Design culture is a frozen shithole

Ask most people to name the second largest search engine, and they'll draw a blank. Google is the alpha and omega. This means that most tech and tech-adjacent business like media is at the whims of Google's search results.

So with the modern internet, as far as consumers go, it's mostly winner-takes all. This trickles all the way through to everything else, including VC investment, "disruption", and cargo-cult design. If you're not following the current zeitgeist you're kind of left in the dark.

As for solutions, I don't think they'll come from designers. You can't ask the soldiers to just stop warring. It's a systemic problem and requires a systemic solution.

I don't see people understanding this or rallying together to combat it anytime soon, so I think it will end like most wars do. One side wins and writes the history books to make it all seem obvious in retrospect.

Citing specific details would be begging for an immediate derailment directly into the sort details that are directly opposed to the larger point:

>'We don’t need more superficial solutions to superficial problems. We need real answers to real problems — big ones and small ones.

Further, and here is where it is exactly survivor bias. You have to show that there weren't other people trying to be designers. That the ones you are focusing on are the ones that were successfully doing it, is what makes it survivor bias.

"if you can’t find an honest-to-goodness, human-centric, non-rich-white-person problem to solve, even if in your spare time and without financial reward, then perhaps design is not a field you should be working in."

and

"(For the record, I’d consider designing flyers for your local corner store better than what’s touted as ‘design’ in the Valley.)"

I live in a non-white area in a city a long way from the 'valley'. We have local printers who do flyers rather well. I get plenty through my door advertising everything from pizza to halal Chinese food through spiritual enlightenment.

And we have designers who are non-white as well as designers who are white, and clients who are non-white and clients who are white. There seems to be plenty of good basic communication and design going on.

Has OP read Lee McCormack's work (and not the books about bikes)?