“The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the “state of emergency” in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight.”
—Walter Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History"
- The future is over. All we have is the past. We must make sense of it.
- Modernist art, design, and culture-at-large of the early 20th century believed in the avant-garde, in the need for new styles and references that did not rely on the past. This was a necessary attitude to contend with the stagnation of cultural production—or at least the perception of it in the earliest days of the information age, when heightened exposure to the contents of the world had already begun to erode perception of that very content and the flow of culture. This attitude was, in hindsight, unbearably hubristic and naive. How could it not produce a slew of negative consequences? To strive for a culture that is absolutely new is to create in the dark.
- Design is a specific historical and institutional phenomenon that originated in the 19th century. Today we can retroactively name nearly all of human activity from the dawn of our species as design, but it is anachronistic to do so. Obfuscating the specificity of design weakens our ability to understand its agency and impact.
- An ontological understanding of design offers new frontiers for resisting the dominant logics of the discipline (and beyond), but it should be done self-consciously. That is to say, engaging in ontological design theorization should expand, acknowledge and work against the discipline of design and its logics.
- The future is over. Narratives of progress have proven time and again to be unfounded and illogical. At best, these narratives create an augmented reality in which the citizens of the global imperial core reside. They are passified. They are unaware that the horrors of the past are the horrors of today.
- Every day fewer people are unaware of the horrors of modernity as we travel further and deeper into the digital age which is marked by inundation and juxtaposition. The younger generations spend hours every day consuming an unfathomably broad range of content in a scrambled shuffle. They are entertained. They are amused. They are exposed to vast suffering. They are aware of the crimes of their governments. They know they have no future. They are numb. They laugh.
- We must not submit to conservative and essentialist understandings of the human. The human is always changing. The human has always changed with the technology it produces. We have always been cyborgs. The integration of new technologies into the category of the human is not a negative state of affairs. We understand smartphones and social media to be bad for us because we have not acclimated to the change yet. Do not scorn the change; understand it.
- The United States military is perhaps the largest polluting entity in the world, with more annual emissions than most countries. The billionaire class emits more CO2 on private jets in a year than most countries annual emissions. The mainstream assumption that designers can solve the climate crisis in any meaningful way is nonsensical. It is akin to the oil and gas industry’s public relations campaigns that created the narrative of personal responsibility. Climate change does not happen because of the average citizen’s furnishings or habits. It happens because of capitalist greed and the disregard of empire for land and people.
- Not only is sustainability design ineffective, it anesthetizes the only possible solution to the climate crisis: a popular movement to end greed, logics of production and growth, and practices that favor profit over people. To this end, the assumption that we can design a sustainable world within the existing political-economic structure is not only an illusion, but a tool to obfuscate our awareness of reality.
- We designers should narrow our scope of impact. Design has been instrumental in creating an unsustainable world by operating with the goal of solving the world’s problems. It is time that we do away with designing with the goal of solving the world’s problems. It is time that we design to make our lives and the lives of those near us better.
- The individual designer should do two things:
- Create and sustain communities of care, support, and aid
- Design things that help us make sense of the contemporary world. And cope with it.
- When the world was colder in temperature and warmer in human experience, ornamentation was a given because it made more pleasant the lives of the people who saw it.
- Pastiche is a gift. Pastiche is context and reality. Pastiche is creating in a room full of light.
- Embrace the enigma. Be the cyborg.
- The future is over. All we have is what we have.