Have we reached the narrowest part of the convergent period? I randomly had this thought whilst visiting a city within Europe. Apart from the tasty dark beers everything felt stale. Nothing felt new and everywhere I looked I was reminded of how much our world has been optimised to be nice & fit within current trends and the status quo.
I have no idea what I’m talking about half the time, I have 0 evidence of this and I’m mainly riffing off vibes and what I notice in my day job (design & branding). Spending time (I think a lot) online and in front of a screen, I’d like to talk about the convergence of everything. The great flattening of culture as is being said in books and in many corners of the internet. This topic has been discussed over and over the past few years. Social media, copycat culture, bla bla. We’re all doing, wearing, creating for efficiency and sameness. Algos don’t like difference. But humans don’t like sameness. It gets boring.
Back to my ramble, everything is very much the same. In my world I see the same references being used everywhere. The same aesthetics being asked for, proposed — and everything just seems to be wanting to please someone without taste. (I wanted to avoid taste, but it works.) The convergence of everything means we’ve narrowed everything down to a singular aesthetic and we’ve remixed to a point where nothing is actually new and just a remix of remix of remix of remix. Even things I read by people thinking they’re creating unique concepts are just remixing niche stuff, which will eventually get remixed again, again, and again. Hence the convergence.
AI is adding to the convergence too — it’s just taking things and remixing shit in its own bland and boring way. (I’m talking mainly images here as I have less experience using it for writing and other tasks. AI is really good at editing existing images, saves me so much time in Photoshop.) We’re at that point where everything is pretty much done and everything is pretty much the same. I’ve been travelling a lot more than I have in my entire life and every location feels pretty much the same. The convergence in culture is making everything the same (as pointed out clearly in that book which I won’t name).
This leads me basically to think that at the point of maximum convergence we’ll start to diverge again. To diverge into interesting and unique designs, music, art, bla, bla, bla. With recent developments in tech revealing that AI as a replacement for an employee doesn’t work and probably won’t work as well ever. They’re going back to us humans for human work that was human in the first place. And what I’m hoping/predicting/praying for is a divergence — that we’ve gotten so bored of regurgitated AI nonsense we’ll start accepting wild, risky, interesting and differentiated proposals.
Not turning up to a shop and asking for a remix of that remix of that remix (no offence to remix culture, but even you’ve been remixed two or three times and it’s lost the charm). We want divergence, things which feel new and actually add to our experience. Like I don’t know, a drink that isn’t popular that was accidentally discovered by mixing two very random things. Being given space to meander and tinker with shit until something new happens. Remove the “I want something like this thing, but not this thing because I want it to feel like my thing but still be that thing” from the equation and we might be able to act like Claude Shannon (you know who named their thing after him, right?) playing around with things and making breakthrough discoveries. What fake-ass content creators try to sell to you through their 30 second videos on “how to be more creative” — the act of playing and freethinking. The only way for that to work is by not thinking of a remix or cosplaying some style that is trendy.
My ramble is becoming a rant. Let’s go back to the original thought. We’re coming up to the maximum point of convergence and things are about to start diverging. What will that mean for the next few years in creativity and life in general? I think it will mean parts of the world becoming their own unique things again. We’ll remember that actually trying to do something interesting isn’t copying what someone is doing on social media because apparently our good taste told us to do so — but playing around with some obscure, random, mystical thing and finding a new thing that makes total sense in the context of there and then. Some of the designs I’ve done that I appreciate most are the things I’ve done not trying to imitate or impress anything or anyone (something that is incredibly difficult to do consciously). I rarely show these because they are hidden away, embarrassed because they don’t fit within the trendy thing on socials (self-doubt right there). These things will hopefully be held in high regard — not because the end product is great, but because of the intent to do something interesting and boundary pushing.
Ok rant over.
God bless.
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