Everything Looks The Same

Within the past few years, tech companies’ digital design all started to look the same: marginally, monotonously quirky; safe. From the sans-serif fonts to the muted pastel color palette, the stark white backgrounds to the curvy shape and hue of the buttons, most modern software blurs together into a familiar, squint-and-you’ll-confuse-it... See more

And I hear all sorts of interesting worries and anxieties from people. Lots of people say something like, “Oh, I would like to be more playful and passionate, but that’s not what the world cares about. The world only cares about what is popular, what is controversial, what makes money.” To which I say – so what? You don’t have to care about what... See more

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.

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.

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.