The Blind Giant (25 page)

A hundred years later, machine-made items, endlessly replicable, were popularized in the austerity period following the Second World War. They were supposed to be democratic: art for everyone, not just for the wealthy. This was art the ordinary people could keep and inhabit: a concept iterated a thousand times being just as splendid as a one-off masterpiece.
Art nouveau – the successor to Ruskin’s
Arts and Crafts movement – had by then itself been pilloried as a death of the individual. The influential architect
Adolf Loos described in 1900 a perfect artisan
dwelling place that echoed every aspect of its owner, leaving him essentially with nothing to do but die: he had been perfectly expressed by his home, so there could be nothing more to add to the story of his life.

Loos’s thinking, like Ruskin’s, embraced art and culture both, and his perception was that the removal of ornamentation was a sign of cultural progress. The process of purification in modernism was evidence of evolution, where art nouveau was ‘erotic and degenerate’. Loos might well have approved of the seamlessness of our present technological devices: led by Apple, the makers of smartphones have eschewed physical ornamentation of any kind, reaching instead for industrial design
. The original
iPhone was a smooth aluminium and glass lozenge; the more recent model, the iPhone 4, is black plastic and glass. In a major concession, Apple has also produced the iPhone in white. Aside from the touch screen, there is one main button, a volume control, and an off switch. The phone absolutely cannot be physically customized; that is to say, opening it voids the warranty. It is as much an extension of Apple’s identity into its users’ as it is a personal item – and that is true of the software that operates it too, blending the technology of the device into a recognizably bland shopfront for selling content. The late
Steve Jobs said in an interview that he didn’t like to talk about design: ‘it’s not really how they look, it’s how they work’, and yes, the function of the iPhone absolutely overrides its physical form. But that, in itself, can be read as a message too: that existence alone is not important, that you should be judged on what you do. Worth is instrumental, not inherent.

Actions are important, of course, and this is not to mount an assault on Apple;
Sir Jonathan Ives’ designs are profoundly elegant, and the system inside is superb; a single iPhone, as a unique object, is a gorgeous and immensely useful tool. It’s the spectacle of millions of units, each the same as the last, each not so much an identity as a vector for the transmission of identity in either
direction, which becomes disturbing, and evokes Ruskin’s concerns.

Each phone being identical is important because it means that (unlike with Google’s competing
Android platform) software developers can work in the knowledge that everyone will be running their apps on the same device. The screen will be the same size, the same accelerometer will be installed, the same chips. It also means that a lost or damaged phone can be replaced and – once the backed-up data is transferred – the new phone will to all intents and purposes be the old one. It’s a practical issue, not obviously an ideological one. The upshot, though, is the same: we carry interchangeable devices, and we are encouraged to see their smoothness as a virtue and to think of their lack of identity as an identity in itself, or at least, to see identity – which you might also think of as a style of being – as something that can be assembled out of pre-made parts rather than expressed uniquely and organically. From Adolf Loos to
Bruce Mau to Apple to us: does the homogeneity of pure design diminish the human? What does it mean that you buy your device from an Apple Store, which is an abstract entity in physical form, the physical instantiation of Apple’s online presence and even its system self, rather than from a unique local vendor? If a given technology carries a message, does the design of our technology imply interchangeability and uniformity – and does that, in turn, imply it about us as individuals?

It sounds a rather fanciful question, but the anonymity of our technology is glaring when you consider how it might otherwise have been. In 1996 novelist
William Gibson wrote in
Idoru
about artisan laptops:

The textureless lines of our technology lack any sense of play in their construction, of the uniqueness and history of Gibson’s fictional devices. The exteriors of the Nexus S, the iPhone, the Kindle, the Vaio – all these are functional and industrial. There’s no space in them for a sculptor’s joke or a designer’s concession to light or local materials. And while that may not seem important – after all, surely what’s inside them matters far more – it continues a mood that permeates the industry as a whole, in which standardization is preferable because it makes the whole process easier – perhaps even makes it possible – for the company and its machines.

The human is secondary; even, actually, in terms of ergonomics. The structures of portable computers are not friendly to prolonged use by humans: they cause cramp, RSI and back pain. There have been occasional attempts to shift this: IBM briefly made a laptop with a fold-out keyboard of ergonomic design, but it was flimsy and the model was dropped. No one has ever made a laptop that did not put the screen at the wrong height for a human typing on the keyboard. Yes, of course, there are conflicting constraints of portability. But the ingenuity that has been applied to other seemingly insurmountable problems is absent. The designs are convenient for a non-human mass-production and distribution system, and that convenience is then packaged as being something desirable, something to be aspired to.

The same was true to an extent in the austerity years, but it’s hard to argue with that in the context. Beauty of any sort was hard to come by in the fatigued post-war environment, and the understanding of it had been newly and appallingly altered by the discovery of the Nazi Holocaust.
Theodor Adorno, the
influential cultural critic, wrote in 1951 that to write lyric poetry after Auschwitz was impossible. The clean, unornamented lines of period furniture and houses were a reflection of that sense that embellishment and frivolous beauty were out of place. The functional cleanness of modern design bowed to a need, quite above and beyond the fact that there wasn’t the time or the wealth to do anything else.

We’ve moved on from that problem into a new one. The successors of
Marcel Breuer and
Eileen Gray are IKEA and MFI, turning out replicas of revivals of copies and converting homes into airport lounges. Modernism isn’t a design ethos any more, it’s an economy of scale, and a marketing tool to sell the ordinary as something special, the sexless as erotic. A technological device without a specific, personalized identity has a subtext: it asserts the value of instrumentality. Its design is a reflection of its role. It’s ironic that the
iPhone and its competitors should come from one of the most identifiable and unique personalities of the modern age,
Steve Jobs, who died in October 2011, and whose life has reshaped the digital landscape at almost every turn. The iPhone’s inner self is like Jobs: versatile, adaptable and intriguing, but its exterior is everything its creator wasn’t: sheer, stark, easily mass produced. The anonymity of these objects is part of what they are: interchangeable commodities whose uniqueness in so far as they possess any is created by what is done with them. Function is an identity. And that identity is something we are encouraged to incorporate into our perception of self, that anonymity is proposed as something to emulate. Whimsy and uniqueness are indulgences; handwork is just an awkward approximation of computer-assisted cutting. Precision is good, and the narrative of an object’s creation in the hands of a workman is a bizarre sideshow, not really the point of the object.

Is it too much of a stretch to connect that idea – that what an item really is, really means, is a product of how it is used – with
the sense of disconnection and hopelessness that organizations such as the
Joseph Rowntree Foundation identify as part of the social problems that led to the UK riots? ‘Through our research, we know that people in some places feel absolutely powerless … they believe their aspirations are frustrated and that whatever their effort they will not be recognised … [they] are worried about living in a culture that has increasingly defined status through material possessions …’
⁵
Does our technological culture tacitly propose that nothing is of value (as opposed to financial worth) of itself; its significance is determined not by its substance, but by what it can do? In which case if your prospects are not good, you are unlikely to achieve any value, or any discrete identity of your own, and the world has no place for you. In this picture, the specific self is without value: only the connection really means anything. Not that Apple and Google are responsible for this; rather that they incidentally lend strength to it, just as TV and film once contributed to the perception that smoking was a trait of the rebel.

You may argue that this issue is nebulous. But certainly, what our technological design lacks is the concept at the heart of this book: a sense of self. Our devices do not express who we are, except to brand us as belonging to a particular group of users, consumers and commodities. Loos has, for the moment, won his battle. The hand that assembled my desktop’s components assembled a thousand like it and never made any impact on how they look or function; the designer who created it never touched the one I work on; the human narratives that could be in our technology are brushed away to make a perfectly artificial product with no history. We deny their origins, perhaps even are uncomfortable with them – the sweatshop labour, the mines where the coltan comes from – and we shut down a part of ourselves to avoid seeing.
William Gibson’s fictional sandbenders have history, and they reflect aspects of an unequal world. From the technology in the real life, you could imagine everything
everywhere was like an Apple Store. We buy an illusion of silvery modernity and progress, a ghost of the designs of Le Corbusier stripped of his idealistic ‘Open Hand’ (a gesture of peace and reciprocity), over something that tells us the story itself and affords us the understanding of another life. The commercial culture surrounding our present style of technological design encourages us, however slightly, to choose not to see.

In other words, on some level – however slight – the design and manufacture of our devices deindividuate us and disengage us from the living world. In exchange for that deficit, though, we get access to the feedback system that is developing in the social Internet, to discussions and vibrant conversations that reaffirm who we are even as they challenge it.

The twentieth century was the century of mechanization, of speed and of industry. It was a time of rapid social change, confusing and bewildering alterations in the relationships between nations, between individuals and society, between individuals and one another. The fundamental tenets of Western capitalist civilization were questioned, reaffirmed, questioned, redefined and so on. Social order in the form of the Church, the legitimacy of the state and the notion of family were scrutinized and in some ways found wanting. Gender roles were reassessed, and the ‘supermum’, juggling job and family and finding a path through the whole thing, became the standard for women to aspire to – never mind that it was precisely this juggling act that men were and are notably unable to achieve. In the 1990s, the complexity of the post-Cold War world became apparent. Twenty-four-hour news arrived, the environmental crisis became increasingly evident and then was assailed as a confidence trick, the notion of peak oil was mooted again. The world became difficult to understand without the massive blanket of nuclear pressure to homogenize and override its many aspects. Simple things –
actions, beliefs, situations and perceptions which required no examination – were harder and harder to find. Even those cherished abstract systems, supposedly infinitely transferable, began to show holes as modern agricultural techniques applied without local knowledge in some ‘third world’ countries caused famine rather than feast, and not every model of industry proved instantly replicable in a new cultural context.

There’s no question that the arrival of always-on digital technology has added in some ways to this sense of bombardment, in large part because it makes us available even when we are not out in public, in part because it connects those different cultural contexts, allowing them – forcing them? – to rub shoulders. However, looking at what digital technology does, and the changes its use causes in us, there’s another way of seeing it: it’s not the problem, it’s the response.