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Every year around this time Pantone publishes a "Color of the Year," which shows up in places like graphic design, home decor, and clothing over the course of the next year. I used to follow them, and in the mid 00s they had nice colors like frog green (greenery, 2017), coral red ("Living Coral, 2019), and Emerald Green (2013). Like many things, they've been corrupted lately, and the past three years have seen "Peach Fuzz" (the color children's art sets used to use to represent people), "Mocha Mousse" (the color of a mixed race actress in an advertisement), and now... white. Literally just white. It's called "Cloud Dancer," and has a tiny bit of grayish blue in it.
People are making fun of the "authoritarian" vibes of literally just white. But also, I was hoping that the white and grey trend was on its way out? I've been seeing white and grey boxes going up this past half decade, full of coffee shops, burgers, and more recently apartment buildings, and am not a fan. At least it's not Pot Shop Green, I guess?
Does this predict another year of literally just white and Landlord Grey?
Adding: The LA Times is trying to make the best of it, by highlighting bridal fashion. The Guardian and the New York Times both mention the difficulty of keeping actually white things clean looking, and several people talk about Whiteness.
If Pantone's doing it as its Color of the Year, then, yeah, that could mean it's on the way out. Same way Peak Oil actually meant the end of oil.
Peak Oil was a relatively dumb theory that was only taken seriously because of the unusual 2004 to 2014 spike in oil prices, which was speculative and driven by short-medium term bullish views on Chinese and other EM consumption, and then prolonged abnormally after 2011 by fears of Arab instability. Weird ZeroHedge types seized on this market dynamic as proof that oil prices would never fall and that actually 100/barrel was just the start and justified it with outdated peak oil fearmongering from the 1970s. In 2014 it became clear that Chinese demand would be lower than predicted, global growth was low, and US shale production was higher than forecast.
What exactly was dumb about Peak Oil? The EROI of the oil industry has gone down steadily - all kinds of energy are more expensive nowadays, and when it comes for the global energy mix we are probably running in the teens. And for good development you need 20-30.
Peak oil was wrong in terms of supply because of fracking (which people thought would make a negligible contribution to overall production), wrong on timing because of miscalculations about China and wrong on demand because of the speed of the electric car revolution, especially in Europe and China. Obviously the original argument that fossil fuels are a finite resource (in the timeframe of human civilization) is factually true, but it’s also kind of meaningless.
How is it meaningless? Being off by a decade or two is not a huge deal in terms of miscalculations because the end result for the oil industry and its dependents is the same: phasing out of fossil fuels and a probable decline in EROI and QOL for most of the globe.
If you're an AI maximalist, then anything that doesn't happen before AGI is basically meaningless: Climate change, peak oil, demographic collapse, etc.
I don't know if I count as an AI "maximalist", though I'm definitely of the opinion that AGI is likely and more imminent than 95% of the population. I still don't think it's guaranteed and have sufficient uncertainty that it's worth making some investment in mundane infrastructure and mitigation. You know, global warming (which is not existential anyway), space exploration yada yada.
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