The Exigent Duality
Wired the Same - 07:32 CST, 10/26/18 (Sniper)
After years of searching, I've finally found a car web site which isn't run by a bunch of nutty Communists. In fact, this guy shares basically all of my views about cars, which is kind of fun. Obviously, when wanting to know ahead of time how one would like product XYZ, one should seek out another with similar taste.

In his latest video, he explains how boring electric cars are, because they're so homogenous. It kind of reminds me of Jaron Lanier's arguments some years ago regarding "social media" sites, or-- my take-- Twitter bootstrap. Both Lanier and I miss the 90s, when web sites had crazy-- and sometimes ugly, true-- background wallpapers, MIDI files playing music, and so on; a lot more personality.

This car fellow even makes the same observations regarding contemporary "smartphones" which I have. This relates to modern-day video game systems as well, versus platforms from the 80s and 90s, which had totally different instruction sets, rasterization techniques, memory architectures, bus designs, and so on. That's a big part of why old video games have so much more personality and charm than modern titles do.

One final note about modern cars: with performance-oriented cars, you get what you pay for, in objectively quantifiable ways; better power-to-weight ratios, mid-engine layouts, higher chassis rigidity, and so on. But with any other class of car, what does a $60,000 cute-ute get you that a $25,000 doesn't? Both have sat-navs, heated seats, blinking lights so you don't need to interrupt your more-important texting to check your blind spot, and so on. This is the homogenization he's referring to.