> On May 5, 2016, at 4:31 PM, Kelly St. Clair <xxxxxx@efn.org> wrote:
>
> This state of affairs can persist for as long as the market is unable to pick a decisive winner,

Presuming ‘The Market’ decides these kinds of things that way in the culture in question. “The Market” and it’s drive to standardization as we know it is a fairly recent thing, and is a cultural construct (as much as some would like to claim it is a natural force of the universe).

As I mentioned, a culture that values novelty or individuality over cost may well go a different way…even now bespoke clothes are still a potent status symbol, even in an Old Navy world.

I just read an article about Aeropostale filing for bankruptcy because, in part, “teenagers don’t want to all look alike anymore” and mall standards selling a multitude of shirts with the same logo on them are no longer doing so well.

A sufficiently advanced technology might even facilitate this: if you have widely available fabrication technology, oddball spare parts or weird tools are no longer bottlenecks in producing things.

Look at the Thingiverse, and imagine that *everything* technological that we use could come from someplace like that. The rock stars of a society like that might not be the industrial titans like Henry Ford,  but the Salvador Dali’s or Frank Lloyd Wright’s.

--
Bruce Johnson
University of Arizona
College of Pharmacy
Information Technology Group

Institutions do not have opinions, merely customs