The café in Tokyo looks like the one in Amsterdam looks like the one in São Paulo. Nobody planned it that way.
Literal meaning: The Age of Average describes the algorithmic homogenisation of culture — a process in which recommendation systems, optimisation feedback, and AI generation converge on a narrow aesthetic and content median, making cultural outputs from different sources, places, and creators progressively less distinguishable from each other.
Origin: The term was coined by writer Alex Murrell in a 2023 essay documenting the visual convergence of interior design, brand identities, film colour grading, and architecture — noting that Airbnbs worldwide had converged on the same aesthetic, that Netflix films shared the same visual style, and that brand identities across industries had become interchangeable. Murrell attributed the convergence to shared optimisation tools, shared audience data, and shared recommendation infrastructure.
The convergence of design, culture, and aesthetics toward a single global look — produced not by taste but by algorithms that reward what already performed well.
The Appeal: Optimisation for engagement produces reliable results. A film that uses proven story structures, colour palettes, and pacing will perform predictably. A café that adopts the Airbnb aesthetic will appeal to the widest possible market. The logic is coherent within an engagement-maximisation framework.
The Friction: The diversity loss is the consequence. Recommender Systems — trained on engagement signals from existing content — amplify what has already worked, creating feedback loops that reward similarity and penalise novelty. AI Slop accelerates the process: when AI generates content trained on the existing distribution, it produces the statistical average of that distribution — competent, recognisable, indistinguishable. Comparison Culture is the social correlate: when everyone’s aesthetic is visible to everyone, convergence toward the most validated standard is rational self-presentation. The result is a cultural environment that looks like everywhere while feeling like nowhere.
Why This Matters: Age of Average names the aesthetic consequence of algorithmic optimisation. Once you can see the convergence, you can ask what has been filtered out — and whose aesthetic got to become the default.
Related terms: Recommender Systems · AI Slop · Synthetic Generation · Comparison Culture · Slow Media · Deinfluencing · Deskilling
Read more:
- The Age of Average — Murrell, A. (2023). alexmurrell.co.uk
- On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots — Bender, E.M. et al. (2021). ACM FAccT