The terms "sameness" and "average" are doing some heavy lifting here. In the grand internet tradition I will memetically unpackage "sameness" and "average" into four related components: (1) things that are BIG (2) things that are HOT (3) things that are COOL and (4) things that are GOOD.

(1) things that are BIG — these are side effects of technological advancement, globalization, the Internet, and frictionless social media platforms. More people than ever before can book a TAP Air flight to Barcelona, stay in a budget AirBnB, and check Google Maps for the same "best cafe near me" that everyone else is going to. Access to the world and to information is more open than ever before, so more people have both the ability to congregate around the top N things (physically or virtually) and the means to do so.

(2) things that are HOT — trends have always been around and always will be. Instagram face, the Kardashian look, hoverboards, heroin chic, microservices, Livestrong bracelets, putting "F*ck" in the name of your self-help book, flat icons, frozen yogurt, Dutch tulip mania — you can localize each one of these into a time period easily enough. Popular because they are new and a momentary cultural touchstone and different enough from the n-1th state of culture.

(3) things that are COOL — what you might call "signaling theory effects". "Ads Don't Work That Way" [1] explains this in the advertising context better than I can, so go read that. Differs from (2) in that the cultural salience is more about vibes and not time. Dad jokes, liking vim (or emacs, or nano), being an EDCer, being a Golf Guy, being a Horse Girl, commenting "nice" when the number 69 comes up — none of these have ever been truly HOT in the same way the examples in (2) were, but you know the type immediately. People who vocally do these things don't just like them for what they are, but for what they think other people will think of them for being into those things.

(4) things that are GOOD — these are things optimized for natural or manmade systems. All cars look the same because they're optimized for aerodynamics (physics, natural) which helps with fuel efficiency (CAFE standards, manmade). Five-over-ones optimize for material costs and regulatory compliance, federal highway signage design language optimizes for readability and consistency, the ADA Standards for Accessible Design optimizes for accessibility to people with disabilities, and so on. Some things are just better (in the systems we live in) and that's how GOOD things end up everywhere.

There's a lot of overlap and causation here. Things that are GOOD can find their way to a BIG channel whereupon they get HOT and build their own COOL followers. But every example of "sameness" in The Age of Average can be meaningfully decomposed into some mixture of BIG, HOT, COOL, and GOOD. Things that are the "same" are that way for different reasons — by the inexorable nature of societal interconnectedness, by human nature, by the laws of this reality, or by the laws that we've created.

So I disagree with the conclusion:

> So, there you have it. The interiors of our homes, coffee shops and restaurants all look the same. The buildings where we live and work all look the same. The cars we drive, their colours and their logos all look the same. The way we look and the way we dress all looks the same. Our movies, books and video games all look the same. And the brands we buy, their adverts, identities and taglines all look the same.

> But it doesn’t end there. In the age of average, homogeneity can be found in an almost indefinite number of domains.

> The Instagram pictures we post, the tweets we read, the TV we watch, the app icons we click, the skylines we see, the websites we visit and the illustrations which adorn them all look the same. The list goes on, and on, and on.

The age of average is indeed the age of opportunity but this is not some untapped, hidden truth that requires some call to arms. There's already a long, long tail of non-conformist, non-average art, media, culture, and so on. You can listen to Tuvan-Mongol throat singing [2] or Estonian Hip Hop or pop songs translated to Latin or a thousand other genres you've never heard of [3]. You can read fictional universes from online collaborative writing projects [4] or micropoetry or experimental self-published genre fiction or hundreds of years of books from dozens of different cultures. You can buy old vans from the 80s and find a whole community dedicated to drifting them around racetracks [5]. (You can replace "old vans from the 80s" with any other car and that sentence would probably still be true.) You can spend thousands of hours in games made by indie studios in every genre imaginable [6] with aesthetics that will make your eyes bleed [7]. You can find small storefronts and brands that lean maximalist and brutalist and weird and grotesque [8].

Yes, there is no shortage of conformity and sameness and average, especially if you go looking where everyone else is. Yes, there are things that are BIG and HOT and COOL and GOOD that aggressively propagate themselves through culture.

But there will always be artisans, bespoke crafts, reactionary uncoolness, a counterculture, an underground scene. Keep things obscure (the dark forest theory of the Internet) to prevent them from being subsumed into the BIG. Resist trends to avoid the allure of the HOT. Keep an open mind and be curious about other subcultures to not be entrenched in the COOL. And if the GOOD optimizes in the wrong direction, help build systems that guide it the other way.

To paraphrase a certain meme — there are far more than just cathedrals everywhere for those with the eyes to see.

[1] https://meltingasphalt.com/ads-dont-work-that-way/

[2] https://www.alashensemble.com/

[3] https://everynoise.com/

[4] https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/

[5] https://www.roadandtrack.com/car-culture/a23110414/japanese-...

[6] https://www.ign.com/playlist/rchnemesis/lists/top-100-indie-...

[7] https://store.steampowered.com/app/1388770/Cruelty_Squad/

[8] https://www.voguebusiness.com/story/fashion/what-is-sexy-gro...