the.com/standardization

Making a million things boringly identical so they all actually work together.

means The process of setting a single agreed-upon spec or format so that different makers' products, parts, or practices are interchangeable and predictable.

from From 'standard,' which traces back through Old French 'estendart' to a root meaning a banner or flag planted as a rallying point for troops — literally something fixed in place that others gather around and measure themselves against. The leap from 'battle flag' to 'official measure of quality' happened by the late medieval period, once royal 'standards' for weights, coinage, and cloth became the fixed point everyone's goods had to match. Add the '-ize/-ization' machinery (make into, process of) and you get the 19th-century industrial-age word for forcing everything else to line up with that flag.

screw threads
once varied by factory, ruining interchangeable parts
shipping containers
a 1956 size standard built global trade
paper sizes
iso a4 halves perfectly into itself forever
tradeoff
kills variety to buy reliability at scale
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