Why Nothing Looks Cool Anymore [video]
youtube.com
youtube.com
And there’s something super dystopian about the idea -
When I was a kid basically four things governed the emotion you felt about a car. What it looked like on the outside, how far the gas pedal was depressed whether or not the window was open and what was playing on the radio.
The experience of driving a car was one of the things we most looked forward to about growing up, and now we’re trying to abstract that away.
And I feel it myself - there is something exciting or stimulating in modern cars about - where the screens are, how big they are, what colors are on them. But how backwards that is to the whole original notion of design.
It is something I often think about in life that, inefficiency is where our humanity is.
This video went way beyond the boundaries of its premise to ask the same kind of questions you did about “where our humanity is”. I often say that when (if) historians look back from 10,000 years in the future there will be general agreement that the period from the late 1950s through the early 2000s will turn out to have been the best patch of human existence — the time when the throttle of possibilities was suddenly wide open and politico-corporate control systems hadn’t yet figured out how to clamp down again. (See also: Iain M. Banks, The State of the Art.)