Why does everything look the same?

Capitalism works best when everyone wants the same things, but resistance to homogenisation has a long political history.

By Ane Cornelia Pade

Stroll down the high street of any major city, from London to Mexico City, and you will find the same restaurants, cafés, and hotels, filled with people dressed according to the latest global online trends. Thanks to algorithm-driven platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and Pinterest, we can see what is trending anywhere, at any time, and shape our appearance and surroundings accordingly. A microtrend in Seoul or a student project in London reaches screens worldwide in seconds. As designs are liked, shared, and reposted, it becomes nearly impossible to trace who created them or why. The noise of the feed becomes their new context, replacing the individual hands and traditions that shaped them with homogenised, screen-sized squares. What we are left with in this global soup of algorithmic images is a paradox: despite more voices and more inspiration than ever, everything looks the same. If we can choose anything, why does everything look the same?

While trends and the critique of trend-based consumption are as old as time (even the Romans complained about trend crazes), sameness is a more recent phenomenon. Before the Industrial Revolution swept across Europe in the 19^th century, sameness was a luxury. In an era when everything was handmade, creating identical objects was extremely challenging. Perfection, evident in the smooth, uniform surface of glazed porcelain, the even weave of silk, and the flawless symmetry of a set of chairs, was reserved for the very wealthy. Once machines appeared, sameness lost its prestige. Throughout the 19^th and early 20^th centuries, sewing machines, industrial looms, gas-fired kilns, mechanical presses, and, eventually, the assembly line simplified and lowered the cost of achieving uniformity. Consequently, sameness became associated with mass-produced, machine-made items, while asymmetry, imperfection, and quirkiness were linked to handmade objects.