Top all-time · #3088
Alex Murrell
Personal blog · alexmurrell.co.uk/articlesbusinessculture
Alex Murrell's personal blog at alexmurrell.co.uk covers business and culture. Since 2020, 25 different Hacker News readers have linked it 26 times, most often “The age of average (2023)”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-08-21, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (14) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Alex Murrell's essay "The Age of Average", which argues that cars, buildings, websites, films and music are converging on a bland mean. It is cited across many threads on design and culture homogenization.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 14 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- The age of average (2023)20 people · 20 mentions · first linked 2023-03-25
- The forecasting fallacy (2020)3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2020-09-18
What Hacker News says?
You'll like this: https://www.alexmurrell.co.uk/articles/the-age-of-average
Comment linking /articles/the-age-of-average
on “NotebookLM's automatically generated podcasts are surprisingly effective”Submitted The age of average (2023) as a story · 250 points
HN discussionI made a comment related to this recently ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45486391 ) and I got a lot of helpful responses that I think help explain some of these trends: 1. With the Internet, things "converge to an optimum" much faster than before where you had more regional variation. Dominant design, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominant_design , explains part of this trend. 2. This article from earlier th…
Comment linking /articles/the-age-of-average
on “The decline of deviance”Submitted The forecasting fallacy (2020) as a story · 91 points
HN discussionthis post which mentioned in the OP has far broader examples https://www.alexmurrell.co.uk/articles/the-age-of-average
Comment linking /articles/the-age-of-average
on “The decline of deviance”Submitted The Forecasting Fallacy as a story · 12 points
HN discussionHe covers music in a follow up article, https://www.alexmurrell.co.uk/articles/the-age-of-average-en... : "Chart topping tracks are becoming shorter, less melodically diverse and more lyrically repetitive". According to him, it is not just tastes, it is the way musicians get paid: "Streaming platforms pay artists each time a track gets listened to. And a “listen” is classified as 30 seconds or more of playback. To m…
Comment linking /articles/the-age-of-average-encore
on “The age of average (2023)”Submitted The Forecasting Fallacy as a story · 7 points
HN discussionIn some narrow sense, this headline reminds me of this Alex Murrell blog post from 2023 called "The Age of Average": https://www.alexmurrell.co.uk/articles/the-age-of-average (HN discussion from that time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35355703 ). Covers the strange phenomenon of cultural homogenization, with all designs (cars, buildings, brand logos, websites, etc) reverting to a mean. In some sense, I'm not…
Comment linking /articles/the-age-of-average
on “A.I. Is Homogenizing Our Thoughts”Submitted The Age of Average as a story · 4 points
HN discussionI think it’s a mix of social media and risk aversion, this article touches on the broader discussion as it impacts many kinds of design https://www.alexmurrell.co.uk/articles/the-age-of-average
Comment linking /articles/the-age-of-average
on “The death of industrial design and the era of dull electronics”Submitted The Age of Average as a story · 3 points
HN discussionIt's not coffee shops, it's everything. I read an essay last year on this topic, "The age of average" by Alex Murrell ( https://www.alexmurrell.co.uk/articles/the-age-of-average ) and it's stayed in my mind ever since. Cars, home interiors, instagram photos, skylines, self help books, franchise movies. The design of everything in our lives has become so relentlessly optimized we have a global culture that's stuck a…
Comment linking /articles/the-age-of-average
on “The tyranny of the algorithm: why every coffee shop looks the same”Submitted The Age of Average (Encore) as a story · 3 points
HN discussionAlex Murrell has a great piece on this: https://www.alexmurrell.co.uk/articles/the-age-of-average
Comment linking /articles/the-age-of-average
on “Regression to the Mean: on LLMs and the quiet death of the new”Submitted The Age of Average as a story · 2 points
HN discussionWhy not put some other generative AI oon top of that to further fuel the age of average? https://www.alexmurrell.co.uk/articles/the-age-of-average
Comment linking /articles/the-age-of-average
on “'Indiana Jones 5' will feature a de-aged Harrison Ford for the first 25 minutes”Submitted Adland Is an Island as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThe video is pretty slick, however i can't help but be reminded of the other story that hit the HN frontpage earlier today: "The age of average" https://www.alexmurrell.co.uk/articles/the-age-of-average These designs are not new and exciting, quite the opposite. I'm happy to be proven wrong!
Comment linking /articles/the-age-of-average
on “Launch HN: Noya (YC W23) – a product design tool for non-designers”Submitted The Age of Average as a story · 1 points
HN discussionGotta love that globohomo convergence in the age of average. https://www.alexmurrell.co.uk/articles/the-age-of-average
Comment linking /articles/the-age-of-average
on “An End to Pop”Submitted The Age of Average as a story · 1 points
HN discussionRelated (and one of the most interesting articles I've read the last few years): https://www.alexmurrell.co.uk/articles/the-age-of-average
Comment linking /articles/the-age-of-average
on “As Nepali villages modernize, mokha art is on the verge of disappearing”Submitted The Age of Average as a story · 1 points
HN discussionIn an objective sense, more new releases today are continuations of existing franchises than they were in the 90s. See https://www.alexmurrell.co.uk/articles/the-age-of-average , which was on the front page earlier this week. Subjectively, the few teens I interact with seem hyped for new installments in old franchises, updates to existing games with more content, or remakes of old classics. I don't think there's as…
Comment linking /articles/the-age-of-average
on “E3 Has Been Canceled”How Silicon Valley helps spread the same sterile aesthetic across the world[1], Discussion:[2] The age of average[3], Discussion: [4] 1: https://www.theverge.com/2016/8/3/12325104/airbnb-aesthetic-... 2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33520414 3: https://www.alexmurrell.co.uk/articles/the-age-of-average 4: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35355703
Comment linking /articles/the-age-of-average
on “Are logos all starting to look the same?”
