One of the best essays of this year, though I think the author considerably underrates how much heterogeneity we are building on the internet, globally, and also through GPT models. Nonetheless an excellent read with some hard-hitting points and good photos to illustrate. Here is one excerpt:
This article argues that from film to fashion and architecture to advertising, creative fields have become dominated and defined by convention and cliché. Distinctiveness has died. In every field we look at, we find that everything looks the same.
Welcome to the age of average.
Here is a photo of some (supposedly different) current cars:
You can read the whole thing here. Note that in my model, the homogenizations we do observe spring precisely from the greater diversity on the fringes of the distribution. People at the edges can get exactly what they want, so the fight over the mainstream middle becomes all the more mainstream, as it is targeting the true conformists in that particular area.
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