Thread by @vgr

HGTV is so depressing

I suppose it is among the less painful ways to acquire some home ownership basic literacy but it is also normie hell

HGTV is Karen TV

Words/phrases I’d like to mute

Open concept
Island
Peninsula
Cabinets
Tiles
Tuscany
French
Farm house
Stucco
Colonial
en suite
Backsplash
Darker
Lighter
Double vanity

Words/phrases I’d like to hear but never do

Drone pad
Observatory
Laser defenses
Missile silo
Robot workshop
Secret passage
On-prem rack
Smart home system

I’m rarely conscious of race stuff, but damn this is the whitest channel ever, even more so than hallmark. Even though a lot of the people featured in the shows are not white, the content is like the Deathstar of white culture

More mute list

Space to entertain
Carrera
Grout
Gorgeous
Breakfast nook

It’s an unbelievably terminal-feeling monoculture

You could run a blockchain on homeowner consensus culture

End of history last man culture

I get that it’s a refined and evolved century old low margin construction culture that has made quality housing and convenience affordable for the middle class but damn is it tricky-tacky stepfordification

Houses in India are all over the place by contrast an architectural babel. Though I think American lifestyle monoculture housing us taking over the higher-end stock these days.

The worst thing about HGTV is that if you search for “HGTV” on twitter you’ll mostly find pure unironic fandom. Pure blue-pill haze.

You could reprogram the consciousness of America by figuring out how to increase the architectural variety, and somehow dampen the mutual-mimetic feeding frenzy.

Even the technical side which would normally interest me depresses me in this context… structural, electrical, material, chemical, hvac… there’s a lot of fun stuff there but here it somehow all just depressingly feeds the Stepford Matrix

Gotta admit it’s a beautiful economic machine though. Mass produced track housing drives down construction cost radically, feeds a Jevon’s paradox expansion in demand for square footage and features, and cycle repeats. It’s like a Moore’s law effect when you compare eras.

Modern American houses are masterpieces of functional density. They get bigger and bigger but also pack more and more functionality and convenience per square foot. Apartments too but less so. The US is a world leader in a certain pattern of single-family housing.