Flattening Into Sameness

Cory Doctorow shares my fascination with statistics and the information it can reveal that would likely otherwise remain hidden. I credit regression analysis and obsessive data collection with helping me survive a debilitating bout of ulcerative colitis twenty years ago, and preventing a recurrence. He recently pointed readers to another data analysis geek, blogger Lauren Leek, who just wrote a post ostensibly about the shrinking diversity of shops on Britain’s ‘high streets’ (‘main streets’ to us North Americans). She presented the data to prove it. But three words in her preamble suggested her assessment was a metaphor for a larger cultural phenomenon: flattening into sameness. Twenty years ago in his better days, Canadian writer Terry Glavin wrote the awesome biodiversity-loss odyssey book Waiting for the Macaws, in which he repeatedly lamented “the dark and gathering sameness of the world”. He was writing about biological sameness and the physical monoculture of human built…