[SteveDR]

Agreed. Reading this I thought "all of these things are superficial, who cares?"

Who cares if movie posters and book titles are converging towards something that markets well? The parts that matter (the content, themes, style, etc) are probably very different among all those books/movies.

IMO Fashion like this exists just so that salesmen can convince consumers that they can buy The Current Thing and earn respect from their peers. Chasing the latest furniture, latest clothes, latest cars, etc.. It's all a shallow, costly signal of wealth that excludes the not-wealthy and distracts the wealthy from more fulfilling/productive pursuits.

If this trend means that fashion is dying, good riddance.

[masswerk]

Fashion used to have an important social and cultural function as it provided signals and markers for group alignment in society. As these kept changing periodically, this also gave a chance for realignment and reconsideration. (Compare this to the increasingly-caught-in-the-bubble phenomenon that we experience nowadays.)

E.g., just compare major fashion trends in the 1970s (from mini to maxi, to bell-bottoms, to pants and tube socks & disco attire, to clogs and para jackets, to college look vs. punk) to the major fashion trends of the last decade (slim fit). This variation from season to season, while, of course, invented as a vehicle for marketing, actually provided a vehicle for repositioning in a varying landscape of tribal subcultures that was typical, then.

[caddemon]

It reminds me of things that are not superficial though, for example the homogenization of universities. Top schools all now mostly fall in line with "peer institutions", whereas you used to find schools that catered at least somewhat to different educational philosophies and personalities - which I think made for a richer academic discourse.

Places like Stanford and MIT slowly become more Harvard every year IMO, and it sucks for student life too. Driving forces may not be exactly the same, but I think there are cultural undertones pervasive across these changes and some of the more superficial ones. It reminded me of this article: https://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/2022/12/stanford-hates-fu...

Anecdotally, I think it affects science too. Grants become increasingly formulaic, and anything deviating even slightly intellectually only has a chance as a token "high risk" project. People are afraid of saying something wrong that also clashes with current scientific norms, so everything seems so damn homogenous despite the many questions we still have little answer for.

I think the "optimization" process that got us here is bad in part because it is optimizing for a single institution style that independently will do fine, and is thus a safe play for any decent university. However that is not the same as the set of institutions that would collectively do the best, not even close IMO. Homogenization can be efficient and should happen to some degree within an institution. But between institution diversity is already bad and continuing to die off year over year.

This is alarming to me and I think there is something to the aesthetics that go with it. People's behavior can absolutely be impacted by the broader cultural vibe that pervades. Signaling is important too - when you go to visit MIT and see the dingy af student center it is part of the model you build about what the school cares about. Selecting a specific type of student body is much easier when it goes both ways, because good luck assessing someone's motivations on a modern college app. When surface-level marketing becomes homogenous across the board it is going to have downstream impacts.