Ferrari built its first electric car. The internet hated it. All 500 sold out in two months anyway…
Why does nothing look cool anymore? From the brutalist architecture that makes your eyes bleed, to the bland-simplicity masked as ‘functional?’… Every cafe has the same subway tile. Every Airbnb is the same gray. Every logo dropped its serifs in the same decade. Every wedding invitation uses the same font. And now the flattening has reached the one brand that was supposed to be immune…
A Ferrari With No Gut
Jony Ive designed the Luce. Yes, Apple Jony Ive. Here’s what he said about it:
“There’s nothing here that isn’t about utility and function.”
That is an insane sentence to say about a Ferrari. I nearly CRASHED OUT.
Nobody on earth has ever bought a Ferrari for utility! Their GTP racecars don’t even (function). The retail car is a $600,000 liability that gets terrible mileage and costs thousands a year just to keep alive. Ferrari was supposed to exist to make you feel like the road belonged to you. For the same money you could buy 25 Honda Civics, and that’s exactly the point… nobody wants 25 Civics.
The Luce isn’t badly made. Ferrari still has people who will rework a single panel by hand until it’s perfect. The problem is that every trace of desire got sanded off. It looks like a productivity tool. It looks like it wants you to relax and let it take the wheel. It was almost a premonition to the failed DUO flip-iPhone launch recently… oof. Uninspiring!
A Ferrari is a glass cannon. It’ll blow you away and break your heart on the same day. And it’s supposed to. You love it for that. A Ferrari is a hunter. The Luce doesn’t hunt.
The Luce, is simply, a product of [our time] and [big data].
ai is a Mean Machine
I’ve argued before that Humans are Just LLMs. Here’s the other half of that idea: an LLM is a median. It’s the statistical center of everything ever written. That’s not a bug, it’s literally the math. Predict the most probable next token. The most probable next token is, by definition, average.
So when a design team asks ai “what should a luxury EV look like,” they get the mean of every luxury EV on the internet. When a marketing team asks for a landing page, they get the mean of every landing page. When you ask it to write your resume, you get the resume of 10 million other people… which is why Your Resume is Noise.
The feed pushed us toward the median. ai is the median. That’s the accelerant nobody in Maranello was talking about.
The result is the same everywhere: products that were optimized and sanitized before building.
I Feel, Therefore I Am
Antonio Damasio, in Descartes’ Error, studied patients whose brain damage left them unable to feel emotion. They didn’t become sharper, colder, more rational decision-makers. They got worse. And slower. Feeling is how you test a decision in your body before you commit to it. It’s the gut check running underneath the logic.
Descartes said “I think, therefore I am.” Damasio says the truth is closer to “I feel, therefore I am.”
Now think about what an LLM has. It has the thinking. It has no body, no fear, no desire, no Saturday morning in a paddock. It has no gut. Every decision you hand to ai alone is a decision made by Damasio’s patient… perfectly logical, a little slower, and regressing to the mean.
I’m not anti-ai. I have four agents and 300+ sub-agents running my life, my fund, and 14 websites. They build all night. But go back and read how I described my role in that issue: I’m the rudder. They are the hands. The gut has to stay human. The moment you let the median machine decide what the thing should mean, you get the Luce.
Design was never a science. It’s a bet on the future, and bets are made with the gut.
Flip the Table - Too Much Same-ness
For those that are actively-engaged-in-their-own-salvation: Now is the time to be 100% only you. The data will average everyone else out on its own.
Tweak. Add your own flavor. It may ‘seem’ archaic, until YOU get your hands on it. For such a time as this you have been called.
The median machine is here. We still get to decide what it’s for.
All the best,
ps
If you want to learn how to build away from the median with ai hmu.