Everything Looks The Same

Rival products (burgers, pop songs, political parties) tend to grow more alike over time, because creators copy more successful rivals to replicate their success and steal their customers/audiences.

Paradoxically, this increases the value of being different.

Gotta say, it feels like we missed an opportunity to reinvent social. Can you tell them apart?

One philosophical objection I have to Silicon Valley is that people are very derivative. They tend to rely too much on what other people do. When everyone relies on what everyone else does, you end up getting a deeply mimetic-culture where no one thinks for themselves.

ALTHOUGH imitation is one of the great instruments used by Providence in bringing our nature towards its perfection, yet if men gave themselves up to imitation entirely, and each followed the other, and so on in an eternal circle, it is easy to see that there never could be any improvement amongst them.