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How Silicon Valley helps spread the same sterile aesthetic across the world
The Airbnb marketplace is evolving toward its most effective product; it seems that what consumers want more than an exotic experience is something like a Days Inn but more stylish and less obvious — a generic space hidden behind a seemingly unique facade.
Kyle Chayka • How Silicon Valley helps spread the same sterile aesthetic across the world
Yet AirSpace is now less theory than reality. The interchangeability, ceaseless movement, and symbolic blankness that was once the hallmark of hotels and airports, qualities that led the French anthropologist Marc Augé to define them in 1992 as “non-places,” has leaked into the rest of life.
Kyle Chayka • How Silicon Valley helps spread the same sterile aesthetic across the world
The homogeneity of these spaces means that traveling between them is frictionless, a value that Silicon Valley prizes and cultural influencers like Schwarzmann take advantage of. Changing places can be as painless as reloading a website. You might not even realize you’re not where you started.
Kyle Chayka • How Silicon Valley helps spread the same sterile aesthetic across the world
Yet AirSpace is now less theory than reality. The interchangeability, ceaseless movement, and symbolic blankness that was once the hallmark of hotels and airports, qualities that led the French anthropologist Marc Augé to define them in 1992 as “non-places,” has leaked into the rest of life.
Kyle Chayka • How Silicon Valley helps spread the same sterile aesthetic across the world
man pov me in panama in a cafe that could probably exist 1:1 somewhere in the middle of toronto
Aesthetic homogeneity is a product that users are coming to demand, and tech investors are catching on
Kyle Chayka • How Silicon Valley helps spread the same sterile aesthetic across the world
I met Bruno Haid in a cafe that Igor Schwarzmann could have been describing, an austere garage in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, full of blonde wood, understated leather furniture, and motorcycle gear, which the shop also sells. Haid is the founder of Roam, an international "co-living" startup that promises its users — "Roamers" — the ability to move... See more
Kyle Chayka • How Silicon Valley helps spread the same sterile aesthetic across the world
t’s easy to see how social media shapes our interactions on the internet, through web browsers, feeds, and apps. Yet technology is also shaping the physical world, influencing the places we go and how we behave in areas of our lives that didn’t heretofore seem so digital. Think of the traffic app Waze rerouting cars in Los Angeles and disrupting... See more
Kyle Chayka • How Silicon Valley helps spread the same sterile aesthetic across the world
It’s not that these generic cafes are part of global chains like Starbucks or Costa Coffee, with designs that spring from the same corporate cookie cutter. Rather, they have all independently decided to adopt the same faux-artisanal aesthetic. Digital platforms like Foursquare are producing "a harmonization of tastes" across the world, Schwarzmann... See more