thinking about how this reflects in architecture, fashion, art… the current trend is that simplicity is beautiful and desirable, rather than intricacy. our possessions and environments are so much more plain and boring as a result
Something you might notice is that a lot of older writings - even things that were made for strictly technical purposes - had far more rhetorical density than most of the stuff people are writing now.
This isn’t because evocative language went out of fashion, it’s because there is a growing tendency for us to think about everything we experience, down to our most intimate and ineffable feelings, in streamlined terms that trade complexity for brevity. Why did this happen?
When time is money and money is survival, we don’t have time to think about much besides time. When we speak, we speak to stop speaking as quickly as possible.
In the motion of the market, the beauty of simplicity becomes the simplification of beauty, and the values of experience decay into the experience of monetary value. Every journey is collapsed into its destination, and we will die before we ever got the chance to live if we allow the regime of capital to buy and sell our futures.