The Aesthetic of Sleekness

 

I hope we're near the end of the era of the aesthetic of sleekness.  Everything these days is designed to be sleek, simple, smooth.  Everything is frictionless, characterless, blank, boring, nothing.  When, one day, we look back at the aesthetic of this era, when it has become quaint, even retro, how will it look to us?  What will it signify?  What kind of vision of the future did it portend?

Nowadays, there are two overriding aesthetics, especially radiating out of the tech world: infantilization and sleekness.  (You see the infantilization in, for instance, the colorful font of Alphabet, the parent company of Google, and in many other places.)  

I see them as two sides of the same coin.  The implication is clear: you, the consumers, are children- innocent, simple idiots. We, your tech oligarchs, are inscrutable, mysterious, awesome, opaque, dark, very slightly menacing.  Occasionally gray or silver or white, but mostly jet black.  Every product is trying to be the monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey, in the midst of the apes.

Sleekness is ideology materialized - pseudo-Platonic idealism rendered into plastic.  It's a lack of creativity retconned into a standard of beauty.  It would be interesting if it weren't already ubiquitous, if everything didn't already look like this.  At this point it has become mindless uniformity and aggressive meaninglessness.  Not to mention that it makes everything harder to use.  Who was the idiot who decided that machines can't have buttons anymore?  Someone at Apple, I suppose?  Like 20 years ago?  Or more?  Whoever it was, these days, the "Wow" factor is long gone - now we just feel frustration that no one knows how to use the damn thing.  The movement reached its apogee with the Tesla Truck, which has hammered the point home that in 2026, sleekness looks stupid.  

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