Is the algorithm making us LESS stylish, LESS interesting, LESS...ourselves?

"We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us." - Marshall McLuhan, 1964.

TLDR: the algorithmic internet is weirding the way we build our wardrobes…and how we build our identities, taste, interests and opinions.

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If everybody looked the same, we’d get tired of looking at each other.
- Groove Armada, 1999

Would we?

This week I want to talk about algorithmic dressing and the effect it’s having on how we think. Echo chamber outfits, the uniform of the chronically online, and about algorithmically-determined sameness more broadly. Plus, how brand leaders can save us.

Why? Because I spent about 6 hours in central London yesterday, running back and forth between meetings, and spotted twelve - TWELVE - women wearing practically the same outfit: maxi-skirt/socks/bi-colour Sambas/bomber/bun.

These women didn’t know each other. They were in different parts of town. Most were early-mid twenties, one was a teenager, one was with two tweens calling her mum. They looked to have different levels of spending power. They had different body shapes. They were of different ethnicities.

But I bet their feeds look pretty similar. They must be being served the same kinds of content as each other. The similarities were too strong for this to be a coincidence. “You can tell someone’s screen time from their outfit,” as fashion commentator Alexandra Hildreth told Vogue Business last month. You can also take a pretty good guess where they’re spending that time, even who they follow: these were TikTok outfits, probably powered also by Pinterest.

How we dress has always been mimetic (I wrote about that here…Third Degree Yearns: Why Do We Want The Things We Want?). We look at how others dress and react accordingly. That part’s nothing new.

But the specificity - and short-livedness - of these echo chamber outfits is.

And yet, for all the content we’re exposed to, all the places we can shop, all the inspiration we have…this seemingly-tribal form of dressing doesn’t seem to be adding up to a clear big picture.

What I mean is that, while the 2020s has many, many defining trends in fashion (the rise of TikTok as a runway; the out-of-control nature of the trend cycle; fundamentally shifting values around overconsumption (and the ensuing rise of pre-loved, the yearning for quality + longevity, rising status around quiet luxury); the blurring of gender lines in how we shop and dress; the casual-isation of everyday clothing; the streetwearification of luxury; the widening of age range and body types on the runway)…we actually don’t seemingly have truly era-defining fashion trends. Not in the way other eras did.

Close your eyes and think about different decades of the 20th century: the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s. Can you picture in your mind the general look and feel of the era? The clothes (or at least a core silhouette), the hair, the make-up, the cars, the architecture, the food, the music of the era?

Me too, pretty well I think.

Ok now do the same for the past 5-10 years.

…….It’s ok, I’ll wait……..

Are you grasping at millennial pink, athleisure and the sprawling cultural impact of the Kardashians? Me too. The amount of in-the-moment trend spikes and -cores and blips is blinding, but I’m struggling to imagine what our grandkids will point at and say ah yes, this is unmistakably a picture of someone back in the 2020s.

Because everything looks the same, and everything is derivative of something else.

Don’t take it from me. There’s a lot of others talking about our current cultural inability to surface truly, honestly, astonishingly-new stuff.

Sameness

Music is becoming more similar and less musically-diverse.

Annual lists of blockbuster movies, chart-topping video games, and bestselling books (and big awards winner-lists) contain more sequels, spin-offs, reboots and repeating franchises than ever before.

See

Matt Klein

epic 2022 Zine post (that I still can’t stop thinking about) on “decades of glacier-paced cultural change”, in which he links to mind-bending data from

Adam Mastroianni

, a scholar at Columbia Business School + author of the Substack Experimental History:

“Until the year 2000, about 25% of top-grossing movies were prequels, sequels, spin offs, remakes, reboots, or cinematic universe expansions. Since 2010, it’s been over 50% every year. In recent years, it’s been close to 100%….Since 2000, about a third of the top 30 most-viewed shows are either spin-offs of other shows in the top 30 (e.g., CSI and CSI: Miami)….In the 1950s, a little over half of the authors in the Top 10 had been there before. These days, it’s closer to 75%….In the late 1990s, 75% or less of best selling video games were franchise installments. Since 2005, it’s been above 75% every year, and sometimes it’s 100%.”

And see Lindyman Paul Skallas’ thinking on the ‘epidemic of sequels’, plus his wider Stuck Culture theory.

But closer to the ground….read a home decor magazine or interiors piece in a newspaper’s weekend supplement…apart from the edge-cases, everyone’s house looks the same (midcentury-with-plants in the city, pale-toned minimalism in the ‘burbs). That’s exactly the opposite of Kevin McCloud’s theory of the ideal home as “a highly autobiographical reflection” of our own unique life and personality (he’s the longtime presenter of Grand Designs and probably the UK’s most iconic thinker on how we live at home, he spoke about this recently on The Modern House’s podcast).

Everyone’s office looks the same (a blend of WeWork/Soho House lite). Everyone’s coffee shops look the same and everyone’s coffee looks the same. Our high streets and malls all look the same (Main Street = chain street). Check into a hotel aimed at people in their 20s-40s…which city are you in? Which country, then? Ok, which continent?
Everyone’s feet look the same: Sambas. Tabis. New Balance. Salomon. Ballet flats. Birkenstock (and none of them are inventions of our current era).
Everyone’s faces have the same…glow. Glass skin, clean girl, glazed girl, cold girl. Everyone’s phone’s the same (and have since 2007 when the iPhone first shipped).
Everyone’s drinking the same amount of water, because ofc everyone’s water bottle looks the same (the Stanley Cup…the status water bottle as talisman of late-capitalism hyper-consumption).
Everyone’s manifesting variations of the same thing in same-looking bullet journals. And accent-aside, everyone speaks with the same, like, ticks and vocal fryyyy. Every sentence begins with the same 2020s ‘So…’. and goes up at the end like a question?

Is all this driven by our deep inner need for social belonging…that central driver of consumer culture? Yeah.

But it’s not just that hard-wired psychological pull.
It’s also a push from an increasingly-powerful external force: the algorithm.

PSA: Our pub bins in London Fields perform public service in more ways than most

“Under the algorithm, it’s easy to forget there are so many different kinds of people you can be.” -

laura reilly

Magasin 16/01/24

Laura’s right. It’s depressingly easy to forget you are an individual, with your own taste. A unique person. That contains multitudes. It’s worryingly easy - especially when young, especially when feeling in any way lost or unsure, especially when chronically online - to let the algorithm push you. Away from the edges, towards the middle. Away from anything old, towards anything new new new. Away from the challenging or thought-provoking or controversial or unusual or unknown. Toward the palatable, the familiar, the commercially-safe, the uncontroversial, the known.

And the push is strong. It’s not so easy to just ‘get out of your filter bubble’ or spend less time online, yo! It’s you vs a system so powerful it has the power to (query) swing democratic elections (remember what went down in 2016?), never mind sway you to impulse-buy a red cardigan.

“Can you remember who you were, before the world [algorithm] told you who you should be?”
- Charles Bukowski

Algorithms are not neutral. They’re designed by humans with goals (business goals) in mind. They’re literally designed to manipulate human behaviour. Keep people on the platform as long as possible (eyeballs = revenue). They can also be underpinned by bias, assumptions or plain bad data…younger female users prefer XYZ type of content, older males prefer XYZ.

Algorithms encourage us to consume things other people think are interesting.

Algorithms reward creators and brands for making formulaic/derivative stuff with predictable mainstream appeal.

But hang on. Is it really so bad? Algorithmic recommendation helps lots of people in lots of ways. Music discovery is a good example. And being one of the earliest major use-cases, it’s had time to develop. Do I get surprised very often by truly new and unexpected music? No. But I do have my repertoire enlarged and refreshed, much better and more easily than I could do myself. TikTok’s FYP genuinely helps people access perspectives, thoughts and ideas that have had a profoundly positive effect on their lives.

However.

I can’t help thinking that living/getting dressed/deciding what to read/eat/listen to, under the algorithm might be cheating us out of learning who we really, truly are, and what we’re really, truly into. Are we losing the wonder - and the curiosity, and the skill - of discovering interesting things by ourselves?

Maybe it’s just not that deep.

Maybe the real truth is that people, after all, when given the widest choice and easiest access to anything, anybody, anywhere, anytime, actually just genuinely do all like the same sort of stuff. Maybe we truly do just have similar, predictable preferences and interests?

I don’t think so.

Anyway. This is the kind of question to which there’s probably no proper answer.
Not yet, anyway.

For now, as long as we know that what feels like serendipity probably isn’t, that’s probably enough. That we’re aware that what’s really going on is someone, somewhere wants you to see that content, this idea, that creator…so you’ll stay on-platform a bit longer, maybe become more likely to use your reach to amplify someone else’s, or use your money to buy something from someone.

What can brands do to help? Don’t conform. Stand for something that’s all your own. Help us find unexpected things and think unexpected thoughts. Don’t create for the algorithm (as tempting as it is to try and give it what it seems to want, to help your brand gain visibility). Don’t drift to the middle in search of eyeballs. Think bigger, more long-term, more societal-level, even. Do things only your brand can do. Expand your audience’s worldview, don’t compress it. Make good stuff, things nobody else makes. Be true to yourselves. It might just help us all be truer to ourselves.

Thank you for reading/see you next time. If you enjoyed, please share with someone who’ll care.

Beth

tomorrowism.co

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Want to go a bit deeper into this stuff??

Read this:

SELF-MADE Tara Isabella Burton PhD’s book tracing the cultural history of self-discovery, identity-building and cultivating your taste.

Do this:

Watch your friends scroll. It’s so interesting! You’ll learn about them + you’ll prob learn about yourself, too. I always do.