When enough things optimize toward the same target, the space for everything else collapses

There is a structural argument hiding inside the complaint that everything feels the same. When MrBeast-style videos, Marvel movies, algorithmic pop, and flat UI design all converge on the same reward target, they are not merely similar. They are occupying the same point in a space that used to be multidimensional. At zero dimensions, there is literally no room for anything else.

This is different from "mainstream stuff is bad." Quality can still be high. Enormous effort still goes in. The problem is geometry. When the entire industry races to the same local maximum, the adjacent territory, where weird, slow, idiosyncratic, complex stuff used to live, does not just get ignored. It gets squeezed out because the space it needed no longer exists.

It explains why genres feel exhausted, why communities "ruin" themselves by getting popular, why the 40th entry in a franchise registers as nothing even when it is technically well-made. Convergence is the mechanism. The thing that got optimized away was not quality. It was dimensionality.

Source claim: When culture converges on a single dopamine target, it collapses the multidimensional space that complexity and variety required, leaving no room for anything other than the optimized form.