Imitation nation
Bland. Boring. Blah. Everything's the same, except when it's not.
In case you were under a rock, the Grammy Awards were held on Sunday and a lot of things were a bit different. Beyoncé finally won best album, on the fifth try. Taylor Swift got zippo, although her her truly awkward dancing is an annual certainty. And I actually knew a few of the artists, which is surely an aberration.
What wasn’t different was the increasingly desperate attempt of the attendees to go viral or cause a stir or garner whatever sliver of attention they could. We had Will and Jada Pinkett-Smith’s kid—er, Jaden Smith—with a castle on his noggin. Chappell Roan as the bride of Frankenstein. Billie Eilish about to work the teppanyaki grill or maybe valet park your car. When everyone dresses to shock, no one does.
This sea of sameness reached its natural apex with the decision of Aussie Bianca Censori, wife of Kanye West (OK, sure, “Ye”), to go all but nude. It served their purpose (lots of headlines!), but where to now? If everyone turns up naked next year, we’ll just collectively yawn. Seen one (or two or ten), seen ‘em all.
My utter indifference to all of this reminded me of a post I read last week titled “Meh-ification, the plot thickens?” Here’s the central thesis: that while we should be living through “a wild explosion of the new and remarkable,” we’re instead getting “cultural flattening and sameness everywhere.”
“I called it innovation stagnation,” Beth Bentley writes. “What’s happening on our watch is so much more than just a drift to the average. Don’t get me wrong—that’s bad enough, but what I’m talking about is about is worse. The real problem is that despite everything we now have access to—the tools, the tech, the time, the AI, the networks, the sharing platforms—it’s becoming harder, not easier, to put new, original, interesting, provocative, strange, challenging things out into the world than it was even a year ago. Because the algorithm will lean towards burying them.”
This isn’t a new phenomenon. Back in 2016, Kyle Chayka wrote about how Silicon Valley helped “spread the same sterile aesthetic across the world,” and that absolutely tracks if you spend more than a second thinking about it. At some point, every trendy hotel or high-end real-estate listing featured Aesop resurrection aromatique hand wash. Every new build seemed to be a Joanna Gaines farmhouse-style number, replete with bloody shiplap. You could walk into a coffee shop from Rome to Reykjavik and not know the difference.
The problem, as Chayka discussed in his book Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture, was just as his title suggests: through Instagram and other social networks, we all suddenly have access to everything, everywhere. And that causes a convergence over time because as we consume content, the algorithms optimizing engagement serve up more and more of it—at the expense of anything else. Pretty soon, your feed is only classic Porsches or cute corgis or the latest news that squarely fits your worldview. And, yes, that was pretty much my Instagram feed before I deleted it.
In and of itself, this is probably depressing more than distressing. Culture has always homogenized over time before the cycle starts over. But the issue now is whether that renewal will happen again. Artificial intelligence is, of course, not intelligent—it can’t think for itself in the truest sense. But what it does with frightening skill and speed is pull together countless information sources on whatever you request in what’s essentially a very sophisticated Google search. It’s amazingly handy, for sure—and I’m a big user of Claude for that very reason. But it’s not creative (yet).
The more I use AI, the more convinced I am of the value of true human distinctiveness. That should command a premium in an AI-driven world: when everything is a lab-grown diamond, a natural one increases in value.1 I’m also more and more convinced of the need to ignore the consensus and do whatever feels right to you as an individual. Who cares if the trend is to wear a hat that looks like Dracula’s castle? Put on a beautiful tuxedo, stay off social media, and think about why bonafide superstars know to retain an air of mystery.
That’s not to say we shouldn’t be concerned about algorithms flattening culture. Exhibit A is the way they silo news (and facts): you can be on X or Instagram today and literally never see content you disagree with. In fact, seeing content you disagree with would mean the algorithm is faulty. We all love to have our preconceptions reinforced, but echo chambers are how people start believing vaccines cause autism or the storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2021 was an “act of love.”
Which gets me to perhaps the biggest and most worrisome meh-ification of them all: Donald Trump. For a long time, it was obvious his approach was grounded in normalizing the very, very abnormal. We all became desensitized to everything he said and did. He spouts absolutely nonsense for an hour? Just Trump being Trump! Joe Biden struggles to find the right words? Dementia!
The problem today is the meh-ification of the assault on American democracy. The firehose of actions in Trump’s first two weeks are serving the dual purpose of neutering the utterly incompetent Democratic Party while acclimating everyone to craziness. Elon Musk has access to every American’s Social Security number and the ability to control government payments? Cool cool. Must be Monday.
It’s in this political environment—where one side is genuinely terrifying but we shrug it off and the opposition is predictably pathetic—that something has to break the fever. In a world of sameness, it will take someone truly radical to cut through. Even then, I’m not sure it can succeed—it may take the complete collapse of America as we know it for the country to break out of its stupor. Maybe that’s the faintest of silver linings? With the start Trump is off to, we’re well on the way.
A note about whatever this is …
After writing a few thousand articles for newspapers and magazines, I spent a long time trying a bunch of other stuff. I guess I figured what came (relatively) easily must by definition be less valuable, so I wandered in the corporate wilderness, becoming increasingly frustrated and doing work that felt increasingly lousy.
Sometimes with age comes wisdom, and I’ve realized finding something (relatively) easy ain’t a bad thing. So, this is a space where I’m resurrecting writing for myself, on topics weird and wild and wonderful.
Posts will appear when the mood takes me, but I do try to be consistently inconsistent—sometimes it’ll be a couple of days between drinks; sometimes a week. But if you subscribe, you’ll get a email letting you know I’m ranting. Again.
“Tell me you just proposed without telling me you just proposed.”