Our culture has become bland, as evidenced by fashion, building, cars, book covers, and household objects all looking the same. Even people seem to be less weird than they once were. It’s an observation that has been made by me and others, on this blog and in many other places, many times over.
What isn’t explicitly stated is how unexpected this is. We have more wealth and freedom than ever to do and create whatever we want, yet we don’t. In the West, our economic system and governments are largely indifferent to how weird we are. For example, we could try experimental ways of living together. We used to do this, but we don’t any more. There are concepts like Jim Rutt’s Game B, but they remain niche. There doesn’t even seem to be a mass movement to be closer to nature, which remains unaffected by cultural blandness.
The reasons for increasing cultural blandness aren’t clear. Now, Erik Hoel has proposed a possible explanation: Overfitting. His blog post on the topic is worthwhile reading in its entirety. Below are the sections I find most compelling.
The switch from an editorial room with conscious human oversight to algorithmic feeds (which plenty of others pinpoint as a possible cause for cultural stagnation) likely was a major factor in the 21st century becoming overfitted […] People get riled up if you use the word “capitalism” as an explanation for things, and everyone squares off for a political debate. But, while I’m mostly avoiding that debate here, I can’t help but wonder if some of the complaints about “late-stage capitalism” actually break down into something like “this system has gotten oppressively efficient and therefore overfitted, and overfitted systems suck to live in.” […] We’ve been replacing generalizable and robust human conscious learning with some (supposedly) superior artificial system. But it may be superior in its sensitivity, but not in its overall robustness.
Towards the end, Hoel writes this on how it may be possible to make our culture less bland:
If global culture is stagnant, then we need to be erecting our own walled gardens as much as possible (and this is mentioned by plenty of others, including David Marx and Noah Smith). We need to be encircling ourselves, so that we’re like some small barely-connected component of the brain, within which can bubble up some truly creative dream.
Nehaveigur 