The age of average (2023)

250 点作者 synergy205 个月前

59 条评论

jp575 个月前

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.

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stringsandchars5 个月前

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.

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jarjoura5 个月前

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.

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l0b05 个月前

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.

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nextlevelwizard5 个月前

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.

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alentred5 个月前

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.

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forgotusername65 个月前

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.

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kqr5 个月前

> 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 × animalsand 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.

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throwaway712715 个月前

> 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 SelfEverything 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.

sahmeepee5 个月前

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.

hsbshs5 个月前

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?

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qingcharles5 个月前

"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.

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lentil_soup5 个月前

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.

0xDEAFBEAD5 个月前

>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:<a href="https://www.lifeandstylemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/MEGAR82562_1.jpg?fit=1200%2C1800&quality=86&strip=all" rel="nofollow">https://www.lifeandstylemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/M...</a><a href="https://hips.hearstapps.com/hmg-prod/images/kim-k-a-interview-1563226220.jpg?crop=0.502xw:1.00xh;0.352xw,0&resize=980:\" rel="nofollow">https://hips.hearstapps.com/hmg-prod/images/kim-k-a-intervie...</a>*>We are so conformist, nobody is thinking.I continue to believe this is downstream of the like/upvote/share architecture of modern social media.The early internet was a space for nonconformist weirdos. The early internet was also a space where the like, the upvote, and the share hadn't yet been invented. Maybe that's not a coincidence.

timerol5 个月前

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.

botanicals65 个月前

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.

krembo5 个月前

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

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DiscourseFan5 个月前

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.

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ofcourseyoudo5 个月前

The most relevant thing about this article to me is the continued need for editors, and for people to push back on articles like this before they see the light of day.This article is dead on arrival unless you start with explaining when in US or global cultural the general trend was individual distinctiveness.Visual examples of sameness could be assembled from practically any point in human history.Where's the evidence that this is a new trend?

FlyingSnake5 个月前

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?

joegibbs5 个月前

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.

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anal_reactor5 个月前

Previously, people within one country would communicate and share a culture. Nowadays almost the entire planet communicates and shares one culture.

NoboruWataya5 个月前

> 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.

dang5 个月前

Discussed at the time:The age of average - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35355703">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35355703</a> - March 2023 (474 comments)

benrutter5 个月前

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.

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LoganDark5 个月前

I've noticed this in many categories, where almost everything in the category converges extremely specifically on qualities that I simply... do not like, at all. For example, laptops and the "thin and light" fad.I may have different needs from the average person, but why does nobody else have these needs? Am I the only autistic person on the planet, the only software developer on the planet, the only person on the planet who likes to be productive on a laptop? The only person on the planet who practically lives in their laptop?I think hopefully not, but this is like... probably under 1% of people. And you know, almost nobody caters to this niche because if you cater to the 99% (or more) instead, you make so much more money!I fucking hate having special needs sometimes.

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Nevermark5 个月前

> 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.)1. Hello Kitty (Japan, kawaii culture).2. Maneki-neko (Japan, ceramic beckoning cat).3. Egyptian Bastet statues (Ancient Egypt, feline goddess).4. Cheshire Cat (UK, literary folklore from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland).5. Maru the cat (Japan, YouTube sensation, internet meme culture).6. Lucky Cat figurines (China, feng shui prosperity symbols).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.

gkcnlr5 个月前

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.

nadam5 个月前

"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.

wellpast5 个月前

You can’t poll people to say what they want in an art piece. They’re not artists.You have to show them the options. Wow them with a masterpiece. See what they pay for, not what they describe they want.If determining what people wanted in art was just a matter of polling them, then Hollywood economics would look much different.

feketegy5 个月前

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 <a href="https://www.instagram.com/insta_repeat" rel="nofollow">https://www.instagram.com/insta_repeat</a>

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jstanley5 个月前

> “I called this style “AirSpace”. It’s marked by an easily recognisable mix of symbols – like reclaimed wood, Edison bulbs, and refurbished industrial lighting – that’s meant to provide familiar, comforting surroundings for a wealthy, mobile elite,Yes.> who want to feel like they’re visiting somewhere “authentic” while they travel,No! I want somewhere clean and pleasant and uncomplicated. I'm not looking for "authentic" local accommodation! That part is a total strawman.> but who actually just crave more of the same: more rustic interiors and sans-serif logos and splashes of cliche accent colours on rugs and walls.”Yes.

clark0105 个月前

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.

bux935 个月前

To be fair, books all used to look the same. Orange cover with a black-and-white penguin on them. My mom had a bookcase full of them.

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RandomThoughts35 个月前

The swing back to less minimalism and more colour has already started to happen.Teenage Engineering is trendy. Clothes are starting to take more volume and have more interesting shapes. I have seen multiple people around me get interested into USM Haller furnitures in bold colors and I have seen more red Fiat 500 in 2024 than I had seen red cars in the past few years.It's coming.

fedeb955 个月前

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.

pavlov5 个月前

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.

gpderetta5 个月前

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.

rifty5 个月前

I think something that plays into this for products is that there is a lot of obvious incentive to making the function of things more efficient to build first. But as we become more efficient at building just the function of things, adding diverging flavor takes up a higher proportion of cost even if the cost of it itself absolutely stayed the same.I do think broadly we're probably oversaturated with the flavor of high definition and 'realness' in the mainstream. But I don't think this is the end of taste evolution. Recently I've been looking back on movie posters from past decades. I think movie posters and advertisements are decent to examine here as they play to the mass taste of their time. In isolation of their moment and market there was a uniformity in style, yet over time it still progresses despite keeping it's core features.Globalism is perhaps disappointing here because it means we have few equally sized parallel 'mainstreams' taking place. But at least with the internet, you can still just as rapidly find many actively diverging styles that are otherwise relatively niche to the mainstream.[1]1. <a href="https://aesthetics.fandom.com/wiki/Category:2020s" rel="nofollow">https://aesthetics.fandom.com/wiki/Category:2020s</a>

tayo425 个月前

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?

AlxKe5 个月前

How is any of this surprising?If you ask 1000 people what they like in a painting, you'll end up with the average. That's how surveys work, by definition.That's not how you make anything extraordinary. That's the job of a creator who dives really really deep into their topic and comes up with all those details that make a difference - not that of the audience. If they could do it themselves, they wouldn't need you.It's actually striking how this article is itself pretty 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").

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ToucanLoucan5 个月前

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?

amelius5 个月前

They forgot about smartphones. They all look the same too.Samsung Flip phones are one of the few exceptions.Oh and many websites and apps have a similar design as well.

greener_grass5 个月前

A good "survey" of something that has been observed many times before. I'm not sure it adds any new insights, however.

fasthandle5 个月前

Creativity used to be the word.Now it's innovation.These words are not synonyms of each other. Creativity dropped out of business-speak around 2000.

achenet5 个月前

well, congratulations to pg for bucking that trend with the desgin of HN :)

feoren5 个月前

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.

UniverseHacker5 个月前

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.

tetek5 个月前

lol, this is an absurdly bad article, picking similar things and showing them together claiming there's nothing else that stands out.

theendisney5 个月前

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.

rob_c5 个月前

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.

justanotherjoe5 个月前

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.

seydor5 个月前

Global optimum

camillomiller5 个月前

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?

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jcalx5 个月前

The terms "sameness" and "average" are doing some heavy lifting here. In the grand internet tradition I will memetically unpackage "sameness" and "average" into four related components: (1) things that are BIG (2) things that are HOT (3) things that are COOL and (4) things that are GOOD.(1) things that are BIG — these are side effects of technological advancement, globalization, the Internet, and frictionless social media platforms. More people than ever before can book a TAP Air flight to Barcelona, stay in a budget AirBnB, and check Google Maps for the same "best cafe near me" that everyone else is going to. Access to the world and to information is more open than ever before, so more people have both the ability to congregate around the top N things (physically or virtually) and the means to do so.(2) things that are HOT — trends have always been around and always will be. Instagram face, the Kardashian look, hoverboards, heroin chic, microservices, Livestrong bracelets, putting "F*ck" in the name of your self-help book, flat icons, frozen yogurt, Dutch tulip mania — you can localize each one of these into a time period easily enough. Popular because they are new and a momentary cultural touchstone and different enough from the n-1th state of culture.(3) things that are COOL — what you might call "signaling theory effects". "Ads Don't Work That Way" [1] explains this in the advertising context better than I can, so go read that. Differs from (2) in that the cultural salience is more about vibes and not time. Dad jokes, liking vim (or emacs, or nano), being an EDCer, being a Golf Guy, being a Horse Girl, commenting "nice" when the number 69 comes up — none of these have ever been truly HOT in the same way the examples in (2) were, but you know the type immediately. People who vocally do these things don't just like them for what they are, but for what they think other people will think of them for being into those things.(4) things that are GOOD — these are things optimized for natural or manmade systems. All cars look the same because they're optimized for aerodynamics (physics, natural) which helps with fuel efficiency (CAFE standards, manmade). Five-over-ones optimize for material costs and regulatory compliance, federal highway signage design language optimizes for readability and consistency, the ADA Standards for Accessible Design optimizes for accessibility to people with disabilities, and so on. Some things are just better (in the systems we live in) and that's how GOOD things end up everywhere.There's a lot of overlap and causation here. Things that are GOOD can find their way to a BIG channel whereupon they get HOT and build their own COOL followers. But every example of "sameness" in The Age of Average can be meaningfully decomposed into some mixture of BIG, HOT, COOL, and GOOD. Things that are the "same" are that way for different reasons — by the inexorable nature of societal interconnectedness, by human nature, by the laws of this reality, or by the laws that we've created.So I disagree with the conclusion:> So, there you have it. The interiors of our homes, coffee shops and restaurants all look the same. The buildings where we live and work all look the same. The cars we drive, their colours and their logos all look the same. The way we look and the way we dress all looks the same. Our movies, books and video games all look the same. And the brands we buy, their adverts, identities and taglines all look the same.> But it doesn’t end there. In the age of average, homogeneity can be found in an almost indefinite number of domains.> The Instagram pictures we post, the tweets we read, the TV we watch, the app icons we click, the skylines we see, the websites we visit and the illustrations which adorn them all look the same. The list goes on, and on, and on.The age of average is indeed the age of opportunity but this is not some untapped, hidden truth that requires some call to arms. There's already a long, long tail of non-conformist, non-average art, media, culture, and so on. You can listen to Tuvan-Mongol throat singing [2] or Estonian Hip Hop or pop songs translated to Latin or a thousand other genres you've never heard of [3]. You can read fictional universes from online collaborative writing projects [4] or micropoetry or experimental self-published genre fiction or hundreds of years of books from dozens of different cultures. You can buy old vans from the 80s and find a whole community dedicated to drifting them around racetracks [5]. (You can replace "old vans from the 80s" with any other car and that sentence would probably still be true.) You can spend thousands of hours in games made by indie studios in every genre imaginable [6] with aesthetics that will make your eyes bleed [7]. You can find small storefronts and brands that lean maximalist and brutalist and weird and grotesque [8].Yes, there is no shortage of conformity and sameness and average, especially if you go looking where everyone else is. Yes, there are things that are BIG and HOT and COOL and GOOD that aggressively propagate themselves through culture.But there will always be artisans, bespoke crafts, reactionary uncoolness, a counterculture, an underground scene. Keep things obscure (the dark forest theory of the Internet) to prevent them from being subsumed into the BIG. Resist trends to avoid the allure of the HOT. Keep an open mind and be curious about other subcultures to not be entrenched in the COOL. And if the GOOD optimizes in the wrong direction, help build systems that guide it the other way.To paraphrase a certain meme — there are far more than just cathedrals everywhere for those with the eyes to see.[1] <a href="https://meltingasphalt.com/ads-dont-work-that-way/" rel="nofollow">https://meltingasphalt.com/ads-dont-work-that-way/</a>[2] <a href="https://www.alashensemble.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.alashensemble.com/</a>[3] <a href="https://everynoise.com/" rel="nofollow">https://everynoise.com/</a>[4] <a href="https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/" rel="nofollow">https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/</a>[5] <a href="https://www.roadandtrack.com/car-culture/a23110414/japanese-dodge-van-racing-dajiban/" rel="nofollow">https://www.roadandtrack.com/car-culture/a23110414/japanese-...</a>[6] <a href="https://www.ign.com/playlist/rchnemesis/lists/top-100-indie-games" rel="nofollow">https://www.ign.com/playlist/rchnemesis/lists/top-100-indie-...</a>[7] <a href="https://store.steampowered.com/app/1388770/Cruelty_Squad/" rel="nofollow">https://store.steampowered.com/app/1388770/Cruelty_Squad/</a>[8] <a href="https://www.voguebusiness.com/story/fashion/what-is-sexy-grotesque-and-what-should-brands-know-about-it" rel="nofollow">https://www.voguebusiness.com/story/fashion/what-is-sexy-gro...</a>

d--b5 个月前

Yeah, and your blog looks like all the other blogs.Fashion is a thing, people tend to have the same ideas at the same time, the internet makes these ideas spread faster. Get over it.

bikamonki5 个月前

Restaurants serve the same menues and food taste the sameMusic sounds the sameClothes look the sameNews outlets show/promote the sameSocial apps have the same featuresMovies are sequels, prequels, spinoffs of the sameYeah, creativity is long dead

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tropicalfruit5 个月前

average, normal, normies

armchairhacker5 个月前

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.