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The age of average

alexmurrell.co.uk

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Re: The age of average

#381

Post by titzer »

anonymouskimmer wrote: post #376
groby_b wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"You buy what you can afford. " The problem is, there is "almost everybody can afford this", and there is "completely bespoke". We have eliminated the middle ground.

Yeah. People still reupholster old furniture. I think the real problem is that many goods these days are either so cheap it's cheaper to replacement them entirely, or not built to last, so they never get to a rebuild stage.

Indeed, and all the local (and unfortunately global incentives, like GDP) are aligned for production, not wealth preservation and quality of life. The reupholster option is the most efficient wealth preservation option and saves production capacity for making new furniture for other people.

Re: The age of average

#382

Post by LesZedCB »

megmogandog wrote: post #369
JoeJonathan wrote: post #73

Three things: 1. The author's entire brand identity follows this format. ("Hi. I'm Alex Murrell. I'm the Strategy Director at Epoch. And I make the complex clear.") 2. This is not a new observation. Apart from the articles he linked to, this is an old conversation, especially among urbanists. Already in the early twentieth century, Frankfurt School critical theorists were worried about the commodification of cities,…

Sure, these types of critiques have been around since the Frankfurt School, but I think that just shows how ahead of their time the members of the FS were. Adorno gets criticized for painting with too broad a brush, but I feel like he was just making the right points too soon. For example, his remarks on the film industry make perfect sense in the context of contemporary superhero movie trends, even though they might…

if those apartments were $1000/mo for the quality of construction, you pay an extra $1500/mo on top for the surplus enjoyment of living the lifestyle which is intrinsically instagrammable.

Re: The age of average

#383

Post by efsavage »

ryandrake wrote: post #148
bumby wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've tried making this same point when it comes to auto designs (at least in the competitive, cost-sensitive ones). A lot of mid-sized cars look the same because the design constraints generally converge on the same handful of principles. They've converged not in the aesthetic sense as much as the engineering sense: because they work at a relatively low cost. (I'm speaking mainly about things like aerodynamics here,…

Even if they had to ultra-optimize the aerodynamics so all the cars look like the same bar of soap (they don't have to), they could still at least paint the damn soap a different color. But, no. All you see coming out of the factory are white, silver, gray, black, the occasional red and the occasional blue. What's driving this? That's what the article is about. Is it actually pull from customers, or is it push from t…

> What's driving this? That's what the article is about. Is it actually pull from customers, or is it push from the manufacturers?

It's both. Most people don't want a gray car as their first choice, but it's probably more people's second choice than a real color. So red cars sit on the lot for 15.3 days, blue ones for 14.2, and gray for 11.6. Obviously (in MBA terms) the dealer, should order more gray cars. So they sell more gray cars, and the feedback loop means it's now hard to find a blue or red car because, if you ask a dealer, "nobody" buys them. So now the manufacturer just stops making those colors, which makes their life easier, and the cycle is complete.

I begrudgingly have a gray truck and my wife has a silver SUV, because those were basically the only options available, many brands now you can't get a decent color selection if you special order them.

Re: The age of average

#384

Post by trgn »

burlesona wrote: post #255

One thing that a lot of people don’t notice is that this is the result of mass manufacturing replacing craft. People want good products that are cheap, and mass manufacturing creates them. Things made in a factory at scale are always cheaper and can even be better quality than low-scale goods. But once companies have sunk the capital into the factory that can churn this stuff out, they want to keep making the same st…

I agree to an extent.

To use Loos's example, the original mass manufactured table was sturdy and practical. Its simple design meant that it would not to the fickle changes in fashion. This was the positive promise of mass manufacturing.

There's no natural law that scaling up production should imply that things are of lower quality. Yet, that's where we are.

Re: The age of average

#385

Post by trgn »

mlhpdx wrote: post #329

I’m clearly in a different world; I see wild diversity in aesthetics and function around me every day. Conformity and convergence? Yes, it’s there but all around it is the beautiful chaos of creativity and divergence.

Can you provide some specific examples from a typical day?

Re: The age of average

#386

Post by hot_gril »

No comment on the argument. All I did was scroll through the pictures. Was hoping to see the "corporate memphis" example or AAPL, GOOG, MSFT, and probably others all using the same branding colors.

Re: The age of average

#387

Post by citizenpaul »

groby_b wrote: post #370
titzer wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Even if those things have converged aesthetically? But they haven't converged aesthetically any more than preferences have been absolutely overwritten , overridden , and overprinted by whatever is most easy to produce today. Your comment somewhat assumes that where we are is the ultimate endpoint of some long process, when in reality fads come and go. Tastes change. What is out there now is no more inevitable than…

This is a core point. It most stuck out to me when the article talked about car colors - most cars are black or white because car makers mostly make black or white . Buying a car with a splash of color is hard. Red is your best chance. Followed by butt-ugly blues. You cannot meaningfully choose according to your taste because choice is restricted. (Related, try to buy furniture that isn't a fucking cheap imitation of…

Safety is an under appreciated function of car color. I've had a number of same looking cars of different color. I noticed that driving a white version results in substantially less near miss/near accidents while driving.

I will only buy white cars now because of this. I'm tired of dodging inattentive drivers that are sleepdriving through their commute or whatever they are doing besides driving.

Re: The age of average

#388

Post by yt-sdb »

SamBam wrote: post #39
slindsey wrote: post #5

Part of the problem within this article is the choice of pictures. The first section states, “In nearly every country all people really wanted was a landscape with a few figures around, animals in the foreground, mainly blue.” They then present 9 pictures that reinforce the concept that people all around the world expect the _same_ thing. But that's simply not true. They didn't take that description and give it to ar…

I figured people were going to take issue with the opening anecdote about art, but that was simply the author trying to frame the story in an interesting way. The rest of the article was more compelling. The ubiquity of the 5-over-1 architecture in the US is very striking. The NY Times had an article recently called "America the Bland" [1] which challenged people to tell if apartments were in Nashville, Seattle or De…

> I figured people were going to take issue with the opening anecdote about art, but that was simply the author trying to frame the story in an interesting way. The rest of the article was more compelling.

I don't disagree, but this is simply bad rhetoric. Don't start with an incorrect/misleading/confusing example, and then expect readers to stick with you for the more compelling stuff.

Re: The age of average

#389

Post by livelielife »

psychoslave wrote: post #83

What can I say, criticism of mediocracy all look the same: https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/51961637 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/104973152110363... https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/jems.12469 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1049731520974764 https://revistaseletronicas.pucrs.br/ojs/index.php/revistafa... http://manuscript.elsevier.com/S004727271500119X/pdf/S004727... http…

this is very funny, that all criticism of convergent blandness when written down converges blandly

Re: The age of average

#390

Post by go_discover »

If you spend some time traveling the world you will see not everything is the same. From Tel Aviv to Mumbai to New Zealand. They're all different with different people, cultures, coffee shops, foods, languages, history, etc, etc.

I am actually developing a web app that highlights these differences. Each week a different country is highlighted and users can post content about that country.

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