Is everyone boring now?
Blandness, homogenization, and a culture of slop
There’s this feeling that’s gotten harder and harder to escape. It’s insidious, tough to pin down, and increasingly omnipresent. It’s a blandness, a lack of depth or individuality, a creeping sense that everything is superficial. People have written about the decay of the movie industry, about how social media went from interesting conversations and unique pieces of information to a pervasive, unflavored mush, and most recently I’ve felt more than ever that millions of people are affected by this growing blandness in ways they don’t understand, or even notice. We’re absorbing grey gruel, and becoming what we eat.
First it was TikTok. I’ve written before about the odd pattern on that app, where across similar videos the top comments are virtually identical. Ten different videos with millions of views and on each one the comment that gets the most likes is often exactly the same. It weirds me out, not the fact that multiple people say the same thing, but that thousands and thousands of people see the same comment repeatedly and like it every time. Where I see boring repetition it appears that some people find comfort in seeing the same phrases again and again.
And that’s partially how TikTok works. The repetition, a core feature of the app in multiple ways, feels to millions like it hits a pleasant groove in their brains. But what is that groove? To me it feels akin to the comfort-seeking that causes people to adore their favorite chain. Why do people visit another town and go to Dunkin instead of a local coffee spot, or Chipotle instead of a small Mexican restaurant? We like comfort and security, and that’s very much a normal human desire. However, that desire has been exacerbated, exploited to such a degree that endless repetition feels like to some like safety. Curiosity and the desire to explore, also typical human traits, have become subsumed by the pursuit of consistency in an inconsistent world.
This repetition breeds homogenization. We see it in our cities, where one town looks more and more like the next. We certainly see it in the suburbs, that part needs no explanation. But our response to this homogenization does need exploration. When I see suburban Philadelphia looking almost indistinguishable from the suburbs of Missoula, Montana I worry for us. What are we doing here, allowing corporations to erase local geographies and cultures? What are we doing when we allow culture to mirror this same homogenization, and even allow ourselves to become yet another site of this growing monotony?
I don’t do large-scale research on this topic, but I am on one or two dating apps in New York City. And the data I’ve gotten from hundreds or thousands of people and their profiles is chilling. In the brief responses to the prompts these apps give you there is yet more alarming homogeneity. Between my last serious go-round on these platforms before Covid and now there’s been a noticeable increase in people using the exact same little phrases, much like the TikTok comment section. Some readers will be familiar with seeing one person after another mention “a sweet treat” or “committing to the bit” or another formulaic copy-and-paste phrase in lieu of really conveying who they are, or perhaps in lieu of doing the self-examination to find out.
The other side of the “finding safety through blending in and blandness” coin is the fear of standing out, the fear of the new, of being the exception. Being a nerd or a dork used to mean standing out, being different. Now people fling these words about to mean liking Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings or Star Trek. Terms that used to signify outliers now often signify liking some of the most popular franchises of all time. In other words, even what once spelled difference can now spell more conformity.
I don’t want to overstate my case. I live in New York and of course I see people being unique, distinctive, standing out from the crowd. I see real weirdos and unusual people and plenty of folks who I think are actually cool, not just trying to signal coolness by doing what everyone else is doing while dressed a little better. I know real nerds, real dorks. But at the same time there’s an increasing fear of being an individual, of being different in a meaningful way, and it's all paired with an insidious and pervasive monotony.
This issue didn’t pop up overnight, of course. It’s vast and complex and we can’t hope to cover all of it here. One thread we can pull out, though, is the consolidation of the internet. Twenty years ago people spent time on countless different websites, and each little pocket of the world wide web thrived. This led to a proliferation of subcultures, niche interests, interesting discussions and more. Now, after acquisitions and years of unfettered capitalism, a handful of websites and apps dominate the internet. Google, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok account for a massive percentage of total time spent online.
The narrowing down of the public square, effectively, has meant the narrowing down of culture. Instead of existing in smaller communities, people exist online primarily on these massive platforms, and although niche interests can be found, content creators are incentivized to move toward the center of the herd. This means we get more and more lowest common denominator content as everyone tries to appeal to everyone. It’s not hard to see how this contributes to the mushing of online content into the gruel that increasingly dominates the web, or how we grow to mirror that gruel.
The consolidation of the internet has strong parallels out in the world. Increasing corporate monopolization has homogenized so much of our world. As chains expand each city starts looking more like the next. The conglomerates’ thirst for profit and ability to undercut local businesses means they supplant mom-and-pop shops everywhere they go. I’ll never forget arriving on Vieques, an island off the coast of Puerto Rico that no longer even has a hospital, and immediately being greeted by a Subway “restaurant” whose sandwiches perfectly encapsulate the bland homogenization of our world.
Both online and offline this grey uniformity of place and culture has been steadily thrust upon us by capitalist consolidation. It’s not total, far from it, but it’s powerful and pulls us all toward the lowest common denominator. It’s hard to resist. We all want to fit in, and we increasingly measure that, typically without knowing it, against the whole population rather than our friend groups or communities. This leaves so many people with less and less of a clear foundation for who they are or what really matters, instead self-identifying with a vague set of signifiers in an attempt to signal a generic coolness and normalcy.
There is no one answer to all this, but an entry point we’re seeing is the growing understanding that politics, particularly a radical politics, is necessary in this moment. Capitalism and the neoliberal era are premised largely on stripping the masses of our politics, beating back the unions and the fighters and the left in order to ensure a regime of corporate profits. The deradicalization of society was not natural, it was enforced by the decimation of institutions and movements. That destruction is yet another factor that has made us increasingly bland and uniform, devoid of the political edge necessary to understand, discuss, and change the world we live in.
And yet day by day people are shifting. Just as many are drawn in by the slop that’s become the cultural center of gravity, others are deliberately pulling themselves out. Our circumstances are pushing more and more people to develop a political consciousness opposed to the dull and numbing content on our phones, and even more so to the conditions that create it. It’s tempting to hide in a bland normalcy, hoping our flaws don’t show in the soup of nothingness, never realizing that we’ve given up on having any substance or distinguishing characteristics, but we can’t afford it anymore. We can no longer afford to sink away from the world — the conditions we now live under are forcing us to take action, and changing society requires people who exercise their agency, have controversial opinions, and know both how to act as individuals and how to be part of a collective. What transforming society does not require is unthinking jellyfish drifting with the current.
We need to build spaces where we can support real alternative culture, foster local community, and explore our real selves. We need to build the capacity to stand out, to be brave, to be a radical in a world riddled with conformity. In this struggle we each must be a person with flaws and bumps, not just another smooth lump of oatmeal. Stand out, break away from composing yourself of little cliches and phrases that feel safe. Say the actual weird shit on your mind, make a mistake, get hurt, feel awkward. We need you, we need the fullest version of you if we want a shot at building a future that’s actually worth something. - JP
In humble opinion it is rooted in the way people think, which is to say, most people don't really think.
They "re-act", or make easy assumptions, and jump to conclusions, rather than think something through.
We're a culture of "assumptions," not critical thinking.
No one actually thinks about the fact, that binary logic can only handle so much before it breaks down under the strain of cognitive dissonance.
Record levels of homelessness, yet at the same time, no one ever thinks about the fact, capitalism has never, and will never, solve unemployment, poverty and homelessness, as long as we do not have a right to a job or economic rights at all.
The private sector and government sector [from local, up through national level] can't not create enough demand to ever reach anything near full employment.
It's much "easier" to think, "it's the individual’s fault." But they have no right to a job, and employers control the entire labor market. You can apply anywhere, but it is the employers choice, who gets a job or not.
The "laws of economics" is all based on flawed assumptions, but no one ever mentions this fact. They talk about GDP like it's a description of the state of our society, but it is not.
People just accept it as truth because they don't think it through, simply because they don't know how.
THANK YOU! UGH! I travel all the time for work and everywhere I go there's that same little suburban mall area pretending to be a neighborhood that has an Apple store in an Ann Taylor Loft store, and I often end up there because it's the only walkable place in the entire metropolis. I am forever desperately seeking small walkable neighborhoods with local mom and pop stores and actually unique and interesting restaurants and perhaps even a place that you can sit without having to pay a lot of money. UGH UGH UGH.
And all of this because the financial models for "difference" have been destroyed.