[tsunamifury]

No it’s not and stop trying to be smarter by saying it’s always been this way.

Go look at art of different societies from as near as 150 years ago. Spanish, French, English, and American fashion, architecture, and style are wildly different compared to the sea of homeginity of today.

I am tired of hacker news for always having these shallow “smarter than you” sage comments that completely miss the point. It’s just like the article pointed out. At scale here everyone’s comment is “no you’re wrong because [some mundane detail observation that misses the point].” It’s like engineer cognitive scale Markov chain.

[nonbirithm]

I think he means globalization. All those cultures were probably homogeneous to some extent in their own isolated bubbles. The thing that changed was near-instant global communication. When most people in each society had full visibility into the standards/cultures of other societies, their definitions of an ideal society converged based on the new information.

[pier25]

Yes this exactly.

[ryandrake]

> I am tired of hacker news for always having these shallow “smarter than you” sage comments that completely miss the point. It’s just like the article pointed out. At scale here everyone’s comment is “no you’re wrong because [some mundane detail observation that misses the point].”

Nitpicking mundane (and unimportant) details is HN Commentary In a Nutshell. I totally expected these comments and did not come away disappointed. We make an art out of missing the forest for the trees here!

It sucks, too, because the article makes a great point with numerous examples, but all we have here are comments like "Well, ackshually, in paragraph 5 sentence 3, the author says 'all' when he meant 'most' so the entire article is clearly wrong!" which completely miss the point.

[pier25]

> Go look at art of different societies from as near as 150 years ago

Precisely.

150 years ago, countries lived in their own cultural bubble because communication was much slower and mostly limited to local information. Or look at ancient societies which had their own homogenous culture compared to other cultures (eg: Ancient Greece vs Aztecs).

I think it's fair to say that today with globalization and the internet, we're really getting into what McLuhan denominated the global village. Instagram is a good example of this.