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by kerowak
1183 days ago
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Ironically, this reads like any other repetitive blogpost running with a half-baked premise. To me, the author is mostly describing culture. Things look a certain way at a certain point in history because of the averaging effects of culture. Houses from the 1950's look like houses from the 1950's. Fashion from the 1970's looks like fashion from the 1970's. Coffee shops from 2020 look like coffee shops from 2020. The subtext seems to be that American society looks like it does, and _that's bad_. This is a more nuanced point that deserves to be examined as it applies to different aspects of our aesthetic culture. I hate Marvel movies and what they've done to mainstream cinema, but I don't particularly care if a certain type of woman wants to emulate Kim Kardashian. I think the notion that you _should_ care about this trend in the appearances of a certain type of women, especially when juxtaposed against cheugy Airbnb decor, is not a good perspective to hold onto. No one is making you decorate your house like an Airbnb, dude. The author concludes that the current state of our aesthetic culture is a market opportunity to "reintroduce" variation. This is a flawed notion. If you succeed in changing a piece of our aesthetic culture, then you will have successfully spurred the mass-adoption of your personal brand of blandness. You may have gotten rich in the process, but you will be a failure in your stated goal. Counterculture exists for a reason |
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However, I think that this current generation is fundamentally different because of a different balance between culture and counterculture driven by demographic changes.
The 50s through to the 90s were all time periods when the population was predominantly youthful, and far more likely to belong to belong to counterculture movements. Because there was a lot of them, they made up a significant market, and so advertisers would pick up counterculture movements.
But in modern times, there are a lot of baby boomers who are pretty old. Their tastes are far less likely to change at this point, there are a lot of them, and they have a lot of money.
Give it 10 years, and hopefully we will start to see some more variety. Variety is the spice of life as they say...