The reading room · Digna Legi
The age of average — Alex Murrell
/100
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How scoring works →This brief · about 3 min with detail
Why read this
Murrell connects sameness across creative fields to market research, platforms, cost pressure, testing, global references, and optimization.
AI brief · Checked against source text
The main idea
Murrell argues that interiors, buildings, cars, faces, fashion, media, and brands have drifted toward recognizable formulas. The mechanism varies by domain: market research, platform visibility, global reference pools, safety rules, cost pressures, testing, shared production systems, and optimization all reward choices that feel familiar, efficient, legible, or broadly acceptable. His conclusion is not resignation: category sameness makes distinctiveness more visible for those willing to depart from convention.
Go a little deeper
Optimization narrows taste
The opening art project gives the essay its governing mechanism: asking many people what they prefer can produce not richness but bland convergence. Komar and Melamid’s national surveys yielded similar blue landscapes across countries, which Murrell uses as a miniature of modern creative production: aggregating preference tends to smooth away edge, specificity, and surprise.
Sameness travels through shared reference systems
Murrell’s strongest connective tissue is that many fields now borrow from the same visible pool. Airbnb interiors, coffee shops, DTC ads, and brand identities spread through platforms, moodboards, social media, and global audiences. The result is not necessarily centralized control; imitation can emerge organically when creators search the same sources and optimize for the same recognizable signals.
Constraints make convergence rational without making it inevitable
In architecture and cars, sameness is tied to material constraints: building codes, land costs, industry consolidation, reused plans, wind tunnels, safety regulation, global markets, and manufacturing efficiency. These forces explain why similarity can be structurally rewarded. But Murrell’s final move is to frame that convergence as an opening for visible departure, not as proof that originality cannot compete.
Distinctiveness fails in testing before it reaches culture
The media examples sharpen the argument because they show sameness being filtered in advance. Soderbergh’s complaint is not merely that posters and trailers resemble one another, but that testing removes the unusual because it performs badly in artificial evaluation. Murrell connects this to franchises, sequels, and repeat authors: familiar formats increasingly dominate attention and revenue.
A case from the article
The Airbnb interior becomes a global template
Laurel Schwulst used Airbnb as a window into homes around the world and noticed that supposedly authentic spaces kept repeating the same cues: white walls, raw wood, Eames chairs, Edison bulbs, bare brick, open shelving, and Nespresso machines. The example illustrates Murrell’s larger point that global platforms can make local hospitality look comfortingly familiar almost everywhere.
How the case is made
The case is made through accumulated observation, cited journalism, industry commentary, examples, and a few reported data points across creative domains.
Where the idea has limits
The essay establishes a broad pattern of visual and cultural convergence, not one universal cause; Murrell repeatedly offers multiple possible drivers rather than a single master explanation.
A question to take away · from Digna Legi
Where in your own field are people mistaking recognizability for quality?
What the original adds
The source contains many more category examples, including architecture, car color, movie-franchise concentration, book-title formulas, DTC advertising tropes, brand-logo flattening, and tagline templates.
About this brief
AI-written, then separately checked for source support, useful detail and clarity. The author’s claims and our editorial question are kept separate. The original remains the author’s work. How we select and summarise →
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Digna legi. Worth reading.