Who knew that the primary incentive being economic would lead to a convergence of human behaviours?
Every profit-motive champion raved about the variety produced by means of competition. Instead, the fear of failure from truly distinguishing oneself has driven competitive differences to the edge where it remains superficial and unimportant. Alpine white or cream white paint? Straight tube or spherical Edison bulbs? Nietzche or Camus on the toilet bookshelf?
In fairness, we can say that this incentive has normalized a lower bound of acceptable design in terms of function. Yes, it's bland, but it works.
But now what? The incentive needs to be transcended. The only way to do that actually is to be rich and/or crazy enough to deny the potential of economic failure. But who can afford to do that?
This hasn't changed. The Sistine chapel wasn't painted according to the whims of the peasantry.
I find it intentional on the authors part that they didn't include "capital" in any of their observations. All houses in the suburbs look the same because its... cheaper to do it that way. There's less risk involved. People don't do anything interesting to their property because of "property value". Why would I want to make my space /interesting/ when this is obviously just an investment I'm going to sell and then live in my /real/ home. (Which I won't make interesting because => go back to square 1)
Its expensive to do interesting things. The majority of businesses are not 1B profitable - they need a place to do business all the same. So an efficient box it is!
The Art example at the beginning is funny to me. People, largely, don't have a lot of ideas about what they 'want' out of any given topic they don't have a ton of interest in. I'd be willing to bet the people they asked haven't given a lot of thought into the art they preferred until they were asked. You have to actively look around to discover new things, you can't expect newness to be fed to you. Emphasis on the Discovery part.
Its all a bit, "Drawing conclusions about the world from zoomed out observations instead of actually looking into the forces that shape our world".
Every profit-motive champion raved about the variety produced by means of competition. Instead, the fear of failure from truly distinguishing oneself has driven competitive differences to the edge where it remains superficial and unimportant. Alpine white or cream white paint? Straight tube or spherical Edison bulbs? Nietzche or Camus on the toilet bookshelf?
In fairness, we can say that this incentive has normalized a lower bound of acceptable design in terms of function. Yes, it's bland, but it works.
But now what? The incentive needs to be transcended. The only way to do that actually is to be rich and/or crazy enough to deny the potential of economic failure. But who can afford to do that?
This hasn't changed. The Sistine chapel wasn't painted according to the whims of the peasantry.