good taste is market failure
things right now 63—week of 3.9.26
This image stopped me in my tracks:
I knew things were bad. But seeing it laid out hits different.
Has there ever been a decade in which technology has been so aesthetically stuck? The issue isn't price. These may be Apple's "low-cost" offerings, but the premium tier looks more-or-less exactly the same. Why is this the case?
Because Apple is the most successful company in the world. Only the Latin American cartels and parastatal conglomerates like the British East India Company can compete for the title. Addiction—whether to dopamine (screens), caffeine (tea), or narcotics (drugs) is immaterial—is the only way to achieve S-tier success.
The form factor of Apple devices is immaterial to the addictive properties of its products. Samsung's phones buzz, condition, and hypnotize consumers just as well. But people are finicky about their addictions, especially the upper-middle class, whose spending powers the consumer economy. (The much cited statistic is that the top 10% of U.S. earners account for half of all consumer spending nationwide.)
The iPhone is the spritz cocaine to the off-brand smartphone's crack rock. It's Maru Coffee versus Monster Energy. Adderall pills instead of trucker speed.
You’ll notice, most of the "better-than" versions of addictive products are not conspicuously sophisticated. They're premium mediocre as tech writer Venkatesh Rao once put it. Brand as vestigial social anxiety. Just good enough to prove (so you think) that you are not downwardly mobile, to prove you are 'normcore' not normal.
That story still dominates the upper-middle class psyche, the millennial upper-middle class psyche especially. They didn't want to be conformist suburbanites like their parents, they needed another rationale, another alibi. But the athleisure and millennial grey remodels betrayed that this was a fear-driven consumer trend.
Like so many trends, its origins come from misinterpreted class codes of the past.
The casual, inconspicuous WASP of the popular imagination, hiding out in his white clapboard New England colonial, his Cape Cod covered in cedar shingles bleached grey by salt and sun, his clothing frugal and frayed. His car might be rusted and rumbling, but he has no social anxiety. His real estate is like his status, inherited.
That's always been the issue the American upper-middle class has confronted. How to flex without flexing? But when you have to buy your own furniture.
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