The World is Flat

I was recently visiting Harvard Square, where I was looking forward to showing my daughter around. But it quickly became clear that she would be the one giving me the tour (even though she had never been there before). Between social media and the ubiquity of chains, she knew all the places where we should look, eat, and drink, and thanks to her superior GPS skills, I ended up following her from place to place. My daughter had never been to this specific neighborhood. But she had definitely been there and done that. While standing on some street in some city, the Dutch Australian data scientist Lauren Leek explained the feeling: “What we see in front of us used to be culturally diverse. Now it is culturally generic. Most of what we see is the big chains we see everywhere. It creates a sense of placelessness. We could be anywhere.” NYT (Gift Article): Why Does Culture Feel So Monotonous? A Walking Tour Reveals the Math. “Leek recently posted a Substack article, with the headline ‘Temperature Zero for Culture: Why Everything Is Starting to Look the Same,’ that analyzed the ‘flattening’ effect that predictive algorithms have had on music, movies, hospitality and almost every aspect of today’s consumer culture … Taking 640 shopping streets in London as a test case, Leek used advanced data-analysis tools to examine how predictive algorithms have helped create what she calls a homogeneous ‘monoculture’ in which, she writes in her Substack post, ‘we lose the ability to tell the difference between what people wanted and what the system made easy to want.'” (I’m thinking of taking my daughter back to the street where I grew up. I could use a tour guide.)