On Ugliness

I have made absolutely no effort to design this blog. There is a practical and an ideological reason for this. The practical reason is I'm not smart enough to work the Blogger design setting without serious  effort. And I still won't be happy with the product because blogs are nearly always ugly. It should go without saying that the templates offered are hideous. Beyond redemption. Not just lacking goodness but possibly participating in evil.

The only blogs I can think of, off the top of my head, that aren't incredibly ugly were designed with some professional participation - someone to create the title bar, match the colours, do some customization of the layout. And while I occasionally work as a professional designer I am not a stylist by inclination. So it's ugly.

The ideological reason has to do with the ubiquity of "design". The word gets, and deserves, scare-quotes because the seven thousand different cocktail sets you can buy, or the even larger numbers of salt and pepper shakers, iPhone accessories, and cet that aren't really design; they are almost pure products, existing for no reason other than to be purchased. They offer nothing to the purchaser other than possession. They serve no function other than as symbolic carriers of identity - the self you bought.

I am sick of designed shit. I am tired of being forced to chose between fifty versions of the same thing because I supposedly want something personal to me, something that fits a constructed identity, what Gibson calls "an external token of self". I do not want anyone to think they can tell anything about me by my choice of colours for this blog, or by the layout, or by the font. It's just words in an ugly face.

So it's ugly by default. Ugly by design. Ugly by intent. Its ugliness participates in a kind of purity most things lack. I find it symptomatic of our culture that beauty must be considered with deep suspicion and while ugly reads as pure. There is, of course, artifice here as well. But it is a simple one and easily seen through. I am leaving this ugly so the lack of polish will imply a kind of purity, straightforwardness, and authenticity it self-evidently lacks. It is what it is, don't think about it too much.

There is one last reason this is ugly. I think the proliferation of designed objects is not to provide consumers with choice so much as to provide the illusion of choice. At its most basic, this illusion functions as a stand in for power; you are not completely powerless in this society because you are free to buy completely different shit than other people. You can even choose to buy shit neither you, nor anyone you know, would ever actually want, thus demonstrating both your power and freedom. This is also true, or perhaps more fundamental, of the thousands of iPhone accessories available. These are compound accessories - useless things one buys to augment, protect, or disguise another useless thing previously bought. Don't get me wrong, iPhones are pretty cool gadgets but I have never found myself seriously inconvenienced because I don't own one. And no one will ever convince me they bought one because of the utility of the object. iPhones sell because they are cultural identifiers. And the accessories sell because people are uncool with some aspect of the culture being identified and want to mask, occlude, or deny it.

The fact the phone I do own cost $7 and is almost universally recognized as the cheapest cell phone in the world (and likely the cheapest possible cell phone) is something to be deconstructed another day.