Tech’s homogeneity is a scale problem
Easier to be creative when there are five of something vs five million of something.
Here’s an experiment. Take 5 unique shapes. They look cool right? Each one stands out on its own has unique characteristics, texture, and color.
We should have more of them. So let's multiply them. Maybe we can add new colours too.
At an even bigger size, the textures are not even clearly noticeable, so let’s remove them.
Let’s make it a little bigger. Actually the colors are making it look incongruous, so let’s have the same color.
Let’s make it even bigger. It’s not very efficient use of space. We can pack way more if everything is a circle.
Great! Now we can scale this to a million units! A million circles of same size, spaced in a nice grid it is.
This is exactly what every aspect of technology looks like right now. You want a phone, it’s a rectangular slab of aluminum. Colors? Barely distinguishable variants of gray, and black. You unlock the phone, every icon is just text slapped on to a white background or an abstract shape that is wearing the brand identity uniform.
You open the phone, every app is a collection of white rounded rectangles and black text.
In fact, we’re in such stages of scaled homogeneity that even language is become a sum of averages thanks to ChatGPT (an LLM is language at scale!)
Scale is the enemy of creativity. Indie apps that have to make an app for one platform, and do it well, have much more fun app icons and interfaces than bigger players. Pre-industrial revolution furniture looked nothing like the sleek boring industrialized furniture of today because billions of units weren't being shipped to people.
When conformity is the norm there’s little room for soul, creativity or fun. Fun is aberrant, uncouth, rebellious. This is what using technology feels like today. It’s scaled to a billion people, but those billions of people are being drowned in notions of conformity, some dictated by mass production, others by product managers and dysfunctional software economies.
No wonder it’s boring and lacks soul. When you’re making something for everyone, you’re really not making anything for anyone.