Comment by fwlr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fwlr | Hacker News Reader

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The styles that the author reviews are real trends in their market (except the paintings, which seems like an intentional publicity stunt on the part of the artists rather than a genuine trend, and it harms the piece by being the introduction - gets everything off on the wrong foot), though not as all-consuming as they are made out to be.

The author then identifies a commonality between these trends, that they are all “average”. I don’t quite see that commonality, it seems a little strained. To be frank, the stronger commonality shared by all these styles is “the author despises it”. But there sort of is something there, “average” does kinda capture something they have in common, so I’ll buy it for the sake of discussion.

So, the author has discovered the current overall aesthetic of the age. Maybe from the inside it feels like it will consume the world and nothing will change, but from the outside it’s just the current overall aesthetic of the age, there were others before it and there will be others after it. You could write a very similar article about the Victorian period, maybe titled “The Age of Ornate”, filled with complaints that every field seems to be obsessed with adding a million curlicues and embellishments to whatever they’re making. The Victorian era (in architecture, fashion, etc., basically all the same categories mentioned in the article) lasted for 70-odd years or so, I bet it felt similarly never-ending and all-consuming to some people living through it back then.

One can make parallels to other eras, sure, but the current convergence to an "average" is unprecedented in scale and speed. Various eras had a distinctive style that everything revolved around, but at least there was variety (cultural and corporate).

Nowadays I can't shake off this weird feeling of sameness emanating from every design. I can hardly distinguish brands any more, I can't tell cultures apart and that's a shame because there's never been an era with such abundance of products and expression mediums as the current one

Music is another example, which the article didn't go into, probably because it's not visual like his other examples. When I say [USA] '60s music, '70s music, '80s music and so on, you kind of know what I'm talking about. Sure, each decade had its outliers and variety, but you can probably immediately hear in your head the decade-stereotype sound I'm talking about. Each decade had that distinct fashion that the culture adopted and became known for. What is 2010's music? I have no idea. It's homogenized nothing. It's a shapeless average song, workshopped and focus-grouped to appeal to some nonexistent "Global ISO Standard Person." It's defining characteristic is its total absence of distinctiveness.

Completely disagree. Streaming has unlocked music listeners and artists to quickly iterate so that choice is boundless. Do you really think being stuck with the same sound for 10 years is a good thing? You don't know what 2010s music sounds like because it's completely individualized. Maybe that has its own problems involving increased siloization and could be linked to political tribalization but claiming its "homogenized nothing" is senseless.

I think the issue is you haven't actually found the sound you enjoy. If you just let pop radio take you on your way you're going to get lowest common denominator sound. And streaming has made this effect much worse. Now music radio is only for people who can't be assed to choose their own music, so it's even more lowest common denominator than before.

The best way I can explain it is as if we now live in a society that invented time travel and we use it to live the exact same month over and over again. We make small tweaks each loop but nothing substantive. We are comfortable in the control of this space and are now afraid of living in the future that is beyond this time window. Anyone who tries has an extremely hard go of it because they are entirely alone beyond the window. The rest of the society goes back to the beginning of the month to live it again.

I feel like a time prisoner /fugitive constantly trying to break out of this window-loop.

The author really describes the effects of globalisation, spreading through consumer culture and online media quicker than before. Capitalism is in a phase where companies are developing "world products" to ever larger audiences. A "world car" would look very different from a 1970s Jaguar, built in Britain and sold there predominantly.

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