31/03/23 20:09:39 @daily
I read this https://www.alexmurrell.co.uk/articles/the-age-of-average
The notion of homogeneity in our consumer culture. I’m a sucker for the optimisation and converging on utility argument here. For instance, cars and movie posters have similarity in keeping what people gravitate towards. You slowly converge to this kind of hodge podge of your market. In the car case, this market is global so all cars, globally look the same.
Because I’ve been reading Axelrod I can’t help but put an evolutionary tint on this. That an idea or product is ‘conditioned’ by the market. For movies, do you take the risk on the new project or go with the sure bet. If you look at it in a cost sense. The cost of taking the risk just isn’t high enough or requires some explicit altruism in a sense.
Disruptive things here are those strategies that are optimal in this pool of strategies like Maynard Smith’s stuff.
There’s also an interesting interaction between consumer and producer here though. If you take the case of movies. People are becoming somewhat homogeneous. This wouldn’t be the case if we all wanted different things, so in some sense we’re just converging on some collective unconscious thing right? Although this is something that might be controlled at the same time, not sure.
The invention of tradition.