severnayazemlya:
untiltheseashallfreethem:
A couple of weeks ago, I was sitting in DC Union Station waiting for my train, and I noticed some huge advertisement banners for a technology company. And I was thinking about the design of those advertisements: very clean, with smooth simple lines and a pastel gradient in the background. You know the aesthetic – it seems very common for technology advertisements these days; Macs have it too.
And I was wondering how this became the default aesthetic for technology. After all, other aesthetics are equally possible. I mean, consider steampunk: you can have an aesthetic for technology that emphasizes its detail and complexity, and people will find that aesthetic appealing and even awe-inspiring. So why haven’t technology companies adopted that aesthetic for their advertisements?
I suspect it’s because… a lot of people are intimidated by technology, and a clean, simple design helps to alleviate fears that a new technology will be “too complicated to use”. I’m reminded of Ribbonfarm’s essay on the Manufactured Normalcy Field. Technology in science fiction is going to have a different aesthetic than technology in advertisements, because science fiction wants to emphasize the strangeness and otherness of its technology (to make the story more interesting), while advertisements want to emphasize the simplicity and usability of a technology (so that people will actually want to buy it). As Ribbonfarm points out, we call a smartphone a “phone” so that people will be comforted by the familiarity, even though it’s a very different device. And presumably we design technology advertisements to look clean and smooth for similar reasons: a clean, smooth design conveys a feeling of simplicity. It’s easy to process the aesthetic visually, and so people will assume it’s easy to use the technology as well.
I think maybe… a lot of my aversion to technology comes from this aesthetic, which I really don’t like. It seems too sterile, too lifeless, too plastic. And maybe, if technology were portrayed in a steampunk sort of way, or a mindblowing, incommensurable sort of way, I wouldn’t be so afraid of it. I might even like it and embrace (some kind of) transhumanism. Maybe my objection is not to technology, but to this particular oversimplified aesthetic. My aesthetic is unfathomable complexity, and I’m afraid of anything that tries to take that away. But technology doesn’t necessarily have to do that.
Part of the problem with trying to give technology an awe-inspiring aesthetic is that people associate it with Hitler. If you read The Gernsback Continuum by William Gibson – it’s about six pages long and it’s online somewhere – you’ll see this in spades: in an alternate timeline, there are beautiful high-tech buildings and so on, but this is actually bad because. you see, in this alternate present, there are people with blond hair and blue eyes, i.e. disgusting avatars of Satan, and that’s how you know this alternate present is bad, and beautiful high-tech buildings are bad, and so on. In our present, there are cheap motels and porn, but this is actually good because it is unhitlerlich.
Then there was the time I linked a VNV Nation song – ‘technology should have an awe-inspiring aesthetic’ is VNV Nation’s entire gimmick – and @krwks said it sounded like it came from an alternate timeline where Hitler won.
That’s all more art deco than steampunk. The problem with steampunk is just that it’s gimmicky and low-status.
I think maybe two reasons.
Number one, there’s a sort of “raw look” for technology where there are wires poking out of everything and it’s all boxy unpainted metal. I think our modern technology aesthetic is an attempt to go as far from the unfinished look as possible in order to look rich - ie “instead of just buying the technology in its raw form, I can afford to have a designer piece.”
Number two, I think that people associate raw technology with danger - live wires, toxic chemicals, exhaust fumes, the chance of accidentally bumping against something and having the whole thing explode - so having it look the opposite of unfinished technology is reassuring.
I think in the past, technology was inherently cool, so having raw technology that looked like technology was a way of saying “Look how cool I am, I have technology!”. Now even poor people can afford to have raw technology, and so having technology that doesn’t look like technology - having a sort of Zen minimalist “I live in harmony with nature” aesthetic - is the new thing.