So we looked at how much of our progress in the physical world has been stalled courtesy of digital innovation and our retreat into virtual worlds.
We’ve divorced ourselves from the inconveniences of the physical in favour of a curated, custom reality defined by proxies not to what is real necessarily but certainly to what is useful or valuable, in that these proxies not only don’t lead us where we want to go, but limit us.
Today we’re going to look at what happens—what has happened— when this process scales up. When entire industries, cities, and cultures are built on abstraction you don’t just get individuals chasing shadows, but systemic sameness. We’re losing all texture, as a bespoke (abstracted) reality devolves into a world at large racing to a neutral, bland, generic, bottom.
THE GREAT FLATTENING
In architecture and design, we live in the same glass-and-steel towered cities; we drive cars differentiated only by name; we eat the same cafe meals and drink the same sourced coffee in the same white-walled, pot-planted interior with exposed brick and hanging bulbs. As Kyle Chayka writes about this Instagram-friendly ‘Airspace’ aesthetic:
…the coffee roaster Four Barrel in San Francisco looks like the Australian Toby’s Estate in Brooklyn looks like The Coffee Collective in Copenhagen looks like Bear Pond Espresso in Tokyo. You can get a dry cortado with perfect latte art at any of them, then Instagram it on a marble countertop and further spread the aesthetic to your followers.
And further spread the aesthetic. There are technological, ideological, and economic drivers, but digital innovation is the main culprit here too.
Algorithms prioritize engagement, so whatever generates the most interaction gets amplified leading to the homogenisation not of cars, cafes or interior design more broadly, but of taste. Full stop.
This optimised aesthetic is then immediately and widely shared via social media and adopted not, as Chayka writes, as a corporate cookie-cutter template, rather, “they have all independently decided to adopt the same faux artisanal aesthetic.” (italics mine). The bland leading the bland.
An interplay of market forces, psychological biases, and structural incentives collectively erode individuality, such that social media replaces local subcultures with global trends, erasing regional aesthetics and traditions. Open a random Airbnb page and see if you can guess where you are. Or you might just look around. You could be reading this in some variation of that space right now. Insofar as there is variation.
Mass production and economies of scale reward designs that are cost-effective, transportable, and ‘universally appealing’, noting that doesn’t mean it’s designed to appeal to you— or any individual— but to everyone. So we are left with design that could be ‘anywhere’ for ‘anyone’, and with all the personality of an operating theatre, as Chayka writes:
The interchangeability, ceaseless movement, and symbolic blankness that was once the hallmark of hotels and airports, qualities that led the French anthropologist Marc Augé to define them in 1992 as “non-places,” has leaked into the rest of life.
All difference is erased in favour of a universal, generic aesthetic that might otherwise be described as inoffensive, but, more worryingly, this extends to a broader political and cultural homogeneity.
Mega-corporations dominate multiple industries, dictating standards that favour uniformity over uniqueness. Standards that optimize for the most viral, repeatable content, branding and messaging with all the same properties: universal and bland, sure, but most of all ‘safe’.
The word of greatest importance when saying the wrong thing can get you cancelled and why this same confluence of factors has come to flatten the political and cultural landscape.
As global media and entertainment industries expand, political ideologies, humour, and even personal identities become more uniform. Creative risks are sidelined in favour of design-by-committee and data-driven decisions that prioritise widely palatable choices. Political and corporate institutions fear offending or alienating audiences, leading to sterile, generic messaging and design.
Not that uniformity signals unity, of course. Our now standard political discourse is the same ideological battles playing out across the globe with local— and more immediate— concerns taking a backseat to imported culture war narratives.
Political parties from both sides lecture to sharply divided electorates from the same ideological playbook—or have seen these ideas installed despite them — making voting less an act of democracy than one of theatre.
Because you’re getting it every way. And every when, with a historical and cultural revisionism bringing giants like Churchill, Roald Dahl and Tchaikovsky to the same boring ideological heel.
But even where no ideological intervention is necessary, this broader cultural convergence is still assured.
The Spotify algorithm once suggested ‘recommendations’ that offered legitimately enlightening leads to artists and tracks I never would have stumbled on otherwise. Now, I don’t even bother. As Ted Gioia writes the ‘recommendations’ here—and throughout cyberspace more broadly are reliably rubbish.
These recommendations and their broader ecosystem of online reviews, and social proof mechanisms reinforce sameness, discouraging deviation or personal experimentation. Underpinning all the online architecture that purports to offer a personalised, tailored experience is the same old engagement data herding you toward what is already popular, safe, and easy to categorise— the same featureless landscape.
The internet, rather than expanding perspectives instead compresses them into a single, easily digestible ‘consensus’. The same memes, phrases, and opinions, dominate every online space and people, as ever, default to what is easiest.
And the final step is to do what technology does and optimise it all for convenience while—always— reinforcing the same trend: like, clap, pre-selected choices; 1-click purchasing; same-day shipping.
And so, like teenagers expressing their individuality, we end up more alike than ever. Perfectly capturing this shift to homogeneity, what was once a derisive shorthand meaning dull, conventional or boring, beige is the new black.
We fear that AI will excise the soul (the art) from art but—with the algorithm— we’ve been doing a good job of it all by ourselves. A dystopian ideal Apple could hardly have conveyed better in an ill-conceived— and quickly removed— ad that somehow deemed the crushing of musical instruments and bottles of paint into the sterile uniformity of an iPad to be inspirational.
An ad that only be explained by a decision-making process in which the human brain is absent. The same ‘decision-making’ that has the music industry leaning on formulas dictated by streaming platforms, resulting in an endless supply of samey, mid-tempo, AI-assisted pop tracks. Hollywood—kowtowing to the same idealogy as above produces propaganda or churns out sequels and remakes because new ideas don’t test well.
But how can anything test well? You’re not just sampling opinion you’re conditioning it. You are training it.
This feedback loop, this death spiral is what happens when we mistake what looks good on a screen, is easy to track, produce cheaply, or scale for what we might want, or for what truly matters, or for what serves us best and by doing so, we erase difference, depth, and even the possibility of a better outcome.
And while it’s true to say that those same abstractions —what looks good on a screen, is easy to track, produce cheaply, or scale— have come to define modern fitness, the fact is that fitness for the general population has never enjoyed its time in the sun, no point at which it hasn’t been either reduced to generic meaningless platitudes or serving another agenda.
Once we adopt abstractions as our guiding principles, industries will optimise for them. The problem is not that these abstractions won’t translate into real life but it certainly won’t be a better one, and for the same reason.
YOU are the least of their concerns.
You’re not in Kansas anymore, Dorothy. Or Paris, Venice or Cairo. You’re in Vegas. A simulacrum. A photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy and an eternally unsatisfactory approximation of the real.
Aesthetically and culturally this is just boring and lazy. In politics it’s dangerous.
In fitness, it’s both.
But how does this flattening sustain itself, and why do we willingly participate? Next time we’ll look at how the answer lies in something older than algorithms and the greatest abstraction of them all: mimesis
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Enjoy your weekend.
- OLI