, other organisms who live in collectives
| like ants, birds etc fall in to patterns that unique. Could it be
| that we are subconsciously following these instincts and falling
| into these "consistent" patterns?
| anal_reactor wrote:
| Previously, people within one country would communicate and share
| a culture. Nowadays almost the entire planet communicates and
| shares one culture.
| rifty wrote:
| I think something that plays into this for products is that there
| is a lot of obvious incentive to making the function of things
| more efficient to build first. But as we become more efficient at
| building just the function of things, adding diverging flavor
| takes up a higher proportion of cost even if the cost of it
| itself absolutely stayed the same.
|
| I do think broadly we're probably oversaturated with the flavor
| of high definition and 'realness' in the mainstream. But I don't
| think this is the end of taste evolution. Recently I've been
| looking back on movie posters from past decades. I think movie
| posters and advertisements are decent to examine here as they
| play to the mass taste of their time. In isolation of their
| moment and market there was a uniformity in style, yet over time
| it still progresses despite keeping it's core features.
|
| Globalism is perhaps disappointing here because it means we have
| few equally sized parallel 'mainstreams' taking place. But at
| least with the internet, you can still just as rapidly find many
| actively diverging styles that are otherwise relatively niche to
| the mainstream.[1]
|
| 1. https://aesthetics.fandom.com/wiki/Category:2020s
| ofcourseyoudo wrote:
| The most relevant thing about this article to me is the continued
| need for editors, and for people to push back on articles like
| this before they see the light of day.
|
| This article is dead on arrival unless you start with explaining
| when in US or global cultural the general trend was individual
| distinctiveness.
|
| Visual examples of sameness could be assembled from practically
| any point in human history.
|
| Where's the evidence that this is a new trend?
| sahmeepee wrote:
| An argument can also be made for a similar effect on language. In
| the UK in recent decades I've noticed a trend towards young
| people from various regions adopting a specific south London
| accent or dialect. Ironically although this seems to be part of
| adopting the culture of south London, it is also abandoning the
| dialect of their region which traditionally in the UK has been a
| very powerful source of identity.
|
| In the town in England where I grew up I could easily tell if
| someone was from the nearest town (<10 miles away) within a few
| sentences, or the city a similar distance in the opposite
| direction. I suspect that won't be possible once the current
| generations have died out.
|
| Homogeneity is just a natural result of more effective mixing.
| gkcnlr wrote:
| Current economic supply/demand balance as well as philosophical
| principles are so utterly deranged, people lean toward what could
| maximize their profit. If this is achieved through conformism &
| doing what you're accustomed to, no one will try to truly
| innovate and prefer staying in their comfort zone.
| jstanley wrote:
| > "I called this style "AirSpace". It's marked by an easily
| recognisable mix of symbols - like reclaimed wood, Edison bulbs,
| and refurbished industrial lighting - that's meant to provide
| familiar, comforting surroundings for a wealthy, mobile elite,
|
| Yes.
|
| > who want to feel like they're visiting somewhere "authentic"
| while they travel,
|
| No! I want somewhere clean and pleasant and uncomplicated. I'm
| not looking for "authentic" local accommodation! That part is a
| total strawman.
|
| > but who actually just crave more of the same: more rustic
| interiors and sans-serif logos and splashes of cliche accent
| colours on rugs and walls."
|
| Yes.
| achenet wrote:
| well, congratulations to pg for bucking that trend with the
| desgin of HN :)
| kqr wrote:
| > Perhaps it's our obsession with quantification and
| optimisation.
|
| I think this is onto something. We're no longer designing for
| _someone_ , an imaginary persona who wants something specific.
| We've learned to gather and analyse data in a way that makes it
| possible to design for _everyone_ , and we're predictable in what
| we desire as a species. Individual variation gets averaged out on
| scales that large.
|
| ----
|
| The bland paintings at the start were requested by nobody, or at
| least nearly nobody. They were not "People's Choice" in the sense
| that most people wanted specifically those paintings. It might
| even be the case that nobody requested the (blue x animals)
| combination. Maybe among four responses we get
|
| - Blue x humans
|
| - Blue x trains
|
| - Green x animals
|
| - Red x animals
|
| and then we end up with a (blue x animals) painting. The same
| thing is going on elsewhere. When trying to offend as few people
| as possible on each property independently, it's hard to get
| anything other than what we get.
| kykeonaut wrote:
| great point.
|
| however, i dont think it is a matter of offending people, but
| of boiling down our differences to the least common
| denominator. if you ask people around the world what the color
| of the sky should be, you cannot be surprised when they all
| answer "blue"
| nadam 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 don't think it is that simple. There is stuff with different
| asthetics today, they are just not always successful among the
| mainstream audience. It is always a choice to substantially
| differ from the mainstream look, and in industries where the cost
| of entry is not too high plenty of people do it, they are just
| not successful or too niche most of the time. Where there is a
| high cost of entry obviously less players try to be massively
| different, because being too niche is not profitable in that
| case.
| throwaway71271 wrote:
| > If I want to understand an individual human being, I must lay
| aside all scientific knowledge of the average man and discard all
| theories in order to adopt a completely new and unprejudiced
| attitude.
|
| -- Carl Jung, The Undiscovered Self
|
| Everything in the average is infinitely reduced, even if you make
| a chair, a perfect chair for one is torture for another. So we
| compromise for all.
|
| It is the same with user interface, or education.
|
| Now however I think we can break out of this, with new unique
| interfaces for each individual, or teaching every child what they
| are struggling with, be ahead or behind the other children, there
| is no need to teach quadratic equations to 1 million kids in the
| very same time in the very same way, some get them in the first
| lesson, some in the last, and some never get them.
| 0xDEAFBEAD wrote:
| >According to the make-up artist Colby Smith, Kim Kardashian is
| patient-zero of Instagram face. Ultimately, he says, every social
| media star's goal is to look like her.
|
| Pretty sure Kim K's look is itself highly artificial. Here are
| some of her old photos:
|
| https://www.lifeandstylemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/M...
|
| https://hips.hearstapps.com/hmg-prod/images/kim-k-a-intervie...*
|
| >We are so conformist, nobody is thinking.
|
| I continue to believe this is downstream of the like/upvote/share
| architecture of modern social media.
|
| The early internet was a space for nonconformist weirdos. The
| early internet was also a space where the like, the upvote, and
| the share hadn't yet been invented. Maybe that's not a
| coincidence.
| amelius wrote:
| They forgot about smartphones. They all look the same too.
|
| Samsung Flip phones are one of the few exceptions.
|
| Oh and many websites and apps have a similar design as well.
| stringsandchars wrote:
| The article mentions cafes and restaurants looking the same, but
| a more significant change in my opinion is that regional recipes
| are disappearing and all food is beginning _to taste the same_.
|
| I've seen this gradually happening in the towns in Spain where
| I've visited my family since a child: for instance in Bilbao the
| traditional pintxos/tapas are gradually becoming erased and
| substituted with a more 'international' style of elaborate
| mayonnaise combos that are photogenic for spread on social media.
| And in a weekly newsletter I get about Spanish culture this was
| the latest topic: specifically how traditional Mallorcan
| restaurants are disappearing and being replaced by more generic
| 'Spanish' tourist-pleasers.
|
| As I've seen this happen in pretty much every city I've visited
| over the last decade (including Stockholm where I live now), I
| imagine it's a generalized phenomenon that will be hard or
| impossible to reverse.
| kykeonaut wrote:
| it is not all bad :) look at latin america where colonization
| has erased a lot of the regional dishes. yet new combinations
| have arisen from a mix of pre-columbian and european dishes.
| tacos in mexico combining corn tortilla with cow and pork based
| fillings, or ceviche in peru are just a few examples of "comida
| criolla".
|
| right now, it might be a swing in the direction of sameism, but
| i assure you that eventually new dishes will arise.
| stringsandchars wrote:
| > right now, it might be a swing in the direction of sameism,
| but i assure you that eventually new dishes will arise.
|
| I do hope you're right, and I agree that there are some
| fusions that are quite exciting and add diversity to some
| cuisines that are otherwise quite bland and monotonous
| (Swedish food has definitely got a massive lift from
| introduced diversity, for instance).
|
| But what I've mostly seen so far, is _convergence_ towards
| the vaguely 'international' and inoffensive.
|
| In this process, items like blood pudding (a sausage made
| mostly from blood and fat) or pork wrapped in cabbage with
| almonds and raisins get phased-out, in favor of homogenous
| crowd-pleasers that taste the same across Europe.
| kilpikaarna wrote:
| > add diversity to some cuisines that are otherwise quite
| bland and monotonous (Swedish food has definitely got a
| massive lift from introduced diversity, for instance).
|
| Other than a lazy dig at "bland Nordic cuisine"[1], I'm not
| sure what makes this different from the situation bemoaned
| in the GP post?
|
| [1] ie a culinary tradition of letting the taste of the
| ingredients stand for themselves, rather than covering them
| up with spices (originally a measure to make up for the
| fact that things spoil easily in warm climates)
| stringsandchars wrote:
| > Other than a lazy dig at "bland Nordic cuisine"[1]... >
| [1] ie a culinary tradition of letting the taste of the
| ingredients stand for themselves, rather than covering
| them up with spices (originally a measure to make up for
| the fact that things spoil easily in warm climates)
|
| I'm afraid if you think that Swedish food is about "the
| taste of the ingredients stand[ing] for themselves,
| rather than covering them up with spices" then you really
| don't have a good familiarity with this cuisine.
|
| Historically the need to preserve food through the long
| winter, or even make scarce food appetizing during the
| summer, means that Nordic food has always been much more
| processed (salting, pickling, smoking, smothering with
| dill or mustard, and so on) than the much more fresh and
| unadulterated recipes of the Mediterranean, where fresh
| fish, fruit and vegetables have always been more
| plentiful, and a greater part of traditional recipes
| (together with the sausage and other 'winter' food I
| mentioned).
|
| I'm also sad to hear that you think my comment amounted
| to a "lazy dig".
| carlosjobim wrote:
| If the subject is restaurant food, French style cooking
| is standard in all Nordic restaurants above the lowest
| level. Before it was introduced, I guess you had more
| like eateries with stew and porridge, or an oven baked
| chicken, smoked fish and such. The French techniques have
| really had a huge importance for Nordic cuisines.
| Combined with traditional Nordic ingredients, you get
| something truly excellent.
|
| It's a pity that the only food that gets international
| success is mostly pizza, burger, doner kebab and taco. If
| restaurants world wide started learning and integrating
| the French cuisine, they could make some great
| combinations with local traditions and also let local
| ingredients shine in a way that you can never do with a
| god damned burger or kebab.
| opo wrote:
| >...rather than covering them up with spices (originally
| a measure to make up for the fact that things spoil
| easily in warm climates)
|
| While salt was used to preserve meat, the idea that the
| huge historical demand for spices was to cover up the
| taste of spoiled meat is a myth.
|
| https://culinarylore.com/food-history:spices-used-to-
| cover-t...
|
| https://historymyths.wordpress.com/2014/10/25/revisited-
| myth...
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/vztzpd/wh
| ere...
|
| etc
| kykeonaut wrote:
| you are right in the fact that some dishes will be phased
| out, but new dishes will spring up. they might not be the
| old ones, but that is the way of human evolution :)
|
| one example that springs up to mind is in dutch cuisine.
| take for example the "kapsalon" which is a mix of
| surinamese, dutch, and middleastern dishes. this is a new
| dish created in 2003 but which enjoys of massive
| popularity; you cannot find a snackbar in the netherlands
| that does not prepare kapsalon.
| d3VwsX wrote:
| Some nice things have been introduced to Sweden,
| definitely, but unfortunately also garlic+onion has gone
| completely out of control. For instance going to France or
| Greece or India, countries known for their garlic, and I
| assume most countries in the world, they still know to not
| ONLY serve food where the difference in taste is the ratio
| of garlic to onions. They do still have dishes that use
| other spices. I asked in a few restaurants in Sweden and
| they literally did not serve a single garlic-free dish.
| Swedes went from zero to "old Nordic food is tasteless, so
| we should put as much garlic+onions as possible in
| everything to fix that" in ~60 years, and much of that
| happened in my lifetime in this century.
| feketegy wrote:
| > regional recipes are disappearing and all food is beginning
| to taste the same.
|
| Because everybody is watching the same 15 YouTube cooking
| channels and replicating their recipes.
| 0xDEAFBEAD wrote:
| All it takes is a single internet-literate person to post the
| traditional recipe online, and it has a shot at immortality.
| yapyap wrote:
| haha no, I doubt those restaurants are changing their recipes
| because "people are watching cooking channels"
|
| they want to be able to serve more people so they serve less
| opinionated food, if you serve something some people think is
| absolutely vile and disgusting but others think is really
| good you'll get less business than if you serve food everyone
| thinks is just "okay".
|
| Even though we give the French a lot of shit, they stay true
| to their recipes for the people who like it. It's very
| opinionated, if u arrive at a French restaurant in France and
| you don't like their food, if it's rather rural they won't
| have an all inclusive "oh here you go" meal, you'll eat the
| pig intestine or go hungry.
|
| Less appealing to the masses, staying true to their recipes
| kevindamm wrote:
| I wonder if there's an element of cost cutting involved
| here, too. Restaurant owners have to juggle the
| availability and pricing of their ingredients. I know of at
| least a few cases when a menu change was done to get better
| ingredient reuse or to manage these costs.
| 0xDEAFBEAD wrote:
| My first thought was that if I was a tourist in Mallorca, I'd
| much prefer an "authentic" traditional Mallorcan restaurant
| over a generic Spanish restaurant.
|
| My second thought is: Maybe the market is telling us that we
| don't need so many cuisines. Think about it: There are probably
| 100+ distinct cuisines in the world. How many people have tried
| every single one? How many people have gotten tired of a
| substantial fraction of that 100+, and are seeking further
| novelty? Probably not very many.
|
| Mallorca is one of the most tourist-heavy parts of Spain. If
| I'm already tired of generic Spanish cuisine, I'm probably
| already going off the beaten path to less-visited parts of
| Spain, where the niche cuisines are incidentally still
| preserved.
|
| You say it's happening in every city you visited, but how many
| cities are you visiting which are off the beaten path?
| Dalewyn wrote:
| >Maybe the market is telling us that we don't need so many
| cuisines. Think about it: There are probably 100+ distinct
| cuisines in the world. How many people have tried every
| single one? How many people have gotten tired of a
| substantial fraction of that 100+, and are seeking further
| novelty? Probably not very many.
|
| Japan is notorious for protecting and marketing
| regional/local cuisine nationwide and they're quite
| successful at it.
|
| Hell, they've succeeded at making global food vendors sell
| Japan-only food (all them wild Kit-Kats, Christmas KFC,
| etc.).
|
| The question isn't posed on the consumers, it's posed on the
| suppliers. Do the suppliers want to preserve their way of
| eating or not?
| Tainnor wrote:
| > My second thought is: Maybe the market is telling us that
| we don't need so many cuisines. Think about it: There are
| probably 100+ distinct cuisines in the world. How many people
| have tried every single one? How many people have gotten
| tired of a substantial fraction of that 100+, and are seeking
| further novelty? Probably not very many.
|
| That's like saying that the billions of people on the planet
| are mostly worthless because you're not going to meet every
| single one of them.
|
| Local culture doesn't exist to satisfy some "market" or as a
| sort of collectathon for well-off travelers seeking novelty
| through fake "authentic culture", it's about the way of life
| of sppecific people living in specific areas.
| lmm wrote:
| > Local culture doesn't exist to satisfy some "market" or
| as a sort of collectathon for well-off travelers seeking
| novelty through fake "authentic culture", it's about the
| way of life of sppecific people living in specific areas.
|
| When local dishes are displaced by international dishes
| it's normally because the international dishes taste nicer
| (adjusted for cost etc.). If the locals wanted to preserve
| the cuisine for their own sake they would do so.
| Tainnor wrote:
| "Tasting nice" is not an objective rubric.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| The whole claim would be "tastes nicer to a greater
| proportion of people".
| Tainnor wrote:
| People's tastes aren't innate and static. They're a
| function of trends, marketing, and importantly,
| availability.
| jterrys wrote:
| and comfort and familiarity. I can easily imagine
| tourists in a foreign land preferring McDonald's or
| generic fast food when they can't/don't/won't make up
| their minds about what to eat. It's entirely possible for
| people to basically "vacation wrong" and many do it.
| ElevenLathe wrote:
| Agreed. Traditional cultures are downstream of traditional
| political economies. Globalization was always going to
| homogenize culture and hey look that's what's happening.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| Yeah it seems the same for music, with the provisio of a
| perfect music discovery service somehow existing.
|
| If it did exist, there likely would be little genuine demand
| for anything beyond the top million most popular works that
| have already been produced in the preceding 100 years.
|
| And probably close to zero demand for beyond the top 10
| million plus maybe the top half million historic pre-1924
| works.
| dontlaugh wrote:
| Maybe the market can go fuck itself?
|
| Not everything has to be commodified into a product.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| You want to force people buy and eat food they don't want?
|
| The people selling food are making and selling what is in
| demand. Not doing that would put them out of business. What
| purpose does that serve?
| OrderlyTiamat wrote:
| > Maybe the market is telling us that we don't need so many
| cuisines.
|
| I think that's exactly what's happening.
|
| The Market has identified a more costly and less universally
| appreciated method, and is trying to eliminate it. The Market
| knows better. The Market knows that the lowest common
| denominator should be served at the expense of everything
| else.
|
| And thus the Market eats another bit of joy, sacrificed at
| the altar of greater efficiency, of more money, at the altar
| of Moloch.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Could it be that locals don't want to eat in a restaurant the
| things they cook at home, while tourists are looking for food
| which is more familiar to them?
| glitchc wrote:
| Part of it stems from the fact that wholesalers, in addition to
| raw ingredients, also sell partially prepared pre-packaged
| meals to restaurants. A number of restaurants resort to this
| model, in particular major chains (Applebee's, IHop, Waffle
| House, etc.) as it means less kitchen staff to hire. This is at
| least very common in North America, where Sysco is the goliath
| and has cornered the market on this front. Perhaps the same
| thing is happening in Spain?
| Xcelerate wrote:
| > all food is beginning to taste the same
|
| This is the one that makes me sad. I lived in a variety of
| places while growing up (countries, states, etc). Different
| countries had _very_ distinctive types of food in the 1990s.
| Living in the U.S., I still visit Europe quite frequently, and
| it seems like all food is converging toward sameness, and not
| in a good way.
|
| About a decade ago when my income began increasing I started
| going to Michelin star restaurants for the "novelty", but now
| that I've been to enough of them they all seem more similar to
| each other than different. It's much more challenging to find
| an authentic old restaurant in e.g., Lyon, that has quality
| food that hasn't changed over the decades (hint: these
| restaurants typically have ratings between 3.9 and 4.1 on
| Google -- Americans tend to drag the score down because some
| aspect of the food or culture is unappealing to them,
| reinforcing the article's point).
| pavlov wrote:
| I do miss the days when French and Italian cars were recognizable
| even across brands.
|
| Even Alfa Romeo is now a pale shadow of its former proud self. In
| my opinion, the 2005 Alfa Brera was the last truly beautiful
| mass-market production car.
| d--b wrote:
| Yeah, and your blog looks like all the other blogs.
|
| Fashion is a thing, people tend to have the same ideas at the
| same time, the internet makes these ideas spread faster. Get over
| it.
| feketegy wrote:
| There's a whole IG account dedicated to photos from unrelated IG
| users who post the same photos from the same location with the
| same outfit and pose. It's at
| https://www.instagram.com/insta_repeat
| pete762 wrote:
| It's at the end of the article
| greener_grass wrote:
| A good "survey" of something that has been observed many times
| before. I'm not sure it adds any new insights, however.
| RandomThoughts3 wrote:
| The swing back to less minimalism and more colour has already
| started to happen.
|
| Teenage Engineering is trendy. Clothes are starting to take more
| volume and have more interesting shapes. I have seen multiple
| people around me get interested into USM Haller furnitures in
| bold colors and I have seen more red Fiat 500 in 2024 than I had
| seen red cars in the past few years.
|
| It's coming.
| wellpast wrote:
| You can't poll people to say what they want in an art piece.
| They're not artists.
|
| You have to show them the options. Wow them with a masterpiece.
| See what they pay for, not what they describe they want.
|
| If determining what people wanted in art was just a matter of
| polling them, then Hollywood economics would look much different.
| rob_c wrote:
| Sorry to call it out but this is such a strong valley centric
| view of things as to be painful.
|
| And let's not stick Airbnb and wonderful in the same sentence.
| There is a complete admonishment towards different socio-economic
| classes here that it's borderline offensive.
| AlxKe wrote:
| How is any of this surprising?
|
| If you ask 1000 people what they like in a painting, you'll end
| up with the average. That's how surveys work, by definition.
|
| That's not how you make anything extraordinary. That's the job of
| a creator who dives really really deep into their topic and comes
| up with all those details that make a difference - not that of
| the audience. If they could do it themselves, they wouldn't need
| you.
|
| It's actually striking how this article is itself pretty cliche -
| like it's talking about itself on a meta level - in how it
| perfectly fits the contemporary narrative about how our popular
| culture is supposedly shallow and uninspired (or even more so:
| not as inspired as in "the good ol' days").
| l0b0 wrote:
| Not sure why you're being downvoted - it's _tautological_ that
| implementing the average opinion is going to end up with
| something average.
| terminalbraid wrote:
| I had the same take and I think it's unfortunate that people
| feel the need to downvote this. If you could inspire great art
| by questionnaires I'm pretty sure it would have caught on. In
| fact I think it's the deviation from and challenges to
| expectation that is necessary (but not sufficient) for great
| art.
|
| I'd be curious to see what would happen if you gave those same
| questionnaires directly to artists. I'd speculate you may get
| more variation than the masses, but probably still a surprising
| amount of overall homogeneity as well due to the constraining
| and limited nature of the questions themselves.
| fasthandle wrote:
| Creativity used to be the word.
|
| Now it's innovation.
|
| These words are not synonyms of each other. Creativity dropped
| out of business-speak around 2000.
| clark010 wrote:
| With industrialization, information, and intelligentization, the
| world, as a massive factory, continues to produce increasingly
| homogeneous products. In turn, the things we see, hear, and learn
| further reinforce this homogenization. Amid this torrent of
| information, we find ourselves trapped in an "information
| cocoon." The ease of accessing information has made us overly
| reliant on passive consumption, leaving us unwilling to engage in
| deeper, critical thinking--precisely the foundation of what makes
| us unique.
| fedeb95 wrote:
| I may be wrong, but this seems to me, while true, a case of
| temporal myopia. After "a few" years, most of this elements that
| constitute the average will go away, leaving only some examples,
| while new averages will emerge. Then, it will just be 20-30
| aesthetic.
| tropicalfruit wrote:
| average, normal, normies
| bikamonki wrote:
| Restaurants serve the same menues and food taste the same
|
| Music sounds the same
|
| Clothes look the same
|
| News outlets show/promote the same
|
| Social apps have the same features
|
| Movies are sequels, prequels, spinoffs of the same
|
| Yeah, creativity is long dead
| terminalbraid wrote:
| You should qualify much of this like "music", "movies", and
| your blanket of "creativity" with something like "commercially
| pushed". You may even have a case that creativity among the
| masses is stifled by sameness, overproduction, and relatively
| low cost from the hyperoptimization from those bland studios
| which makes creation intimidating to someone wanting to become
| some kind of artist.
|
| But I assure you creativity is alive and well.
| justanotherjoe wrote:
| i remember the many 'xxx is all you need' variation in AI papers
| and got tickled.
|
| It feels like there is a lot of copying going around, trying to
| hijack the character of others. Maybe in the future we'll get a
| lot of donald trump clones. We will definitely get a lot of elon
| musk clones. What is unique is quickly becoming a template.
|
| It's like when we were kids. With the reach of
| information/internet, the classroom has gotten bigger; more
| percentage of kids end up copying and less actually do the
| homework.
| benrutter wrote:
| I hate the idea of boring, generic art, but for lived spaces, I'm
| kind of on board.
|
| Walk through an old european city, there's a sense of cohesion
| that's immediately appealing. That's missing in a lot of modern
| architecture where every building is trying to show how unique it
| is.
|
| There's so much unsustainable churn in building and interior
| design. Finding universally appealing design doesn't feel like
| the worst thing in the world.
| l0b0 wrote:
| No mention of usability/accessibility in the
| interior/architecture section, and barely a mention of regulation
| and cost. But it's _expensive and difficult_ to come up with an
| interior /architecture which is user friendly and accessible,
| while conforming to regulations written in blood. So _of course_
| people with finite money are going to copy and paste existing
| designs. Doorways, corridors, corners, inclines, bathrooms, etc
| safe and fit for small children, the elderly, the visually
| impaired, people in wheelchairs, and so on. Items positioned so
| that inhabitants /users/visitors/customers can use their
| intuition to navigate the space, rather than having to ask
| someone all the time. It should be _expected and natural_ to
| reuse.
|
| On a related note, I suspect a lot of people these days assume
| that most "alternative" things are unusual for the sake of being
| unusual, and not actually some stroke of genius. Not saying they
| are always right, but there's certainly a lot of alt-crap out
| there.
| api wrote:
| Good catch re: cost. I bet every medieval peasant's home looked
| the same, but the homes of the aristocracy were different and
| varied. Novelty is expensive and/or time consuming.
|
| The same is true in industrial design too. If you use common
| designs you can often build your product from off the shelf
| parts, reuse already deployed manufacturing processes, etc. A
| fully unique and novel design would require retooling, re-
| testing for things like product safety, etc.
|
| What we are seeing is perhaps a post-industrial, clean,
| technologically advanced peasantry.
|
| Of course my observation may be baloney... do all super rich
| peoples' homes look the same? What does Jeff Bezos' house look
| like? I've seen pictures of the interiors of super yachts and
| there's definitely some sameness. Of course there you're
| dealing with more engineering constraints. "The ocean designs
| boats."
|
| > I suspect a lot of people these days assume that most
| "alternative" things are unusual for the sake of being unusual,
| and not actually some stroke of genius.
|
| It's also often the recycling of some old trope.
|
| Original genius exists but it's pretty rare.
| connicpu wrote:
| At the very least all the homes in one village probably
| looked very similar, since in those times the exact aesthetic
| would be subject to the availability of local materials.
| avgDev wrote:
| I'm surprised nobody has mentioned the International Building
| code. There is a reason everything is starting to look the
| same, safety, building code, access to this information and
| globalization all play a part.
|
| If you perform a surgery a certain way and it proves to be cost
| efficient with great results, other surgeons will study it.
| They no longer need novel or different ways. As information
| spreads other surgeons do the same thing. That treatment now
| becomes standardized across the globe.
|
| Same thing is happening to cities. Additionally, often top
| firms will work on projects globally.
|
| Another interesting example is Hyundai/Kia/Genesis. They hired
| a lot of German talent. Their car designs are extremely popular
| now and resemble German cars. Elantra N has been designed under
| Bierman, who worked for BMW on the M division. Now, the Elantra
| N is an absolute bargain that can compete with more expensive
| cars on the track.
| mrob wrote:
| The modern interior design with hard surfaces everywhere is
| worse for usability/accessibility because it reflects sound,
| increasing noise levels. This is especially a problem in
| restaurants, some of which are loud enough to cause hearing
| damage.
| tetek wrote:
| lol, this is an absurdly bad article, picking similar things and
| showing them together claiming there's nothing else that stands
| out.
| NoboruWataya wrote:
| > In an in-depth investigation for The Guardian, Chayka documents
| how the AirSpace style of interior decor has become the dominant
| design style of coffee shops:
|
| For a long time this was how I identified coffee shops I would
| like in new cities. Places that serve good, single-origin coffee
| in a "third wave" style (as opposed to, for example, more
| "traditional" coffee shops, particularly in Europe, which
| probably sell darker roasts).
|
| Now, of course, it's become almost universal so is no longer a
| particularly strong indicator of anything.
| timerol wrote:
| This article doesn't quite seem to know what it's complaining
| about. 90% of everything is shit, as it's always been. Trends
| have always existed. Trend followers have always blindly copied
| what's popular without putting any originality into it.
|
| This so-called age of average is also a great age for subcultures
| and visual distinctiveness, but it's not found in the popular
| districts of cities over 10 million people or anything
| recommended by an Instagram account over 10 million followers.
| jp57 wrote:
| There's a distinct snobbery to some of the architectural
| commentary, particularly in lamenting the sameness of stick-built
| "blocky, forgettable mid-rises" providing apartments for the
| masses. It is a critique that could only be written by someone
| who has no trouble affording their rent. Austin, for one place,
| has had some success in bringing down rents by building tons of
| blocky, forgettable mid-rises, and I'll take it, thank you.
|
| One must have a certain amount of wealth just to be able to
| travel to enough different places in the world to notice that
| they are all kind of similar. I think the world's smallest violin
| plays for the moneyed tourist, disappointed that he's not finding
| enough variety in his travels.
|
| Furthermore, as one who is fortunate enough to have been able to
| do some traveling like that, in southern France, Croatia, and
| Greece, I'll point out that the architecture in quaint villages
| around the mediterranean is _also_ all kind of similar: narrow
| streets lined with small homes with terra cotta tile roofs and
| stuccoed stone walls are everywhere. To the extent that there are
| distinct regional motifs, they are only discernible to the
| trained architectural eye.
|
| As it turns out, in every age, people are less concerned with
| asserting their identity than with having housing that can be
| built with available resources and is not too expensive. In an
| era of global shipping and industrial production, "available
| resources" doesn't mean local materials any more, though.
|
| EDIT: Of course, one can look at pictures of places to which one
| hasn't traveled and notice that they're similar, but that
| complaint seems, if anything, even less important.
| patrickhogan1 wrote:
| I agree--the complaint seems trivial. You could frame it as:
| Oh, how mundane--so many homes now feature open floor plans
| that let more people enjoy sunlight and fresh air, with well-
| lit spaces, functional plumbing, antibacterial stainless steel
| fixtures, easy-to-clean hygienic floors, cheap yet comfortable
| furniture, and the charm of indoor plants. What a bunch of
| hipsters.
|
| If raising the standard of living for the majority results in
| some uniformity, so be it.
| mschild wrote:
| No, that's not how you could frame it. At no point in the
| article does the author suggest that more affordable housing
| with modern amenities is bad. He, and the people he quoted,
| clearly are critiquing the sameness of the styling and for
| housing especially the outside. Not just across cheaply built
| timber frame lowrises, but also across office buildings.
| jp57 wrote:
| Perhaps, but the tone underlying the article, as with most
| art and style critiques, is if you don't care about the
| considerations they are critiquing, or if you even
| prioritize them lower than affordability, ease of
| construction, and low barriers to development, then you are
| a philistine -- you have bad taste.
|
| _But it's downright shameful that we deprive ourselves of
| living in interesting, meaningful, and wonderful places,
| given the thousands of precedents for inspiration
| worldwide, and many hundreds within our borders. Instead,
| we've copied and pasted our society from the most anodyne,
| the most boring, and the most bleh. We've all seen them.
| Covered with fiber cement, stucco, and bricks or brick-like
| material. They've shown up all over the country,
| indifferent to their surroundings. Spreading like a non-
| native species._
|
| So it's not really the sameness, per se, but the that these
| buildings all have, in the opinion of these pundits, the
| same bad taste. Stucco is okay on thousands and thousands
| of five-hundred-year-old homes all around the
| Mediterranean, brick is okay on 19th and 20th century
| buildings throughout America, but these same claddings are
| somehow anathema on five-over-ones?
|
| One paragraph before the above quote they lay out four
| economic reasons why the same styles are proliferating, so
| it's reasonable to infer that diverging from the sameness
| would make properties more expensive to build, and thus to
| buy.
|
| I think that making city living accessible to the non-
| wealthy has a greater chance of making cities "interesting,
| meaningful, and wonderful places" than trying to create
| expensive architectural diversity.
| mrob wrote:
| >One must have a certain amount of wealth just to be able to
| travel to enough different places in the world to notice that
| they are all kind of similar.
|
| You don't need to travel in person to see things. I like
| watching videos of foreign countries, and part of the appeal is
| seeing different architecture. I don't want every country to
| look the same, even if I never travel there. And poor people
| can usually afford cheap smartphones, so they can also enjoy
| watching foreign videos.
| yowzadave wrote:
| I think this is a good point, and perhaps one of the bigger
| reasons for the "average" quality the OP is describing. We
| are all consuming the same media, so our culture is
| homogenizing. Just like speciation requires isolation,
| perhaps our cultural globalization is preventing weird
| uniqueness from developing?
| yowzadave wrote:
| Yes--also, the McMansion has a much more toxic and lasting
| impact on a place's urban qualities than a five-over-one. The
| five-over-one, yes, often looks bland and cheap and "same-ey",
| but it does at least allow for a productive density and
| walkability. It's not as overtly anti-social and vulgar as the
| McMansion.
| klik99 wrote:
| I, personally, hate the trend because it's visually boring, but
| that doesn't mean there's upsides - buildings are safer, it's
| cheaper to build. Even though I subjectively don't like the
| style, I don't believe everyone should strive for art in all
| things.
|
| Another optimist read about the non-architectural global
| monoculture the article was complaining about is it's a great
| sign we're becoming closer as a world, that whats hip coffeshop
| in NYC is hip coffeeshop in Shanghai is hip coffeeshop in
| Liverpool. On one hand I hate that everything looks the same,
| but it also gives me hope that the world is starting to unify.
|
| Also I would forgive a lot of blocky buildings if there were
| just bits of personality of cities sprinkled inside. For
| example - Amsterdam has blocky buildings like everywhere in the
| world, but it has these cool riverfront, bridges, and a few
| unique modern constructions that give it real personality.
| LunaSea wrote:
| > There's a distinct snobbery to some of the architectural
| commentary, particularly in lamenting the sameness of stick-
| built "blocky, forgettable mid-rises" providing apartments for
| the masses. It is a critique that could only be written by
| someone who has no trouble affording their rent.
|
| This is easily invalidated by the fact that villas drawn by
| architects also follow this withe cubes trend in many European
| countries.
| lentil_soup wrote:
| in a way you're kind of agreeing with the author, the reason
| those mediterranean villages feel the same is because they make
| sense to the climate and lifestyle of the people there. It
| wouldn't make sense to have that kind of architecture in say
| Canada, but somehow globally we're converging on styles that
| might not be the most appropiate for the place (without going
| into the hot debate of the identity of the place). For example,
| why do we have glass skyscrappers in hot countries instead of
| architecture and materials that by design helps regulate
| temperature?
|
| I also don't buy the argument that considering the identity of
| a place is being snob. Of course it's ok to want to build
| affordable housing but that doesn't mean you can't spend some
| time to plan the city we want to live in. If it was just about
| building cheap many countries have tried building faceless
| blocks and ended up with bigger problems than just rent. If
| anything, I find assuming that other places should just build
| like Austin because it worked there problematic.
| jp57 wrote:
| There is a paragraph with four economic reasons why buildings
| are converging on the same set of styles. It is reasonable to
| infer that divergence would make properties more expensive,
| and the article doesn't even attempt to suggest that that
| might not be so.
|
| Just following the paragraph on the economic reasons for
| convergence, there's another paragraph with a quote dripping
| with contempt for the aesthetics on which the style has
| converged. The combined message is "It's too bad we can't
| afford to have better taste." That sentiment is snobbishness
| in a nutshell.
| lentil_soup wrote:
| I found this part of Koolhaas's quote quite interesting:
|
| "Convergence is possible only at the price of shedding identity.
| That is usually seen as a loss. But at the scale at which it
| occurs it must mean something. What are the disadvantages of
| identity, and conversely, what are the advantages of blankness?"
|
| The question doesn't need an answer, it's just the exploration of
| the idea without judgement that I find interesting.
| qingcharles wrote:
| "What's your favourite colour? Do you prefer sharp angles or soft
| curves? Do you like smooth canvases or thick brushstrokes? Would
| you rather figures that are nude or clothed? Should they be at
| leisure or working? Indoors or outside? In what kind of
| landscape?"
|
| This is flawed research. I hope they just did it for a joke. The
| reality is, you can't really just ask people what they want in
| art because the logical parts of their brain will answer it, and
| most people lack the domain knowledge to describe it, so you end
| up with a mush answer like they got.
| shimon wrote:
| I totally agree, but it is reflective of a shift in how
| cultural products are designed and selected that is in my view
| the more interesting story here.
|
| When selection is personal, you have a smaller set of choices
| and will respond to how things feel. If you're walking down a
| street looking at 3 restaurants, a surprising element in one
| might speak to you in a way you can't even explain. On the
| other hand, if you're just browsing in maps, you'll be going by
| ratings that reward a more generic notion of quality. That type
| of selection is algorithmic rather than personal.
|
| More parts of our lives have been algorithmized than even
| before, and we generally like this because selecting things is
| hard. But algorithmization can drive us toward local maxima,
| where the pleasantness of familiarity draws us away from
| selecting or creating something truly personal. Of course, it
| can also draw people into arcane and corrupt niches like
| conspiracy theories.
|
| The algorithmizations of physical spaces and social connections
| are probably the newest and most distressing. These realms used
| to be almost entirely localized; the idea you'd pick your
| friends or spouse by algorithm used to be rare and is now
| dominant. But personal relationships are incredibly nuanced and
| the algorithms are inadequate to the diversity of human
| desires. Yet they're shaping our desires in a way that is
| preventing many people from finding their happiness.
| UniverseHacker wrote:
| The basic premise of this article is false, and the argument is
| presented in a disingenuous way by cherry picking examples. The
| example photo collages are collections of things that in real
| life look quite different, but are artificially arranged to make
| the differences hard to visually detect- e.g. a grid of car
| photos scaled to all be the same size, colored the same, and too
| small to visually tell the very different shapes apart.
|
| Granted, trends exist, and an awful lot of Air BnBs do have
| "California Pizza Kitchen" aesthetics but one can just as easily
| choose a representative set of really visually unique places.
|
| Additionally, often things tend to look the same for really
| functional reasons. One could present a collage of, e.g. groups
| of distantly related animals that all have nearly identical body
| shapes and coloring. This convergent evolution happens naturally
| when form follows function, and a certain form is massively more
| functional than others.
| gpderetta wrote:
| It is only tangentially related, but this reminds me of the
| apocryphal story of the USAF trying to designing the perfect
| cockpit sized for the average pilot. The result was that none of
| the pilots actually fit.
| feoren wrote:
| I'm sorry, but that painting experiment is bafflingly silly. The
| same two artists painted 11 paintings based on independent
| majority votes of a bunch of general criteria, and then made a
| shocked-Pikachu-face when all the paintings looked the same? Does
| a culture where the vote of sharp angles vs. soft curves was 55%
| vs. 45% get the same painting as where the vote was 90% vs. 10%?
| Did everyone vote for the painting to have a single tree exactly
| 3 inches from the right side of the canvas? Give me a break.
|
| Even putting aside the fact that these same-same paintings were
| literally painted by _the same artists_ , the fundamental
| experiment is mind-boggling:
|
| "We asked a diverse group of 10 people to choose a cool unique
| color, and then we mixed them all thinking we'd get a _Super
| Unique Color!!_ , but instead we just ended up with a bland
| brown! We conclude that everyone in the world sucks."
|
| WTF?
|
| And by the way, those AirBnB interiors _don 't_ all look the
| same. They just all have white walls. And those city skylines
| _don 't_ all look the same, either. Nor really do the apartment
| buildings, to my eyes. Nor do the Instagram models look the same.
|
| The cars are a good example, but they state exactly why they look
| the same: it's a good design. What the authors seem to really
| hate is that function is ever put above form, and that trends
| exist. Sorry?
|
| Another factor is just that _lots of things_ exist. "Movies with
| creepy eyes on the poster" is just a sub-sub-sub-genre of movie
| that exists, and there are _so many_ movies that they can find 10
| examples. Okay? So? It offends them that genres exist? Watch a
| different damn movie then; there are plenty.
| jcalx wrote:
| The terms "sameness" and "average" are doing some heavy lifting
| here. In the grand internet tradition I will memetically
| unpackage "sameness" and "average" into four related components:
| (1) things that are BIG (2) things that are HOT (3) things that
| are COOL and (4) things that are GOOD.
|
| (1) things that are BIG -- these are side effects of
| technological advancement, globalization, the Internet, and
| frictionless social media platforms. More people than ever before
| can book a TAP Air flight to Barcelona, stay in a budget AirBnB,
| and check Google Maps for the same "best cafe near me" that
| everyone else is going to. Access to the world and to information
| is more open than ever before, so more people have both the
| ability to congregate around the top N things (physically or
| virtually) and the means to do so.
|
| (2) things that are HOT -- trends have always been around and
| always will be. Instagram face, the Kardashian look, hoverboards,
| heroin chic, microservices, Livestrong bracelets, putting "F*ck"
| in the name of your self-help book, flat icons, frozen yogurt,
| Dutch tulip mania -- you can localize each one of these into a
| time period easily enough. Popular because they are new and a
| momentary cultural touchstone and different enough from the n-1th
| state of culture.
|
| (3) things that are COOL -- what you might call "signaling theory
| effects". "Ads Don't Work That Way" [1] explains this in the
| advertising context better than I can, so go read that. Differs
| from (2) in that the cultural salience is more about vibes and
| not time. Dad jokes, liking vim (or emacs, or nano), being an
| EDCer, being a Golf Guy, being a Horse Girl, commenting "nice"
| when the number 69 comes up -- none of these have ever been truly
| HOT in the same way the examples in (2) were, but you know the
| type immediately. People who vocally do these things don't just
| like them for what they are, but for what they think other people
| will think of them for being into those things.
|
| (4) things that are GOOD -- these are things optimized for
| natural or manmade systems. All cars look the same because
| they're optimized for aerodynamics (physics, natural) which helps
| with fuel efficiency (CAFE standards, manmade). Five-over-ones
| optimize for material costs and regulatory compliance, federal
| highway signage design language optimizes for readability and
| consistency, the ADA Standards for Accessible Design optimizes
| for accessibility to people with disabilities, and so on. Some
| things are just better (in the systems we live in) and that's how
| GOOD things end up everywhere.
|
| There's a lot of overlap and causation here. Things that are GOOD
| can find their way to a BIG channel whereupon they get HOT and
| build their own COOL followers. But every example of "sameness"
| in The Age of Average can be meaningfully decomposed into some
| mixture of BIG, HOT, COOL, and GOOD. Things that are the "same"
| are that way for different reasons -- by the inexorable nature of
| societal interconnectedness, by human nature, by the laws of this
| reality, or by the laws that we've created.
|
| So I disagree with the conclusion:
|
| > So, there you have it. The interiors of our homes, coffee shops
| and restaurants all look the same. The buildings where we live
| and work all look the same. The cars we drive, their colours and
| their logos all look the same. The way we look and the way we
| dress all looks the same. Our movies, books and video games all
| look the same. And the brands we buy, their adverts, identities
| and taglines all look the same.
|
| > But it doesn't end there. In the age of average, homogeneity
| can be found in an almost indefinite number of domains.
|
| > 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. The list goes on, and on, and on.
|
| The age of average is indeed the age of opportunity but this is
| not some untapped, hidden truth that requires some call to arms.
| There's already a long, long tail of non-conformist, non-average
| art, media, culture, and so on. You can listen to Tuvan-Mongol
| throat singing [2] or Estonian Hip Hop or pop songs translated to
| Latin or a thousand other genres you've never heard of [3]. You
| can read fictional universes from online collaborative writing
| projects [4] or micropoetry or experimental self-published genre
| fiction or hundreds of years of books from dozens of different
| cultures. You can buy old vans from the 80s and find a whole
| community dedicated to drifting them around racetracks [5]. (You
| can replace "old vans from the 80s" with any other car and that
| sentence would probably still be true.) You can spend thousands
| of hours in games made by indie studios in every genre imaginable
| [6] with aesthetics that will make your eyes bleed [7]. You can
| find small storefronts and brands that lean maximalist and
| brutalist and weird and grotesque [8].
|
| Yes, there is no shortage of conformity and sameness and average,
| especially if you go looking where everyone else is. Yes, there
| are things that are BIG and HOT and COOL and GOOD that
| aggressively propagate themselves through culture.
|
| But there will always be artisans, bespoke crafts, reactionary
| uncoolness, a counterculture, an underground scene. Keep things
| obscure (the dark forest theory of the Internet) to prevent them
| from being subsumed into the BIG. Resist trends to avoid the
| allure of the HOT. Keep an open mind and be curious about other
| subcultures to not be entrenched in the COOL. And if the GOOD
| optimizes in the wrong direction, help build systems that guide
| it the other way.
|
| To paraphrase a certain meme -- there are far more than just
| cathedrals everywhere for those with the eyes to see.
|
| [1] https://meltingasphalt.com/ads-dont-work-that-way/
|
| [2] https://www.alashensemble.com/
|
| [3] https://everynoise.com/
|
| [4] https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/
|
| [5] https://www.roadandtrack.com/car-
| culture/a23110414/japanese-...
|
| [6]
| https://www.ign.com/playlist/rchnemesis/lists/top-100-indie-...
|
| [7] https://store.steampowered.com/app/1388770/Cruelty_Squad/
|
| [8] https://www.voguebusiness.com/story/fashion/what-is-sexy-
| gro...
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