Social in 10

In June 2025, I joined the Giraffe Social team for an episode of their ‘Social in 10’ podcast.

The conversation was inspired by my article, The Age Of Average. I’ll share the full transcript of my conversation below.

You can listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Thanks to the team at Giraffe Social for having me. I hope you all enjoy the show!

Transcript

In Alex's article, he highlighted the homogenisation in fields like film, fashion, architecture and advertising. So Alex, could you please elaborate on how this uniformity manifests in these industries?

In every field I look at, I find that everything looks the same. My article, The Age of Average, explores six of these fields. But today, let's focus on three.

Take interiors. Author Kyle Chayka has identified a style that can be found in coffee shops from Seoul to San Francisco. He calls this style airspace and it's characterised by raw wood, bare brick, open shelving, Edison bulbs and metro tiles. You can be anywhere in the world and feel like you haven't left home.

In film, an analysis found that in the year 2000, about 25% of top-grossing movies were prequels, sequels, reboots or remakes. And today, that number is closer to 95%. And exactly the same thing is happening in TV shows, books and video games.

And finally, brands are all looking the same. We've seen car, tech and fashion brands all adopting a blanding approach to their identities, featuring flat sans serif, all caps, monochromatic word marks. Everywhere we look, everything looks the same.”

And what do you believe are the broader cultural implications of this trend towards uniformity in creative expressions?

I believe that a culture that is homogenous, repetitive and referential is a culture that is flat, static and lacking in life. On the contrary, a culture that is in a constant state of creative invention and re-creation is one that is dynamic, progressive, vital and full of momentum. I worry that the trend towards the age of average in the way our world looks mirrors a parallel trend in the flattening of the way we think.

I see fewer subcultures that rise up to challenge the status quo. I see fewer movements in music or art that offer truly new ways of expressing our ideas. And I see fewer thinkers who provide fresh and challenging perspectives.

The internet era, it seems, has reduced the amount of major cultural breakthroughs. Instead, our visual culture iterates and riffs and references on the same few algorithmically approved styles. Our visual culture is flatlining, and I believe the only cure is creativity.

It's time to cast aside conformity. For years, the world has been moving in the same stylistic direction, and it's time we reintroduced some originality.