I see a lot of sentiment against the post-WW2, american, timber-based style of construction on HN and I've never really understood it.
I view modern american residential construction as a model of efficiency. Why build a house out of brick or stone when timber is completely sufficient, and the latter is much, much cheaper to come by? It's not like timber just magically stops working one day - there are plenty of houses in older parts of the US that are 100+ years old. Any argument along the lines of "they don't build them like they used to" is likely ignoring survivorship bias among older homes.
And for the record, ceilings over 8FT are not a luxury item in the US. Any major home improvement store sells framing lumber and drywall in a variety of sizes over 8FT long:
That attitude goes back at least to Thomas Jefferson. Here's a letter he wrote in 1791:
A country whose buildings are of wood, can never increase in its improvements to any considerable degree. There duration is highly estimated at 50 years. Every half century then our country becomes a tablua rasa, whereon we have to set out anew, as in the first moment of seating it. Whereas when buildings are of durable materials, every new edifice is an actual and permanent acquisition to the state, adding to is value as well as to its ornament.
Any argument that wooden houses last 100+ years is ignoring survivorship bias :) But even granting that, 100 years is not a very long time - just over one lifetime. If your parents lived in a wooden house, your children will need to build a new one.
I agree with you that 100 years is not very long - I chose that number because a lot of communities in America aren't a lot older than that. The idea of a suburb didn't really catch on until after WWII, so we don't really have much data on those beyond 60 years. And even beyond that, a lot of areas in the midwest/west weren't very settled until around the turn of the century, so permanent structures from before then are not common.
> There duration is highly estimated at 50 years. Every half century then our country becomes a tablua rasa, whereon we have to set out anew, as in the first moment of seating it.
Maybe this was rhetoric (? who was that letter addressed to, and what was his purpose in writing it?), but I can't fathom the thinking that the entire country's buildings would simultaneously fail, in lockstep, every 50 years.
It doesn't have to be simultaneous. If buildings last about 50 years, then in 50 years you're going to have completely different set of buildings. You'll have no influences to draw on from 50+ years ago.
I actually like European houses because they have a sense of being of a longer timespan than I am, it reminds me that I'm transient in a much slower changing world.
Seeing the cities change around me faster than I can absorb those changes always weirds me out. In Europe you have that too in areas where there is a lot of construction but it only gets to me with places that I know well. I remember almost driving into a tree when I rounded a corner into Amsterdam one fine weekday morning and saw a - new to me - very large building that had been built during my stay in Canada. Of course for people that had seen it built it arrived very slowly but for me it might as well have popped out of the ground.
So you can imagine what I feel when I'm in North America.
That's an interesting viewpoint that I hadn't really considered before.
Of course, the US as a whole just isn't that old compared to most of Europe. So it's hard for us to have buildings that are 300 or 500 years old - because no one was here that long ago. Not saying our current buildings won't last that long, we just don't know yet. And the idea that they are just going to crumble to the ground one day because they are made of wood seems a bit misguided to me.
Indeed. My house is ~150 years old and made of wood, much of it original. Even large sections of the hardwoods are believed to be original or relatively close to it. Certainly the newest section of hardwood predates the addition of radiator based heat (based on scorch marks from a wood burning stove)
In my neighborhood, the #1 reason for similarly aged wooden houses to be torn down is simply because developers want to build multi-level, multi-unit condo buildings.
As a landlord, I put neutral-beige paint on the walls because it's the least-offensive option. If I had put a strong color on them, even as an accent color, there will be a percentage of potential tenants that would dislike it and rent from someone else. "Oh, that was the place with the hideous apple-green wall by the stairs. I couldn't live with it there."
I've rented a bunch of places in my life and rental rooms almost always looked pretty bare. Landlords do not want tenants painting their own colors for those same reasons. Tenants that frequently move each year do not accumulate furniture/furnishings because they are too annoying to move year after year and get damaged. You can only speculate how big a factor rental vs ownership plays in determining if rooms look like this.
>Tenants that frequently move each year do not accumulate furniture/furnishings
This is something I noticed a while ago when I was living in a nice apartment complex. It seemed like many residents would just throw away old lamps or small furniture rather than take them to their new place or put them in storage. A good portion of those videos looked like people bored in their apartments or parents basement which would fit your observation.
This happens at most colleges every year. It's a goldmine for dumpster divers or even just locals who don't mind hauling it back to their house and possibly selling it.
I've thrown away some perfectly good furniture just because it wasn't worth hauling it across the state or I didn't end up having room in the moving truck I had rented.
Yeah, I could have probably made some money if I sold it on craigslist.
Many places I've stayed at will have a promotion "get $50 off first months rent or we will paint any wall in the house a color of your choice", I always just do the $50 because I couldn't care less about the random wall color.
Owners do this because they believe their house is an investment and they want to be ready to move whenever someone waves that wad of cash in their face. Apparently people buying don't realize they can repaint because coloured walls are a reason people won't make an offer on a house.
Personally, I can't stand white/beige rooms. I want colour in my life. When I bought a house, we painted half of it before I moved in. The kitchen is a yellow, the living room has a peach/seashell thing going on, the guest/spare room is a light lavender and the office is a blue that almost glows in sunlight.
This is supposed to be my house, I want to like living in it. It should be colourful. Maybe it's because we rented several houses when I was growing up.
I read this whole thing, I even continued when he showed a clear misunderstanding of how pinterest works (the columns aren't going to show the same "Gallery Wall" in the same column every time someone clicks your link!) I continued through his careful selection of things that seemed to follow his logic and ignorance of things that argued against it. I hoped and hoped a point would be made at some time, but I was disappointed.
Yes, lots of American homes have similar decor, but those pictures on pinterest that you seem to think are fantasy are not fantasies, they are actual pictures of actual homes. We don't all live in wall-to-wall off-white boxes.
What is the point of this overgeneralization? Is it a surprise that lots of people have similar houses? Is it a surprise that lots of developers always wear t-shirts and jeans? Why is this on the front page of HN??
I like the piece. It exposes a melancholic beauty to the ticky-tacky hedge rows and webcam uniformity of the Western existence. Peering past the facades and in to the lives of American suburbanites we see a million people separated by their screens yet united in their droll simplicity.
There's more to life than just the exuberance, progress, and extraordinary creations that we obsess over here in the Bay Area. For every amazing success story there's a thousand people shuffling their feet and walking in circles just to be our customers. On the other side of almost every IP packet is a person sitting alone in a room. It's important for us to realize the implications of our creations. It is important for us to realize what's real and what's just an idealized vision of the future. It'll keep us thinking about a path forward that includes everyone. It'll keep us from thinking that we're special and different and more entitled to life's pleasures. When we turn our heads most of us see the same pale white walls.
Well Frisco's a mighty rich town, now that ain't no lie
Why they got some buildings that reach a mile into the sky
Yet no one can even afford the time just to tell me why
Here's a world filled with people and so many people alone
"There's more to life than just the exuberance, progress, and extraordinary creations that we obsess over here in the Bay Area. For every amazing success story there's a thousand people shuffling their feet and walking in circles just to be our customers. On the other side of almost every IP packet is a person sitting alone in a room. It's important for us to realize the implications of our creations. It is important for us to realize what's real and what's just an idealized vision of the future. It'll keep us thinking about a path forward that includes everyone. It'll keep us from thinking that we're special and different and more entitled to life's pleasures. When we turn our heads most of us see the same pale white walls."
OMG! The self-importance in that paragraph is hilarious!
It happens to be the same self-importance that I see driving almost every entrepreneur in the tech sector. Everyone speaks of "changing the world" and the importance of individual innovation. Very rarely do people in Silicon Valley take the time to think about the effects of their creations. Getting rich is also the process of extracting wealth from others and people seem to forget that. The blind faith that a "rising tide lifts all boats" is an ideology that deserves heavy scrutiny.
My question for you is, would it have been a better talking point if I made it very clear that I'm somehow different and "better" than the tech culture I see around me? Or would the finger-pointing be less successful than a message that inculpates myself in to the tragedy?
Wow, you must be brilliant, somehow "better" than the rest of the people in Silicon Valley, to be able to know their very thoughts, and what deep, important things that they "very rarely... take the time to think about."
It truly is a "tragedy" that they're not thinking about all of us foot-shufflers out here in the larger world who are "walking in circles just to be their customers." I don't know if I'll be able to bear the grief...
I enjoyed the post. It's well written. It had a stream-of-conciousness feel to it. I liked the idea of looking at internet videos from a different angle. I knew almost none of the videos and didn't play any of them, the stills were enough illustration for the post.
Not everything needs to make a point. Sometimes we read (and write) things just for fun.
I also read the whole thing, even though I started disliking myself halfway through.
I also wonder why this is on HN. But the reason it was written is eyeballs, a thin excuse to tie together a bunch of viral videos. This kind of 'meta-viral' post is easy to write because you're working with a vetted pool of already-popular content.
All you need is to suspend the reader's disbelief enough, with your narrative, that your post does make sense, that there is a thesis statement here. The popularity of the content you're cribbing from does the rest.
I don't see any misunderstanding about how Pinterest works. He points out that one of the pinned photos is itself a kind of meta-Pinterest -- the "Gallery Wall" item is an article about how to arrange stuff on a wall similar to Pinterest. Nothing about clicking, nothing about the same column showing every time.
> those pictures on pinterest that you seem to think are fantasy are not fantasies, they are actual pictures of actual homes
Actually, quite a lot of pinned photos on Pinterest are from marketing materials (catalogues, Etsy, magazines, etc.). That applies to Houzz, too. Sure, there are some real homes there, including ones that have been designed by professional interior designers. But the point is that's why they are pinned there: It's what a lot of people aspire to. Not necessarily what they have.
Speaking from experience of other people's homes, people generally don't have homes like those shown in interior design magazines. Part of it is that most people simply don't have the taste -- whenever I speak to Americans about their beige homes, their wainscoatings, paneling, stained-glass windows and other reactionary cruft, they insist their love it -- and also that it's often very expensive.
He said "Gallery Wall" from the second column. As if we would all see that post on the second column of the link he provided. That's not how pinterest works, it is always updating and changing.
Well, we can. Because it's a static screenshot of his Pinterest view. It's not an embed. (Edit: I very much doubt he thinks that his link always shows the same content, I don't read that from his text at all.)
Aside from the cherry picking of the author, and the natural tendency for people to use the simplest possible backgrounds when they're recording a video, it's worth noting that the simplicity of modern interior construction, and the use of neutral colors, is completely intentional and desired.
It isn't accidental or unnoticed, and isn't some side effect of cheapness or thrift, or the "temporary worker" suburbanite, as the post seems to imply. It's that we learned through many generations that the things that you think look pretty awesome today often don't look that great in the near future, and soon interior design is an enormous burden instead of an expression or enjoyment.
In the 70s homes were filled with wallpaper, wall to wall carpet, shelves with trophies and knick-knacks, etc. And then we collectively decided that we didn't like wallpaper, carpet, shelves or knick-knacks.
So we moved to more malleable internal decorating that can more easily change with tastes. Pictures and accents instead of strongly colored walls. Throw rugs instead of carpet. Decorative free-standing elements instead of bolting stuff on a wall.
This newer model has held since pretty much the 80s. Simple interiors that you make your own, and you can keep making your own with every change of your taste, instead of being tied to the taste of you from a decade ago, or worse the taste of generations before you.
Carpet/rugs were a status symbol of ultimate luxury when they were expensive; as synthetic fibers became cheaper new construction settled on plywood and carpet flooring as actually being cheaper than hardwood flooring. Pretty soon carpet was "gross" and "tacky" and hardwoods became a status symbol.
Prior to cheap aluminum manufacture through the Hall–Héroult process, aluminum tableware was light weight and considered excellent, after the process it was cheap tacky and flimsy and everyone knows you need some heft in your fork for proper balance and etiquette.
Walls that are white or beige indicate to me that there is no personal ownership of the room. When I last owned a room, I painted it orange, because I was the only one that had any say in the matter, and I wanted orange.
Now, all my rooms are white.
And almost all of my furniture is crappy, flat-pack, self-assembly particle-board dreck. That's because my preference for durable, quality furniture is overridden by my ever-declining wage relative to my expenses, and my need to move around frequently in search of jobs that allow me to tread water a bit longer at my current standard of living.
I want a nice chair, but I also want something to sit on until I can afford one. It always seems that the price of a chair I could keep until the day I die increases faster than my ability to pay for one. And so I live in a cheaply developed suburban subdivision, in a cheaply built home, on cheaply constructed furniture, using a discounted laptop. And all the while, things crumble around me, and I constantly find myself paying to replace the cheap things that I only have in the first place because I am trying to save up enough to buy the nice, durable things that I really want. And those recede into the distance faster than I can chase them.
My American room is devoid of decoration, because I no longer have any sense of ownership. It makes no sense to personalize a place that is not mine. It makes no sense to invest emotion and effort into something that you feel in your heart to just be temporary.
And in the end, I live a temporary life, plodding through endless mundane todays in search of an extraordinary tomorrow. Everything that I own is junk that I never wanted to keep. Everything that I really want dangles just barely out of my reach.
And all the time, I am angry and frustrated, because all I ever wanted is quality. And I can't afford it. The walls behind my webcam aren't blank, white, and empty. They're covered in the corpses of my dead dreams and aborted aspirations. Those gothy types think black is the color of despair. But it's really eggshell semi-glossy.
I have plenty of decorations to hang up. But they are still packed up and ready to move--again--because there is no longer any wall that I can say is my wall. All those white walls out there belong to someone else. All those videos just show that someone else controls the backdrop of your life.
And I just want to get out my brush and paint. It. All. Red.
The fact that the author is trying to make the argument that (I'm exaggerating here) "All Americans must be poor, because the walls in YouTube videos are white" doesn't make any sense. The author even alludes to this briefly in talking about "YouTube Teens." Yes, author, younger people tend to a) rent more and b) not have as many things to hang.
As someone under 30 who moves across states every few years, I have no desire to collect a bunch of stuff to hang on my walls.
This struck me as analysis for the sake of analysis. I'm willing to wager many people pick the most bare wall in their house on purpose because it looks best to film against.
People pick bare walls because they're imitating each other, and the bare-wall look is easy to recreate. For example, Hannah Hart can make videos like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OzYk2iOZqss#t=242 but when she built a studio, it looked like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjK2xgolAws The first one is more engaging, but people have this idea of what a youtube video looks like, and they just keep doing that because it's what they're used to.
I'm immediately reminded of the background Ze Frank has used in his web series, "A Show"[1]. In the videos, Ze regularly places a single white bookshelf with a mishmash of objects on it, mostly books. He either uses the bookshelf often enough to arrange the objects in unique ways regularly, or re-arranges it for every individual episode of A Show he records.
When I see videos like those Ze creates, I know they're staged but can't help but feel like my life, too, should be filled with knickknacks, books, clutters of inspiration.
There's some sense of: "If my environment looks like that environment, I'll be able to act like that person does." I imagine much of pop culture influences how we imagine our rooms and homes should look.
My house is 100 years old. The walls are bright green and ten feet high, and full of homemade art. I will never buy or live in a boring beige box again.
I'll never understand why people want to live in such mind numbingly plain spaces. We decorate our cars, we decorate our laptops, we have cute cases for our phones, but the walls of the house we live in must be grey, beige or off-white? I don't mind the architectural sameness. I understand its efficiency. But the lack of color, or any kind of self-expression, that's what I don't get.
Most people don't want to. Rentals and often even homes for sale take on these colors because they're the most inoffensive. Everybody wants some kind of color and character to their home, but nobody will agree on exactly which kind of color or character. As a result, those responsible for selling/renting these places have them take on a "neutral middle": something absolutely nobody loves, but you can't really hate either. Inoffensive.
And since so many people either a) Rent and aren't allowed to paint or make significant alterations (e.g. nails in the wall), or b) Move too often to feel it's worth the effort, lots of people don't bother to change it from the inoffensive, dull, soul-crushing middle ground.
Paul Ford is a magician and offers terrific perspective on subtle aspects of what is typically our American culture. If you're looking for him to beat you over the head with THE POINT about what he insists you're suppose to think, you're reading the wrong author.
This whole article feels like the author is trying to pull something from nothing. House-poor seems like a stretch. I would suggest a more plausible theory: people, in general, just aren't that creative, especially when it comes to interior decorating.
Yep. I'm sitting in a beige box right now. I own it. I'm not house-poor. I just haven't put the time into re-painting or decorating much, and I just don't have the desire to put my money into things that just sit there.
Tangental: did anyone else see that video of the woman talking about a nuclear Jesuit semen bomb (not making this up)? Is she frighteningly schizophrenic or just pulling yarn?
I have noticed the American Room in YouTube videos too. Another things is lake of shelfs - things seem to be stored sitting on the floor. No time to move it?
At risk of sounding cynical, I would find an entry titled "The Medium Blog Entry" even more compelling.
It is a platform made for entries to be authored quickly and cheaply. The droll full-page lead image sets it apart, the color palette muted and neutral, simultaneously making it exactly like every other Medium blog entry you've seen lately. Many intermix videos and viral media to tether off of other's fame.
The air of grandeur of the platform allowing people to post with pomposity while simultaneously sharecropping. To post judgmental observations by carefully cherry picking the evidence.
Medium. You and your predictable blogs.
As an aside, it's curious that this entry talks about "suburbs" a number of times. Most condo and apartment rooms have the same 8' ceilings, the same muted palette, and virtually identical construction. But...you know...suburbs and temporary workers, or something.
I also think if you're going to publish a video, one might think about the background and might choose a room which is not cluttered and won't distract from what the subject wants to present. I mean, if I had a few rooms to choose from, I'd choose the least cluttered or decorated one to use as background.
But, might be a good idea to sample rooms from videos/clips produced in rooms in other countries, maybe there is something to it?
Also, as a counterpoint, I recall when living in the suburbs as a teenager, friends' rooms bedecked with posters, pinup pictures, clothes strewn, music instruments about, etc. Their basements might have been different, those tended to be bare with exposed support beams, studs, unfinished (without a finish) concrete floors, etc.
Minor (major?) nit: I'd like to see a post about "The top HN reply to any submission that makes any sort of statement." In it, the author could show a number of top replies, each trivializing the original submission. "Look, I did this three weeks ago in my handmade Javascript interpreter [0], written in my own implementation of Go [1], compiled with a compiler written in assembly [10], by me."
I view modern american residential construction as a model of efficiency. Why build a house out of brick or stone when timber is completely sufficient, and the latter is much, much cheaper to come by? It's not like timber just magically stops working one day - there are plenty of houses in older parts of the US that are 100+ years old. Any argument along the lines of "they don't build them like they used to" is likely ignoring survivorship bias among older homes.
And for the record, ceilings over 8FT are not a luxury item in the US. Any major home improvement store sells framing lumber and drywall in a variety of sizes over 8FT long:
http://www.menards.com/main/c-13132.htm?criteria3_facet=2%22...
http://www.menards.com/main/c-5656.htm?criteria5_facet=9%27&...