// An Ocean of Artificial Intelligence
Optimise everything toward the same metrics and you get the same product.
Fourth of five, following on from Rocket Boots for Terrible Ideas. About what homogenisation does to trust, once every option looks and behaves the same, and why that makes leaving easy and staying meaningless.
Also: the same coffee shop in Berlin, Bucharest and Cape Town, enshittification, and why there’s no hook left for customer intent.
Trust
Optimise everything toward the same metrics and you get the same product. An optimisation mindset will only get you to the local maxima of a bad idea. It’ll never make a leap of conviction that differentiates.
Every streaming service with the same recommendation engine. Every app with the same onboarding flow, the same design system, the same brand colours. Every city centre with the same six shops, because retail property managers optimise for the same credit ratings and footfall numbers. Every festival and club with the same data driven lineup.
Kyle Chayka coined a name for this in 2016. AirSpace. The strangely frictionless geography created by digital platforms. The same coffee shop in Berlin, Bucharest and Cape Town. Not a chain. Independent businesses, unknown to each other, converging on the same aesthetic through algorithmic pressure. Subway tiles. Hanging plants. Flat whites. He wrote the book on it in 2024. Filterworld.
This is the same pattern, just offline. Nobody in that chain was asked what they wanted the high street to feel like. Just what performed.
They weren’t authentic to their place, he observed. They were authentic to the internet.
Cory Doctorow calls this enshittification when it happens to a platform. This is what it looks like when it happens to an entire market.
In that world, switching is easy. Every competitor is more or less functionally identical, so the moment trust breaks, what the customer wants becomes simple and clear. I don’t want to use this company again. Not everyone leaves. Habit and switching cost keep people in places they don’t love. But the ones who do leave tend to leave for good, and there’s nothing left to win them back with. There’s no hook for customer intent.
That’s as declared and purposeful as anything the intention economy runs on. It’s just pointed the wrong way.
The irony is that hyper-optimisation was supposed to maximise retention. Frictionless onboarding. Personalisation. Engagement loops. But in converging toward the same product as everyone else, it removed the one thing that would have made leaving difficult. Character. Differentiation. The bit you couldn’t get anywhere else. The reason to trust one product or service over another.
I believe that trust is the only differentiator that matters. Sarah Gold and her team at Projects By IF have been saying this for a decade now.
Last one: Imagining the Traffic Jam.
I'd love to tell you more.
Previous Journal Post
// Rocket Boots for Terrible Ideas
Creativity is powered by friction.
Third of five, following on from My Reconditioned iPod. About what happens to creative work when the friction gets designed out of it. Design systems, Figma agents, and the difference between producing output and having something to say.
Also: a frozen risotto, a component library nobody had to think about, and why the operating was never the differentiator.