You've started noticing it. A café in a city you've never been to, and you've somehow seen everyone in it before. The same haircut, the same trousers, the same quiet, expensive beige. You walk out sure you've met these people. You have. Just not here.
It's easy to file this under getting older, or kids these days, but it isn't that. Taste didn't get worse. It converged.
It's not in your head
Style used to vary by place. A look needed months, sometimes years, to travel, and a scene in one city looked nothing like another. Now a feed in Toronto and a feed in Berlin serve the same twelve things in the same week.
Style used to travel. Now it teleports, and it arrives everywhere at once.
Where it comes from
Trends used to move slowly, and from the edges. Something started in a subculture, got borrowed, and turned up on a runway a year later. The lag was the point: it gave a look time to mean something before everyone had it.
That machinery is gone. A look that once took years to spread now takes weeks, because it no longer travels person to person. It travels through one recommendation engine.
A recommendation engine doesn't have taste. It has an average, and it's very good at finding it.
The loop
Here's the part that closes on itself.
You're shown the thing. You buy the thing. You post yourself in the thing.
That post teaches the engine the thing works, so it shows it to more people, who buy it and post it too.
Every turn narrows the funnel, and the styles that survive aren't the best ones. They're the ones that test well on the most people, which, by definition, are the most average ones.
Death by a million small choices
This is the uncomfortable part. There's no villain at the top dictating the beige. The sameness is the sum of everyone individually getting exactly what they asked for.
Your feed feels made for you, and it is. But it's built from what people like you already clicked on, so the harder it works to match your taste, the closer it lands to what it's showing everyone else.
A feed built just for you, handed to millions of people, points them all at the same rack.
You don't fix this by leaving the feed. The pieces that don't quite match it, the ones you'd still wear if the algorithm had never heard of them, are already in your closet.
Nobody's going to hand you your own taste. You usually find it in the stuff you already have.
- Oro