It’s a question critics have been asking, in various ways, for decades. It helps that midcentury design encompasses a remarkably wide and ill-defined period, encompassing many decades and many distinct schools and movements. Meanwhile, midcentury design also plays into our collective fixation on tidy, clean spaces. A lot of it was designed to be mass-produced–and indeed, plenty of knock-offs have sprung up online. It is humane and inclusive, an inoffensive design camouflage that can easily be picked up online or in countless chain stores around the country. It’s reigned in pop culture, from Mad Men to Keeping Up with the Kardashians. “I’m reading a book about Le Courvoisier, which is an architect,” Kris Jenner recently said in one clip. “It’s so weird and boring, but I’m obsessed.”

It’s the pumpkin spice latte of the design world: a prefabricated style so inoffensive and ubiquitous that even cynics eventually yield to its nostalgic, neutral warmth. There are many deeper, near-anthropological explanations for the rise of midcentury design, though. It was popularized during the Cold War, when the U.S. sought to portray well-designed American consumer goods as an ideological weapon against the USSR. Then there is theory proposed by the New Yorker‘s Adam Gopnik, the Golden Forty Year Rule, which states that nostalgia moves in 40-year cycles, where cultural nostalgia follows a pattern of popularizing styles and aesthetics from roughly four decades prior. Fascinatingly, the term “midcentury design” itself didn’t even exist until it was coined in the mid-1980s, as Laura Fenton reported last year. Google’s Ngram Viewer definitely seems to support the 40-year rule, with mentions of “midcentury modern” exploding around 2000.

It may also be the product of a great averaging: as algorithms track our preferences and shape our online lives accordingly, we’re all becoming more and more similar. Siri and Alexa, for example, are killing off regional accents. Facebook crafts our news feeds so they match up to what it knows we already love and hate. Companies like Airbnb and WeWork are popularizing the same generic spaces across the globe; it even has a name, recently christened by Kyle Chayka: airspace. Midcentury modern design, it seems, is another form of technological averaging–the cream, gray, and wood-paneled amalgam of all user tastes.

Another fascinating data point about its popularity comes from the home design startup Modsy. The company was founded by Google Ventures and Autodesk alumna Shanna Tellerman, who specialized in game development at CMU and went on to work in the game industry before launching Modsy in August. Tellerman is applying her expertise in game development and rendering to an unlikely space: interior design. To her, it’s an industry that’s badly in need of better UX, a belief reinforced by her own experience trying, and failing, to decorate her new home in San Francisco.