Beyond The Age of Average
A Case For Human Proximity and Strange Creations
I haven’t been able to shake the images from Alex Murrell’s The Age of Average article. Disturbing, but if you’re an entrepreneur, also inspiring.
In the article Murrell describes our present AI curated world where brands, buildings, and fashions converge toward the same safe, beige middle. He shows in excruciating details how frictionless globalization and optimization algorithms have delivered efficiency at the cost of originality. Everything begins to look and feel the same.
None of this is new. Malvina Reynolds’s 1962 song, “Little Boxes,” which criticized the conformist lifestyle of the emerging suburbs seems appropriate for the wind tunnel effect that forces car design into little boxes made of ticky-tacky.
Hyper Personalized Bullshit
Now layer on Jaron Lanier’s recent suggestion that we will soon like in a future where “content” as we know it fades away. Instead of unique creations, everything is replaced by AI-generated experiences. Music, conversations, even news will be synthesized for us on demand.
Sure it’ll be personalized but also obviously universal, all seeming to flow from a singular invisible source. It’s a vision of culture that’s infinite in supply, yet hopelessly hollow. An endless ocean of generic output and entirely indistinguishable. The Age of Average on steroids.
Zigging While Others Zag
But I’m still excited, because when everything becomes average, when every channel is flooded with derivative garbage, people start to really crave novelty and the kind of trust that can’t be forged.
I believe we’re entering an era where we seek signals of meaning that can’t be faked. Looking into the eyes of the person you’re interacting with or touching the textures of the clothing you’re considering buying. These are fundamental to the human experience.
As I walked through Copenhagen’s Norrebro and Indre By neighborhoods this week, I was struck by how many people are doing things in an analog way. Sitting at the street side cafes, rummaging through football sized flea markets, and lying out on picnic blankets and games in the park. There’s a deep desire to be out in the world interacting with each other. They’re not all shuttered up indoors watching their screens and getting food delivered.
As I argued in The Human Proximity Marketing Playbook, once trust in digital erodes, the moat isn’t generating more content, it’s developing closeness. If everyone is doubling down on noisy content then do the opposite to build signal. Create the analog, face-to-face, hand-to-hand experiences that AI can’t simulate. Dinner tables, retreats, and live conversations become cool again.
Nostalgia or Connection
This isn’t the political nostalgia of “when we…” boomers. I’m not anti-AI, in fact, I’ve adopted it in many of it’s current forms, but it’s not a substitute for the fundamental human desire for connection. This isn’t a question of whether we go back to the good ol’ days and extinguish the tech advances of late. This is about finding ways to reconnect to what feeds our souls.
I’m going to stick my neck out and say that to endure we must design experiences AI can’t replace entirely: eye contact, vulnerability, shared laughter. You know, the difficult stuff. The hard to manufacture stuff.
Crafting What’s Next
So what does this mean for creators, designers, entrepreneurs or those navigating careers? It means imperfections, and weirdness and the kind of curation servers can’t automate. It means showing up one-to-one and one-of-a-kind instead of scaling millions of replicas. It means crafting experiences that have human connection at the core.
There will no doubt be hardcore technophiles that claim these human proximity suggests won’t scale and thus won’t provide entrepreneurs and their investors with the market opportunity they need. But, before you rush to conclusions, as yourself if scale guarantees sustainable success. The answer is a resounding no.
Approximately 75% of venture-funded startups fail to provide a return to their investors, with about 30–40% of those losing the entire initial investment. These failure rates don’t include the companies that slowly fade into oblivion or get sold in fire sales. Without question, every single one of these startups promised significant returns for investors because of some massive market they would conquer.
Average Is A Signal For Change
Average was already the inevitable context we generated long before AI. The local maximum is the consequence of over optimized and endless interactive musings that simply circle the drain. Algorithms and agents are no smarter than us. They have already started to flood our lives with more of the same over optimized remixes of the crap we’re all seeing everywhere and all the time.
But I am hopeful that meaning will come from doing what has always made us interesting as a species: creative people will come together and under the influence of delicious food, and meaningful conversations, their strange ideas will combine to create weirder ideas. Mutant ideas that inspire and excite us. Stay weird people.
