Everything Looks The Same

exploring the endless forces luring towards conformity and sameness

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.

On the Sublime and Beautiful/Part I/Chapter 17 - Wikisource, the free online library

sari

alex

andrea

Yes, websites really are starting to look more similar

Sam Goree theconversation.com

sari

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.

phoebe

The tyranny of consistency

Robert Stribley uxdesign.cc

aandrea

Develop an eye to know when to break away from consistency

More of the Same

Tal tals.substack.com

sari

anxiety surrounding AI art is less about computers becoming humans and more about humans becoming more robotic.

social media is robotic, formulaic. everything looks the same. everything is a copy of a copy of a copy.

what a computer can never reproduce is organic human emotion. it cannot recreate authenticity.

-paraphrased from Mango Street

Alara

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.

Gurwinder • 30 Useful Principles

AAlara

this examples why tiktok, spotify, instagram, and twitter all start to look the same - pivot to video, stories, etc…