I see the same sort of thing happening in housing, and I think it's because the nature of the thing has changed.
Houses used to be for families; they were often quirky or strange or emergent, with weird layouts or materials. They may have garish wallpapers or floor to ceiling wood panelling. But these touches were reflective of the personalities of the owners. They met the needs of the specific people who inhabited them.
Nowadays, as houses are more of a commodity, they must be generic. All flat white interiors, straight corners, no cornicing or archetraves or plasterwork or anything to give the home a unique character. Instead it must be a blank canvas such that any inhabitant can put his own things inside it to make it his.
Computers are the same; what was once a niche product for enthusiasts and businesses has now become an instrumental part of nearly every moment of nearly everyone's lives. Thus they also must be generic and same-y, with limited avenues for superficial customisation, so that they can be interchanged or upgraded without jarring the user against the new version or device.
Personally I prefer radical customisation and quirkiness. I find it charming. But it seems that those who are designing (or perhaps only selling) the things disagree with me.
Not that I have much of a bone in this fight - I already own a home and don’t plan to ever move (which makes this especially easy for me to say) but generic, identical housing is probably going to be essential moving forward. One of the reasons we haven’t found a way to make home construction faster is because every single project is about as unique as can be.
Not to mention, there are still billions of people needing housing, and with the climate situation we’re already in, building billions of unique homes will make the problem a LOT worse.
Again, I don’t really care much about the issue, but I just think it’s worthwhile to remind people that the American way of life (which developing nations aspire to) is absolutely untenable as far as all modern as currently-feasible technology is concerned. Maybe we could live with not being expressive just on the outside of our houses specifically?
The solution here is to build more higher-density housing options. Tokyo has very affordable real estate because dwellings are appropriately-sized for dense urban lifestyles and are nearly uniformly mixed-use buildings with retail space on ground floors and residence/office above. Combine this with lax zoning and you have a recipe for affordable housing.
Comparing this to my own city of Melbourne, Australia: high-density dwellings are generally constrained to innercity suburbs and are still seen as undesirable compared to free-standing homes or semi-detached houses. Councils restrict the development of new high-density or mixed-use buildings for what amounts to NIMBYism. Inadequate public transport in the growth areas of the Northern and Western suburbs increases dependence on roads and freeways.
There are options to support affordable living in cities that don't involve covering our farmland and wildlife reserves with uniform white plaster cubes.
I agree wholeheartedly with some of your premises. Melbourne zoning, public transport, uniform white plaster cubes. All need unconditional improvement and some of it is simple rule changing to allow better solutions.
I contend other aspects of your ideas are not bad but need some work.
> The solution here is to build more higher-density housing options.
and
> undesirable compared to free-standing homes or semi-detached houses.
Any good idea for housing won't please everyone. In this case, when you see anything about the rich and famous are they likely to live in "high density" the way developers think of it?
space is desirable. Space you control (rent vs own.. another can of worms.) even more so! High density housing may help - any bloody action at all would be nice - but it isn't what people desire.
As for "covering our farmland and wildlife reserves"... Australia is a huge country and comparatively tiny population as yet. There is a looooong way to go before a significant area of the country is covered. However I would argue that we don't try to have a continuously expanding population - which would also help with housing costs.
I have mixed feeling on "NIMBYism" too. On the one hand we need solutions for people. On the other hand, the general idea of "people chasing happiness" means they should be free to oppose actions too. You can characterise it as a class battle of the rich opposing solutions to homelessness but usually each such situation is not clear cut, usually being muddied by developer profiteering too.
To throw another idea in there.. why is it that all the infrastructure monies are being spent in our capital cities? We have a crap ton of towns in the countryside - many of which are dying or barely holding steady. Why can't they grow at similar % as Melbourne? Where are the jobs there? After COVID they got a shot in the arm but it wasn't sustained.
> In this case, when you see anything about the rich and famous are they likely to live in "high density" the way developers think of it?
There are an awful lot of exceptionally wealthy people living in buildings in Manhattan with hundreds of apartments. Their apartments themselves are larger than average, but given how much they cost per square foot there’s clearly a lot of demand to live in that environment.
I imagine so! I wasn't trying to say apartment living is ultimately undesirable. But when there is the money to do it, that apartment has more space.
Basically, money = space. In the city, you need more money. In the suburbs you need less. There also other concerns like commute and facilities but that varies person to person.
For many people, the tradeoff to live in the suburb is the right decision because the other factors don't matter so much and so to get more space for their $ they choose suburb.
Does that mean high density housing is bad? Absolutely not! If there are people that want to live in X space for Y money then go for it. But that applies to suburbs too. Once you involve money there are developers/builders and rent/own issues however my general take is that higher density building are impeded by rules and regulations more than a lack of demand. I have nothing to really back that up though.
> Tokyo has very affordable real estate because dwellings are appropriately-sized for dense urban lifestyles and are nearly uniformly mixed-use buildings with retail space on ground floors and residence/office above
I thought being early to the low-birth-rate party, culturally valuing new construction more than "old bones" or whatever (preventing sitting on real estate), and a low-growth economy over the last ~100 years were much more relevant contributing factors than the type of construction they've prioritized
Some of the similarities are because of the need to produce at cheapest options.
But much, much more are because people have too much an eye on resale value, and if your house is different from all the rest, you reduce your buyer pool.
It costs nearly nothing to make kitchen cabinet heights comfortable for the main user; almost nobody does this even on full custom builds.
Yeah we need those identical brutalist and easy to build concrete housing estates like on A Clockwork Orange. Or a cookie cutter surrealist hellscape like in Edward Scissor hands. Sounds lovely.
Those aren't two extremes. They're alternate versions of design on the same end of the spectrum. Anything in between is likely to be just as off putting, featureless and lacking in character.
> so that they can be interchanged or upgraded without jarring the user against the new version or device
I suppose this is a big point. I used to spend hours... days really... setting up a new PC. Partly because it would take ages just to get everything off the various floppy disks and CD-ROMs and installed onto the HDD, but also because everything was quirky.
Nowadays I hew to the default install of Ubuntu (or Windows + WSL2) and replacing my device (or SSD) or upgrading the OS is basically a seemless experience. I have some .bashrc/git config/etc stuff I can grab quickly and then I'm basically good to go.
Perhaps just coincidence but I found it interesting to realise that buildings and animals followed a similar structural development trend: both started off with externally structural components (exoskeletons and structural walls) that evolved to become internal structural components (endoskeletons and load-bearing columns with concrete flooring).
The Grayjay Android app (which I use regularly) has a "Recommended" tab under each video that provides anonymous recommendations based only on the video you're watching. I recall them asking me to opt-in to the creation of a database like this as well recently, but I don't think it's available yet.
I was thinking about how to solve this given that one of the primary problems is that of fast, global content distribution. I like the idea of paying people in crypto as part of a ledger transaction to host and serve content, like bittorrent with a crypto payment. Unfortunately I can't also think of a way to prevent such a system from being abused to distribute harmful media such as CP. I guess it's not like this isn't a problem with BitTorrent today though.
Regulation might here - something like minimum mandatory 3 months notice for shutting down the API keys. Considering the average age of our politicians, I doubt they’ll understand what “API” is, much less be willing to take on giant tech corporations even if they did understand the problems
Yeah, what’s popular is actually to crap all over the first amendment by mandating private companies to allow whatever each politician’s special definition of “free speech” is (but of course probably also not allowing whatever the politician’s definition of “dangerous misinformation” is).
As for the actual anticompetitive power of big tech, absolute crickets.
It seems that the US Government introduces a new bill of this form every few years; SOPA & PIPA, COPPA, CISPA, etc. Will governments (particularly the US government) simply keep attempting this until they get one through?
I love the idea of such smaller communities and the "old web" style of interaction, but for me the issue is one of discoverability. How do I find and follow people? Does anyone still use RSS, or are we relying on Mastodon/ActivityPub? Bavk in the day this was the purpose of search engines, but it seems that now such small pages are scarcely even indexed...
Discoverability and smallness are at odds. This problem isn’t specific to the internet. That quaint, beautiful postcard town does not remain so once it’s been discovered. Eternal September happens everywhere.
Is it really true on the internet though? omg.lol could presumably stay "small-appearing" and "quaint" and have millions of users. How could you really tell the difference?
If it were all indexed you could drill down and find people who share your interests, that doesn't necessarily ruin the website, yeah?
For published works (say, a blog), discoverability is probably a good thing. For communities, however, with many-to-many communication (forums, etc.), discoverability is an antifeature. Community building requires some degree of common ground, which obscurity naturally filters for.
The other downside of mass-popularity is that above a certain scale, your community becomes a target. Both for individual bad actors (spammers, vandals, etc.) and for the apex predators of the small community world, commercial interests. Look at Maker Fair transitioning from a relatively niche convention of people showing off their cool stuff they made, and some miscellaneous sponsors and vendors looking to appeal to those people, to an over-commercialized affair with a thousand people trying to sell you a 3D printer, because that's the big moneymaker.
Community norms are what makes spaces worth inhabiting, and they just don't scale well.
How did we find forums back in the day? Someone said something somewhere and you looked it up. It was less discoverable but less… volatile, because it was just “your” kind of people there, not millions of random people who found a hashtag
I wonder about that myself as someone who grew up on this.
I used webcrawler at the very beginning and I'm probably looking that things through rose lenses but I found what I wanted back then. I think back then in some ways it was easier to find your community because SRO and the like wasn't a thing back then.
The years where I found my niche forums benefited me much more than my college days.
Might be a tangent - but is more discoverability actually desirable in this case?
Could it possibly preserve that "old web" style of interaction, if it becomes a global phenomenon that everyone uses? Or does this only work as long as it stays a little hidden niche, that most people don't know about, and will never find?
Or in other words - can something feel like "the old web" (which was early adopters and enthusiasts only) - if it's frequented by everyone?
You love the idea of smaller communities - but how can they stay small?
Houses used to be for families; they were often quirky or strange or emergent, with weird layouts or materials. They may have garish wallpapers or floor to ceiling wood panelling. But these touches were reflective of the personalities of the owners. They met the needs of the specific people who inhabited them.
Nowadays, as houses are more of a commodity, they must be generic. All flat white interiors, straight corners, no cornicing or archetraves or plasterwork or anything to give the home a unique character. Instead it must be a blank canvas such that any inhabitant can put his own things inside it to make it his.
Computers are the same; what was once a niche product for enthusiasts and businesses has now become an instrumental part of nearly every moment of nearly everyone's lives. Thus they also must be generic and same-y, with limited avenues for superficial customisation, so that they can be interchanged or upgraded without jarring the user against the new version or device.
Personally I prefer radical customisation and quirkiness. I find it charming. But it seems that those who are designing (or perhaps only selling) the things disagree with me.