One of the most recent rebrands in our media ecosystem is “HBO Max” becoming “Max.” What problem does this possibly solve? Ostensibly it will help Discovery + maintain more of its identity and not get buried in HBO programming. But HBO Max already housed programming from things like TCM and somehow, everyone managed to figure out how to use it and appreciate the different contributing threads. The loss of HBO Max is just part of a larger trend—to simplify and streamline everything around us.
It’s not that we’re becoming Hemingways and trying to be more economical with language. In the last few years, university presses have been killing their revered logos. Harvard’s new logo is somewhat sad. Who needs the legacy of centuries when you can have a handful of rectangles? Oxford University Press now resembles an inferior loading icon. This kind of thing has been going on for a while. KFC no longer stands for Kentucky Fried Chicken—it only stands for KFC. ESPN hasn’t been more than four letters for some time.
There are several reasons to oppose some of these rebrands. For a start, many are ugly or aesthetically displeasing. They’re also often boring. Sure, there’s something to a streamlined image, but not when practically everything we see is in Helvetica. So many logos are getting changed to all look so similar that some people are calling it “blanding” instead of branding. It’s also kind of offensive to suggest that we can’t handle anything but conformity in branding and that the complexity of a company name with actual words is beyond us.
Companies want to “fit in” with the media landscape, but what they’re offering us is monoculture. And monoculture is never good. Monoculture isn’t good for farming, it’s not good for politics, and it creates some particularly acute vulnerabilities and unhealthy outcomes. Nature never does monoculture. How many types of plants do we have on this planet? How many varieties of bird? There’s not “one bug to rule them all.” And we’ve got such diversity in “fish” that, if we’re honest, the category doesn’t hold up very well (find your own link to that rabbit hole).
These rebrands seem to be in keeping with the dumbing down of society generally. Our national literacy isn’t amazing. It seems that collectively we read around the 7th/8th grade level. But how often do we even have an opportunity to flex? Everything around us is basically at that level. We can appreciate the government trying to simplify language in government documents, but that doesn’t seem necessary in every area of our lives.
It could be that all of the oversimplification is a concession to the overwhelming complexity of modern life. Maybe you’ve had a long day and if “I-95” is better than “Interstate 95,” we can apply that logic to other areas of life and give you some relief. We get decision fatigue, maybe we also get detail fatigue. We’re inundated by so many words and brands and slogans, wordless logos are all we can handle.
On the other hand, it seems like we can and should handle more. If we are taught that “Kentucky Fried Chicken” is overwhelming and that a university press logo that reflects its heritage is archaic and irrelevant—what are we saying to ourselves? While only seeing KFC probably won’t make us less equipped for complexity in more serious scenarios, it may be unnecessarily limiting our exposure to complexity. What if we need to build up a little tolerance to longer words, phrases, even sentences? Maybe we can build up from there to ideas.
HBO Max becoming Max reflects the way in which TL;DR has become an approach to life. But that mentality hasn’t really been doing the best work for us lately. It’s important that sometimes we have to slow down before we consume. It allows us time to reflect and consider. It’s good to be able to distinguish brands. It’s good to sometimes encounter challenging sentences. That way we don’t just nod and move on. Clarity is important but complexity is also sometimes necessary, and the best work can combine the two. At the end of the day, we can handle a little more complexity than we’re getting.