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.
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.
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.
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.
In Vienna there's Hundertwasserhaus and other distinct examples of public housing. It proves doing it differently is possible and the uniformity complaint does have some merit.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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?
> 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.
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.
The article mentions cafés 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.
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).
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?
> 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.
> 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.
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.
Agreed. Traditional cultures are downstream of traditional political economies. Globalization was always going to homogenize culture and hey look that's what's happening.
> 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.
>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?
> The people selling food are making and selling what is in demand.
The problem is that in highly touristic areas a big chunk of the demand comes from tourists, most of which are happy to pay for crap food as long as it's marketed to them in a way that fits their expectations about the country. The crap-selling businesses have higher margins (through cheap ingredients and unskilled labor) so it's difficult for quality local cuisine restaurants to compete with them. So even if a tourist-driven market is asking for crap, I'd argue the impoverishment of local culture is an unacceptable externality.
That would not be an externality. Which type of restaurant succeeds is internal to the economic activity of people paying for food at restaurants.
Also, what type of cuisine is crap and not is extremely subjective. If a local populace is not sufficiently motivated to make and eat a specific cuisine such that it dies out, that is sad, but just one of many compromises society makes while constantly evolving due to new parameters.
The place/tribe my parents come from is losing its amazing cuisine because it requires one stay at home parent to labor for many hours per day and years and years of experience to master. I grew up eating amazing home cooked food at all of my aunts’ and great aunt’s houses, so much so that going out to eat at a US restaurant was rare and considered a lesser alternative.
However, all of their kids obtained higher education and work, so are unable to devote anywhere close to the time my aunts and grandmas did in the kitchen. Not to mention that they like doing other things like vacationing, playing sports, going to parties, etc. All the institutional knowledge of the fresh, home cooked food is going to be gone in about 20 to 30 years, it wouldn’t success as a business and individuals have priorities other than living in the kitchen.
> That would not be an externality. Which type of restaurant succeeds is internal to the economic activity of people paying for food at restaurants.
The externality is not "which type of restaurant succeeds" but the "impoverishment of the local culture". Call it a side effect if you prefer, one of the many caused by heavy tourism (rise of housing prices, replacement of local commerce by souvenir shops, etc.) that end up pushing locals out of those areas and turning them into theme parks with no soul. Of course you are free to think that's not something worth caring about as a society.
> What type of cuisine is crap and not is extremely subjective.
There's some subjectivity involved, but in the same sense there are books that are bad by any account, there's food that is crap by any account.
> If a local populace is not sufficiently motivated to make and eat a specific cuisine such that it dies out, that is sad, but just one of many compromises society makes while constantly evolving due to new parameters.
At least here in Spain and the Mediterranean Europe in general, they do. You just have to go outside of the heavily touristic areas into the ones where actual locals live. It's true that home cooking has changed a bit in a similar fashion as you describe, but it resists in family and friend gatherings during weekends and holidays.
It's an interesting point you make about the effort involved in making a dish. I'm on a mission to eat, and mostly home cook, food from as many countries as possible. I'm at about 25% of the world's countries now after several years of gradual chipping away.
From that experience I feel that there are some food traditions which will be more durable than others and, as you suggest, this is not just a matter of tourist influence but I think capitalism/market forces are behind most of it.
Factors which I think will work against long term survival include:
-high effort: more families where both parents work for money and where the family unit is very small mean fewer opportunities for elaborate preparation. In my family we think of that type of cooking as a luxury afforded to us because we are wealthy enough to have enough free time from work to do it once in a while, but in the cultures where the food originated it was built into the schedule.
-scarce ingredients: 25% is a lot of the world's countries but I know I will never reach 100%, even if I live to 110 years old. Some countries, especially island nations, have specific local herbs and vegetables that aren't available elsewhere. Over time, the market for cultivating these will decline as it is squeezed out by cash crops for export or non-indiginous crops that grow more reliably or productively. This has happened to some regional foods in my (western) home country and while they are still available, they at risk of disappearing. Another reason for scarcity is overuse e.g. with herring overfishing and surströmming scarcity.
-banned ingredients: as food standards regulations around the world gradually harmonise to allow free trade, some ingredients will be banned. This is an ongoing global war which will carry on for decades, but it already means that some cuisines aren't available in other territories. In the longer term they could be lost from their home countries (bush meat etc.). Again surströmming features in this category and only has a temporary reprieve from the EU.
-unavailable methods: in some cases it's already a stretch to say that I'm cooking the food of a country when I'm improvising with the methods and materials. I don't have a tandoor in my back yard or a wood-fired oven for baking shakh plov; I've not really got the option of digging a hole to ferment some hákarl either. With increasingly urban populations globally, many traditional cooking methods will be unfeasible for most people.
While there are good reasons for some of these influencing factors, like food safety, others are clearly unintended side-effects. There is a strong (non-economic) case for national governments dedicating resources to conserve their cultural heritage by giving their local cuisine some protection from external pressures.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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)
> 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".
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, döner 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.
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?
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?
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
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.
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.
Maybe we are overstimulated by visual content and attracted to otherwise less visually striking objects, either to find some peace or to not be distracted from that content?
At least for me, visually minimalist objects and environments are appealing because I generally feel overstimulated in modern society and by modern technology. I might feel different if I were to spend my days on the field doing slow, repetitive hard work.
I don't really buy this line of reasoning. Nature can be immensely colorful yet soothing to all the senses. You don't need to stuff your house with psychedelic rugs, tapestries and color-changing LEDs for it to have color. Including color does not mean that your space is cluttered or maximalist in style.
We got a designer for a flat that was being renovated, and I realized that I needed to seriously involve myself in the project if the result was not going to turn out a lifeless, gray-white-beige soup.
Now the flat is full of green, (warm) wooden, peach and red elements, giving it a cozy autumn-y vibe. And I don't need to stuff it with props that "pop" to add personality - it has one of its own.
The prevailing wisdom seems to be "Make it all greige, and introduce life with (often pointless) colorful props". I feel this is more offending to the senses than having a tastefully colored environment where you don't need to "add" anything.
In some markets at least, like cars, this blandness is a sales optimization. Strong distinct colors are more likely to block a sale than bland generic ones.
It may not be exactly the same in other markets, but there's still a cost to offering additional color variants. It's a cost optimization to offer the fewest colors that are appealing, or at least aren't objectionable, to the widest range of potential buyers.
I suspect that's the demographic shift towards older average population.
I've only got anecdotal examples of old people preferring blander colours, hence "suspect" rather than "think".
When my dad died, my mum replaced all the furniture and carpets with blander versions of the same — in particular replacing the bold orange living room carpet and dark green patterned hall, stairs, and landing carpets with mild off-white.
> I suspect that's the demographic shift towards older average population.
I agree. The downside is that this is a sort of permanent\long-term shift since the world is generally getting older and we are reproducing at below-replacement.
> can't tell if this article is trying to make it seem like a negative
or not
It left no ambiguity for me. Both the project (which is great art in
itself) and the commentary opens a door for a hard truth, and new
questions emerge,
In tech, might we learn from this?
from TFA: "Looking for freedom, we found slavery.”
Every parent. Every patrician, condescending patron. Every "elite".
Each have their idea of what "freedom" is best for others.
And the people say: "Boaty McBoatface!"
In cybersecurity we want people to be safe. But the people say;
"Give me TikTok, Microsoft...."
> Would Rousseau want us "being forced to be free"?
Probably. The French revolution actors were inspired by his work, and the French revolution led to the declaration of the human rights, which states that all people are born free and equal. If you take this claim as universal, then your moral duty is to make it happen.
So yes, do free people even if they believe their situation is fine. Perhaps for instance because they've been brainwashed into believing it is, or perhaps they don't even know what freedom is.
Unfortunately countries/organizations/persons that claimed to do that too often also had ulterior motives.
The phrase "looking for freedom, we found slavery" is interesting because if there's slavery, then there's a master. The master we are talking about is "norm" or "convention". The term "slavery" can be apt in some cases, but generally is excessive.
"Anticonformity" was somewhat a dismissive word in my country up to some point, but I have not heard it in that way for while, which suggests that people accept more easily "abnormal" people. When you want your freedom and you can have it, then there's no slavery nor tyranny.
It's odd that in almost all walks of life, freedom comes from
non-conformity. In arts, and in science, "progress" is a movement away
from wherever we are. We may not like non-conformists, but we
absolutely rely on them to move forward.
Yet totalitarian technological social systems are the only creation
that make those who conform "more free". By design they limit options
at the margins while enabling those in the middle of the mediocrity
curve. Slavery is freedom. And thus, since time stops for no man or
machine, systems invite their own inevitable destruction.
Technology is not just "a way of not having to experience the world"
(Max Frisch), but a way of not having to experience change. And I
think the "master" that you speak of is fear (fear of things
changing).
2010s visual art was full of super saturation and hyperrealism due to Marvel and Instagram filters.
Sony's "Into the Spiderverse" freed itself from the shadow of Pixar, and has forever changed what high quality, mass audience, computer animated films can be, and Dreamworks has already shifted its own design towards more expressive unique cartoon language.
Also, the rising shift of A24's unique visual aesthetic in the 2010s remained quite obscure until "Everything Everywhere All at Once" 2 years ago finally brought its "freedom" of visual expression to mainstream audiences. Now, others want to capture that same visual style and I'm seeing a broad shift away from over saturation, hyper realism, and toward the more muted and mundane. I'm impressed that Marvel is already applying some of it in "Agatha All Along".
Anyway, my point still stands, artists will constantly push back against whatever is mainstream in an effort to be seen and to define their own aesthetic/brand. It's easier to be 1 of 10, than it is 1 of a million. Plus, if they're lucky enough, they get to be known for starting or accelerating the movement.
Every single decade has very clearly defined aesthetics that designers copy until something new comes along to disrupt it.
For the very same reasons you point out, there is also a style shared by the servers who work at these coffee shops. We would expect young people from the same generation to adopt similar hairstyles, facial hair choices etc.
When we look at 70s interiors full of leather upholstery, wood panels and with a desaturated look from old film camera pictures, they feel outdated. It's hard for me to imagine looking at these white, clean HD interiors and saying "oh this feels so outdated" - but I bet that's exactly what people will think decades from now.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Hard nonporous surfaces are easier to clean, sanitize, and maintain, which is why you find these kinds of surfaces everywhere in professional settings, especially anything to do with food or medicine. Anything that isn't able to be cleaned and sanitized in those settings is usually single use disposable.
At least with the "f*ck" books this is just a money grab. Subtle art was a hit - I also remember enjoying the book - and it sprung bunch of copy cats with no originality. I also got suckered into this, picking up another one of these books thinking it was a sequel, but it was the most boring non-sense and I dropped it almost immediately.
I suspect money drives most other of these trends. You want to builds homes to look away that is proven to get highest sale price. You want to make the car look like the model that has sold most over past decade. You want to make your coffee shop look like what a successful coffee shop looks like to attract more customers. You want to make you influencer account look like every other influencer account to get as much sponsor and ad revenue as possible.
This is the same reason why we see reboot after reboot and if it isn't a reboot it is a sequel or prequel or reimagining of some sort, since all of the arts are now investments and need to make profit, no one wants to take a risk on unproven idea.
As for why even my home has white walls? Most people don't change the default. I don't care enough about the wall color and I know that I will be selling at some point and would have to paint the walls white again.
I think this one's the gist of it, and the big irony we'll all suffer from: While it gets cheaper to produce new things, not a lot of things will be original anymore.
I once heard that the 90s were the decade of references, and that might have just stuck a bit for too long: The boom of second-hand, mid-century furniture, the "industrial" look, rounded edged everywhere. Hell, even smartphones are just a reference to Sci-Fi flicks from the 60s (the case was Apple VS Samsung, I think). On demand services and the easy piracy of digital goods... I feel while there has been an perceived increase in quality for each individual at first, all these things helped everything to converge into "the average" for everyone.
We still see originality here and there, but you can just feel their competition against big budget productions. The movie Mandy (2018) was great, so was the show Scavengers Reign (2023), Breaking Bad etc. Landscape FM produce really interesing audio gear. I'm sure Open-Source (Hard- and Software) makes a lot of this possible, but for small and big equaly alike - depending on business practice, small might even be in danger to suffer from it.
I'm sure we all have our gems, but they just feel rare in this huge landscape. I just wish it would be a more common practice to support local artists and individials that take this mentioned risk, without having to turn it into a growth hacking startup idea.
I respectfully disagree. Things look the same only if you look at the same things.
Fashion and trends where always a thing. They spread faster and more globally today because the communication is rich and easy, and of course there are a lot of followers of any trend.
But, not everything is "average". That bell curve is probably very high today, but there is a lot beyond the ±σ , just need to look there.
There used to be more regional diversity, though. Things had distinctive characteristics that could easily be associated with the culture that produced them. A German car looked restrained and taut and had no cupholders. A French car looked kinda unusual and Avant-garde. Now everyone is driving the same blobby thing with several cupholders decided after a customer survey among Americans driving through McDonalds.
McDonaldization = globalization? The world is smaller now than it was in the 80's, and even then there were trends in design and fashion that spread across the world.
They are not quite the same idea. In a globalised but diverse economy, a Japanese buys a Swiss watch and a Swiss buys a Japanese air conditioner. McDonaldization refers to the incessant urge of Western societies to over-rationalise every aspect of the economic and cultural life, resulting in bland uniformity. It is a progression of Max Weber's ideas on bureaucracy and rationalisation.
I think globalized but diverse was always kind of a pipe dream because along with things you're trading across the globe you're also spreading information back and forth. And as the article points out, human preference is roughly the same in aggregate across the globe, so we all loosely converge on a local maximum of "the best" rinse, repeat, and you suddenly get homogenization.
> there is a lot beyond the ±σ , just need to look there.
Of course, the world if large and kaleidoscopic. But the rate of homogeneity in the middle 80% is higher than it's even been, and that really affects everyone.
I actually want diversity in the mainstream, since some projects are only enjoyable if you can share them with others and if they get the most talented people to work on them.
The fact that nobody would make a Doctor Zhivago or even a Back to the Future today is not something I can fix with all my searching.
> The fact that nobody would make a Doctor Zhivago or even a Back to the Future today is not something I can fix with all my searching.
What do you mean by that?
I'm not familiar with Doctor Zhivago so I had to look it up, the 1965 film is based on a 1957 novel, which seems to match just fine with the pattern of The Martian, The Three Body Problem, Game of Thrones, Fifty Shades of Grey, etc.
Back to the Future is a fun trilogy, but the first film was mostly set in 1955 (so if it had been done today the past would have been 1994, compare to Captain Marvel being mostly set in 1995), the second film was 1985's idea of 2015 (and we still get plenty of what-if fiction in the near-ish future, e.g. Blade Runner 2049, Cyberpunk 2077), the third was yet another wild-west Cowboys-and-Indians gunslinger (1885) — but if you mean to focus on the more playful and fun aspects of how it was put together, or the positive vibes of good people working to solve problems and where it's clear who the goodies and baddies are, BttF reminds me more of The Orville or Lower Decks. (And The Martian if you want to consider the environment/time travel itself, rather than Biff, to be the problem).
I don't mean in broad genres, but more in terms of the range of emotions and thoughts that the top movies of the year evoke. The Martian is great movie, and does thankfully hit a different spot than the generic dystopian Sci-Fi, but there still seems to be a compression of that range, one which unfortunately nobody can quantify so that's why it's mostly opinion here.
For that issue, I think that as any medium ages, it transforms from "explore" to "exploit", which is also why films have a lot more sequels and reboots.
So, if you want more range, explore new media: games, youtube, etc.
> For that issue, I think that as any medium ages, it transforms from "explore" to "exploit", which is also why films have a lot more sequels and reboots.
I've never agreed with this argument, it just felt like an excuse. For 100 years movies kept changing as society also changed, and all of a sudden they hit the exploit phase somehow after 2000, when GCI was still improving.
Movies are in part a product of a social climate, and that climate is never static, so to me it seems like there should always be something to explore. It just seems that financier no longer want to put any money in exploring, and culture becomes poorer while the GDP grows.
It wasn't a sudden change, it's been a gradual tendency towards them. James Bond was already 19 films by the turn of the century (or 20 if you include the other Casino Royale), King Kong and Star Trek both got to 6, Batman 8, Star Wars had just had the 4th, Friday the 13th had reached 9 films.
Even BttF itself was three films, and in the second one was parodying the tendency towards sequels with the holographic Jaws 19.
there 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!
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
And the music? Film music for everything popular seems to have come from the same music box.
But popular music itself is to a high degree very same. That's not to say that there is no original music anymore. There is a big amount. It's just people tastes that decide what becomes popular, and everybody wants to hear the same.
And yet, fashion and taste change. It's just a matter of time.
>It's just people tastes that decide what becomes popular //
What becomes popular seems to be whatever we get brainwashed with, ie what we get advertised.
It seems to be less driven by social changes than it is driven by profit motive of those able to feed most of us 10-15 minutes of advertising within each of the several hours of media consumption most of us partake of each day.
I'm late to reply but for the record I think you're way wrong about music. You (and I) are just old. I'm a musician and I do think there is a sense in which the most popular songs are "worse" - they contain fewer, simpler musical ideas. But there are plenty of good song writers doing interesting stuff. I'm not totally on the ball as I do prefer music from the past. But I would point to Billy Eilish as a particularly young example, there's also Jacob Collier for instance. Both very unusual, very popular.
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."
> 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 × animals) combination. Maybe among four responses we get
- Blue × humans
- Blue × trains
- Green × animals
- Red × animals
and then we end up with a (blue × 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.
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"
> 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.
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.
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?
"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.
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.
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.
>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:
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.
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.
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.
I find myself really missing Winamp and the ability to personalize the app using skins. This gave the user the ability to distinct the Ui using libraries of thousands of skins
There has been discussion on this topic for about 100 years, but the most prominent is in the books Dialectic of Enlightenment by Theodor Adorno or One-Dimensional Man by Herbert Marcuse. They are a bit heavier than this article but they go into the problem with far more depth.
The Frankfurt school in general deals with this problematic of Capitalism losing its revolutionary potential and becoming a stagnant, homogenous, unchanging system. Walter Benjamin, the spiritual father of both the above authors, in fact did extensive work attempting to uncover the wondrous possibilities of early high capitalism before it collapsed under the rule of Louis Bonaparte, which was the subject of Marx’s quite famous article The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Disagree with Marx if you want but he did believe that capitalism, if left to run wild, would produce a new form of hypermobile, freely associating society, but when that gets close to happening in times of crisis a certain section of elite seize power for themselves and prevent the revolutionary social changes from occuring, thus producing this endless mediocrity.
While it’s mostly a laugh (a shock?) to read Guénon and Marcuse side by side, I think Vico is really misunderstood and under-appreciated in our present cultural moment and I think a lot of good could come from a revival of his thought. He’s influenced a diverse array of characters, from Marx to Rosmini-Serbati, and I see a lot of his thought in Horkheimer and Habermas (I.e., the side of the Frankfurt school that rediscovered the big questions in a non-reactionary, non-nostalgic way).
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.
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?
The "International AirBnB Style" isn't of a place but it's definitely of a time, and that time was probably ten years ago to now. I think it's fading. It always feels like styles will be eternal until they go out of fashion. Probably by 2035 it will be completely uncool and replaced by something different, maybe local. Maybe not, since we're more interconnected than ever, so styles end up propagating fast and wide. In 2050 though, it will be cool again, like all the other things that went out of fashion.
AirBnB is profit driven. So buy Ikea stuff or similar, paint the walls white, make it feel middle class for the $ but at the same time easy and cheap to maintain.
> 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.
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.
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!
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.
What features are you seeking that aren’t available? There are many powerful, heavy laptops. There are many 16+ inch form factors. My current laptop has dual screens!
I agree it can be frustrating when the mainstream focuses on things you don’t like, but that doesn’t always exclude the things you do. I don’t like pop music but there’s more music I like now than when I was young.
> What features are you seeking that aren’t available? There are many powerful, heavy laptops. There are many 16+ inch form factors. My current laptop has dual screens!
Sure, there are many powerful, heavy laptops. Almost none with a HiDPI screen, though. And almost none that lack a numpad (and off-center trackpad). And almost none with half-height arrow keys, even among the ones without numpad.
To find one with all three of those? You may as well not even try. I have more requirements, but nobody really cares even about the most basic ones, so there's no point in hoping for the more complex ones.
Even among laptops with 4K screens they're bound to have "full-size" keyboards with a numpad. If no numpad, the arrow keys are still likely to be full-size, and there are probably dedicated Home/End/PgUp/PgDn buttons, which are always stupid compared to putting them into Fn+Arrows.
I get it, portable workstations are designed to be desktops in a laptop form factor. They're not designed to be laptops. But maybe something out there should be. Maybe there should be even a single laptop on the planet that is actually designed like a premium laptop, with workstation-class power inside.
There probably won't be, though - far more likely for everybody to tell me my expectations are completely unrealistic. (It'll happen any second now, probably.)
> I agree it can be frustrating when the mainstream focuses on things you don’t like, but that doesn’t always exclude the things you do.
The Framework Laptop 16 is one of the first Windows laptops I have ever seen that checks many of those boxes, but unfortunately it's still thin and light (and also AMD).
I recently got a Apple 16" MacBook Pro and it's okay. Really many of my requirements were inherited from the Mid-2015 MBP being possibly the best machine I'd ever used, but then Apple became terrible for a while, and nobody else (not even Razer) did a good job of replicating what I liked about that machine.
The new Apple Silicon machines outperform full-size desktop workstations. I'm OK with that.
(According to Geekbench, this machine outperforms my desktop 12400F by 20% in single-core and over 100% in multi-core, and it's also less than 5% behind my RTX 3090 in GPU performance... in practice though, I've noticed certain work tasks drop down from taking over 10 seconds to under 3 seconds.)
The reason I don't like thin and light Windows laptops is because they freaking don't.
In pros they stick more ram chips in parallel, and depending on storage the same for flash. I.e. more bandwidth. That may aid your tasks more than the extra geekbench scores.
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.
> We like to think that we are individuals, but we are much more alike that we wish to admit.
There is something missing here.
If you have to poll people and slavishly follow large aggregated preferences in order to show commonality, that really doesn’t prove much commonality. Because you basically asked “what is common?”.
Averages are low frequency, low information pass filters. By design.
If you ask for averages, don’t be surprised to get little variation.
They are not measures of differences in preferences which would show up as variance. High frequency, high density information.
Low pass: Everybody likes cats.
High pass:
[Disclaimer, advance apology, don’t hate me: generated list. I was genuinely interested in what I would get by asking for distinctive culturally specific cat archetypes/icons.)
7. Cat-shaped alfeñique candies (Mexico, Day of the Dead crafts).
8. Schrödinger’s cat (Austria, quantum thought experiment symbol).
9. Le Chat Noir posters (France, 19th-century cabaret art).
10. Pusheen the Cat (global, digital sticker and merchandise phenomenon).
I could happily spend many an hour going down the rabbit hole for any of these.
So much of art and anything aesthetic is culturally distinctive. For instance, Hindu art from India vs. Christian art from Europe, each are highly prevalent phenomenon, and surely demonstrate culturally contrasting artistic preferences.
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.
"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.
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
> “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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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]
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?
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 cliché - 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").
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.
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?
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.
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.
If you average out people you end up removing all refined qualities.
This is for example how otherwise sophisticated intelligent respectful people end up creating a brainless government that acts like a rampaging dinosaur trampeling everything on its way. It is a quality we all share in modest amount while various compensating refinements are shared by fewer people.
Similarly, if you let the customer design the product it at best wont be revolutionary and at worse be something no one likes.
I wonder if doing the exact opposite would yield inferior results.
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.
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.
This is a byproduct of capitalism, which is fundamentally driven by optimization and efficiency.
The most efficient way to optimize is to homologate.
Funnily enough that’s an endgame that resembles closely what realist socialism would impose from the start, in order to distribute equally (whereas in capitalism this also led to increasing inequality).
Globalized capitalism now resembles a lossy compression algorithm applied to the world.
That said, the one shown by this article is also a very, very Western view of this issue.
A stroll through Asian smaller places and you’ll see the difference popping up.
There are also interesting Western holdouts, where usually tradition still defies optimization. Italy is a good example of that.
Edit: every time I mention a critique of capitalism on this forum it gets absolutely zero traction and even downvoted.
Why is this the reaction, instead of maybe even telling me why this analysis is completely worthless or wrong in a proper argumented comment? Change my mind! But be also open to see more structural issues in the way we all live, maybe?
> every time I mention a critique of capitalism on this forum it gets absolutely zero traction and even downvoted. Why is this the reaction, instead of maybe even telling me why this analysis is completely worthless or wrong in a proper argumented comment?
I'll break the silence to give you at least my view on it.
I find the "blame it on the capitalism" rhetoritc somewhat annoying, to be fair. It sounds like an escape hatch you can always invoke, and since we don't really have a significant example of a non-capitalist society, it's unfalsifiable. It often seems to me, that people use this argument as psychological escapism - a simple solution to a complex problem.
Specifically, I see the "capitalism is bad" argument often used on examples that are not really specific to capitalism and are instead a result of some general principles.
For example, it seems to me that this article just describes preferential attachment process (rich get richer) in various fields.Another common one is multipolar trap (or tragedy of the commons or collective action problem). Those things tend to happen absolutely everywhere, because the conditions for them are very simple to satisfy.
We shouldn't be suprised to see them in capitalism, and we should expect them to arise in different forms in practically every system.
Thank you, this is exactly the answer I would expect from this kind of forum.
I am all but an anti-capitalist per se. I believe that, among all forms of societal organization, capitalism has proven to be the most effective at taking masses out of poverty.
I am also very aware that different types of capitalism exist, and in my critique I'm usually referring to the American "unbridled" or more or less libertarian Capitalism, rather than the social democratic flavor we have in Europe.
We even have chinese capitalism, the most beautiful and effective economic oxymoron to ever prove effective at what it does.
My gripe is mostly with the American form, and its role as a fundamental engine of disequalities. It's socialism for the ultrarich, as many capitalists in America would define it with no issue. I do think that this explains not all, but a lot of the undercurrents that lead to what this article described, as most of this trend seem to spread from a globalized push for optimization through homologation.
Especially when discussing with an educated American counterpart, I have the feeling that capitalism is the untouchable axiom of everything - which is expressed in your "annoyance", or at least that's what I perceive.
"Oh, here we go, let's blame it all again on capitalism..."
To me that's like fish complaining that everything around them is always wet, but getting annoyed if anyone mentions water.
Of course, getting out of the water is not an option for them, and sure there is no alternative for us about capitalism.
In this case the options are twofold: go the Mark Fisher way, conceding to the despair of a lack of an alternative; promote constant discussion and self-reflection about it, in a democratic and dialectically constructive way, to make the best of the water we all swim in.
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.
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.
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.
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.