First Quarter (Zodiac Series): The form is the function

Hello. It's Friday, and after a decidedly false start last month, I'm making a fresh attempt at my concept for a twelve-month post series integrating my lunar work with the Western/Babylonian tropical zodiac: one post apiece focused on a zodiacal constellation and its ruling planet. Despite writing barely anything for Aries last month, I have no reservations today about continuing onward to Taurus, as in some ways I find it fitting for the content of an Aries post to be an open, null set: the tarot card I map to Aries season is 0, The Fool, infinite in identity and possibility. When the signs and the Wheel have spun full circle again, I may well conclude with the first post I meant to write, but in the meantime I'm making do.

In my personal associations and also more or less traditionally, Taurus is a sign related to material matters because its element is earth, and it's also a highly aesthetic sign because its ruling planet is Venus. While Taurus has parallels with some other signs for traits like artistry, hedonism, stubbornness, and flamboyance alike, I can't think of any others that are said to embody all of those qualities at once — save perhaps my own Sun sign of Leo, but there I would still say the emphasis is different, as Leo's fire makes the stubbornness also impatient, whereas Taurus operates more steadily, more methodically. And although no labor or pastime is someone's astrological destiny (or taboo), I tend to think of Taurus as aligning particularly well with not only artists but artisans, craftspeople, designers.

As one of my focuses for the Moon's First Quarter is often hand crafts, here in Taurus season I would thus particularly like to use a First Quarter post for delving back into the value of hand crafts as a whole. Here is an earnest ode for form and function intertwined.

Design 101, versus our surroundings

The false dichotomy of "the beautiful" and "the practical" has been deconstructed and turned inside out by more philosophers and designers than I can possibly count. It may be enough to summarize such endeavors with the understanding that a fabricated item's form should ideally emerge from its function, and in turn that something pleasant to use is more useful because it will be used more. I am not sure who would sincerely contend that a practical object should never be beautiful, let alone that such an object should be deliberately ugly. The real design challenge is in recognizing that something beautiful will not serve its theoretical purpose if certain beautiful features are not fully thought through; then those features will ultimately support a different purpose.

Now as a disclaimer, my awareness of design principles comes from what some people might consider a rather slipshod background. Academically I do have a philosophy degree, but in pursuing that degree I only briefly entered the study of aesthetics. For the most part, I've learned design through, well, designing — but sometimes immaterial things like theatre lighting, or workplace processes. I've also worked heavily on game design — but in a somewhat odd context where most of the digital tools that such designers often use were not available to me. My entry into hand crafts through knitting has been a very recent development, so when it comes to highly visible, highly tangible physical construction I'm nowhere near an expert; I'm more of an appreciator. But I raise all of this to say that even if I don't know so much about design in an "official" way, the design ethos I just described in the preceding paragraph is so rudimentary that I'm sure a first-year university student of design would have to be exposed to it immediately.

But whether or not that's a safe assumption on my part, these days it sadly does not seem that such a basic design concept is preserved in enough professional design settings. Digital technology has become one of the worst offenders lately, as highlighted by commentators like Ed Zitron or Cory Doctorow.[1] In the pervasive realm of tech that Zitron dubs the rot economy, design hallmarks include companies mistaking surface flash for nonexistent underlying substance, such as with the LLM grift where a machine accomplishes seemingly astounding feats but won't exactly be changing the world in any of the utopian ways that Sam Altman promises; or conversely, companies over-design for functionality to the point of feature bloat, and the form in turn becomes hideous, such as the psychic barrage that occurs for anyone opening Facebook these days.[2]

Ultimately, though, if the tech industry has become a notorious contemporary offender for bad design, it isn't as if these types of failings are brand new. An equally apt name for the rot economy would just be late-stage capitalism, an inevitable outcome of all capitalism's alienation of labor from the commodities this labor produces. Industrialization especially accelerated this process; as more than two centuries have now been spent with goods made for rapid consumption, the only ways to keep profits rising are to make those goods cheaply, which means making them function worse and break fast — or to make the goods reasonably well but artificially limit the lifespan of their usefulness. Either way, we must of course eternally buy more.

All of this is to say that if we want to look for some of the best-designed things, those things are usually not coming off an assembly line. When they are, they're an exception that proves the rule.

"Made with love" should be more than a slogan

By contrast, a hand crafted physical object can still be at the mercy of capitalist pressures but intrinsically carries a far better chance of being both genuinely useful and genuinely lovely. Perhaps for some people this chance is wrapped up in the item's uniqueness — who doesn't admire a unique work of art in Walter Benjamin's age of mechanical reproducibility? In my case, however, I find the uniqueness less important than the fact that someone spent an intimate degree of effort on the thing they made.

A skilled potter can make relatively identical copies of the same vase; I would consider any one of those vases more necessarily valuable than a unique diamond ring that was sourced through colonial supply chains and relied essentially on slave labor. Likewise, people do not value a Stradivarius violin because it bears some magically distinct property from more modern violins, given how acoustic analysis consistently shows that no one can really tell the difference in sound; a Stradivarius is valued rather because its official maker and his sons became particularly well-recognized for the quality of their work at the time, and in hearing such a violin one feels like there is something to connect with.

When someone works closely with the thing they are making, they develop a bond with that thing, and I believe this can be sensed. Indeed, they put themselves into the thing. The more I've practiced knitting, the more I find this is a kind of love. Each knitted item I create — I love it. About half of my knitting so far has become a gift for someone else, so this love is not possessive; but it is love because I am attached to the end result. Wherever it goes without me, I won't sense it, and yet if it should return I would welcome it with open arms. I have also come to enjoy making gifts more than buying them, even if the bought ones still have their place.[3]

Therefore, I better understand why someone might throw the slogan "made with love" on their merchandise. But if it isn't made in such a personal way, I don't think it could be made with love at all. And even if it is, I admit I would struggle to describe my own artisanry with the same language, finding it cliché. I cannot deny that the love exists, however. A distinct but clear way to say the same thing would just be "made in relation."

And when an object is made in relation, with such give and take between the maker and the material, it often seems hard for the form and the function not to behave harmoniously. Among the woodworkers I've encountered, a piece of wood can quite literally describe its own purpose and shape while still raw; the carver's job is to listen and tease the thing out. When I see objects classified as "folk art," referring to them as art often elides how they are more likely to have a pragmatic function as well; I have grown highly suspicious that distinguishing between art and design, much like the modern denigration of craft stores[4], is a tool of cultural hegemony.

So let us make things that blur the line. We must only remember to do so directly, and to invest proper time and focus.

Better, longer, slower

This is one reason I mistrust and avoid anything that the LLM grift has tried to forge. As I have probably said here before, I do believe a "complete" artificial intelligence could be attributed animacy and personhood; this has immense ethical implications of its own, but it would mean the AI would have conscious investment in something it made, and might thus relate to it. But I also don't believe that humanity has achieved such an AI yet. It's currently and transparently beyond our planet's threshold of sustainability. Instead we are merely faced with a dubiously effective time-saver that as such can only serve highly commercial interests; outside a capitalist society, the entity would offer no emotional appeal compared to what is derived from truly making something with your own physical and cognitive skills.[5] It does not make anything in relation to that thing. At most, the relation is bad relation, given the theft of established creators' work to train the machine and also given the accelerated destruction of the earth to power it.

But much as I can get caught up in the luddite spirit, I care about facilitating true, literal hand crafts — and the mindset behind them — because of even deeper revolutionary aims. If more people were able to create things by hand again, it would be easier for us to prioritize local supply chains because we wouldn't need to rely on centralized factory hubs. If the incentive to mass-produce and mass-obsolesce were erased, these objects would also be more likely to last a while, and less of them would need to be made in the first place, furthering the economic degrowth strategy that the eco crisis demands of us. And there is the somatic reward of using one's body for something — not that manual labor is superior to the mental, nor that everyone's bodies are all equally able to do the same things, but a life entirely uncoupled from somatic engagement is not the same as a life where that engagement occurs to at least some degree.

In a better world where we were not so alienated from the things we made, we would also make what really needed to be made, and it would be beautiful, and strong, and elegant, and deliberate. Let us hold that prospect in our hearts for the remainder of Taurus season.

[1] I dislike Zitron's excessively choleric style and likewise I am aware of just how many people dislike Doctorow's coined term "enshittification" even though we can all agree it describes a real phenomenon. Still, they're some of the main journalistic critics of the tech industry that I've had recent exposure to, and I won't disagree with their overall views.

[2] Before anyone wonders, I deleted my primary Facebook account ten years ago this month. I have only logged in periodically on blank accounts for professional purposes now and again, and I actually just deleted both of those recently too.

[3] After all, I can't make everything that everyone in my life might appreciate.

[4] Seen as quaint, glitter-covered spaces for grandmothers and children (usually girls), when crafting is so much more than gluing uncooked macaroni together. And frankly, hail to the macaroni gluers, if it brings them delight.

[5] LLMs aren't even useful for automated drudge work unless the drudge work doesn't have life-or-death consequences. Hallucinations will always occur and human interventions will always be needed. Anything authoritative I could say about this would unfortunately come too close to my legal-name life, but let it suffice that I've witnessed this problem for years and years.

Thank you for reading, and as this particular series continues I will be curious to know if it enhances what you get out of this newsletter on the whole. Looking ahead to next week, however, I will be writing a post on runic divination for paid subscribers only, and now is a good time to note that if you pay to read my work instead of reading for free, not only does it compensate my time in our current economic model but it also helps to re-value writing instead of treating it like something a machine ought to produce. Meanwhile I remain unemployed, so I don't just appreciate this kind of support but need it.

All of that notwithstanding, I'm still trying to keep most of my thoughts here free of a paywall since I equally remain opposed to knowledge silos; so after next week's post the subsequent one will be public and involve a key return to death work.