The Beauty of Technology

Long ago, when the book Beautiful Code was first published, I read a few blog posts where the authors stated that they had never seen beautiful code. Everything they worked on was always grungy, I felt sorry for them.

Technologies can be beautiful; it is rare in modern times, but still possible.

I’ll broadly define ‘technology’ as anything that allows humans to manipulate the world around us. It’s a very wide net.

Probably the first such occurrence was mastering fire. We learned to use it to purify food and for warmth and security. Clothes are another early example, they reduce the effect of the weather on us.

Everything we do to alter or control the natural world is technology. Farming, animal domestication, and tools. It has obviously had a great effect on us, we reached our highest-ever population, which would have not been possible before. We’ve spanned the globe, surviving in even its darkest corners. So, as far as we are concerned technology is good, it has helped us immensely.

But as well as making our lives easier, it is also the source of a lot of misery. We’ve become proficient at war for example. We have a long history of inventing ever-increasing weapons that kill more effectively. Without knives, swords, guns, canons, tanks, planes, ships, etc. wars would be far less lethal and have less collateral damage. Technologies make it easy to rain down destruction on large tracts of land killing all sorts of innocents.

So technologies are both good and bad. It depends on how we choose to use them.

Within that context, technologies can be refined or crude. You might have a finely crafted hammer with a clever design that makes it usable for all sorts of applications. Or a big stick that can be used to beat other people. We can build intricate machines like cars that transport wherever we want to go at speeds far better than walking, or planes that can carry hundreds of people quickly to the other side of the planet.

When we match the complexities of our solutions to the difficulties of the problems we want to solve, we get good fitting technologies. It might require a lot of effort to manufacture a good winter jacket for example, but it holds in the heat and lasts for a long time. All of the hundreds of years of effort in materials, textiles, and production can produce a high-quality coat that can last for decades. You can rely on your jacket for winter after winter, knowing that it will keep the cold at bay.

And it’s that trust and reliability along with its underlying sophistication that make it beautiful. You know that a lot of care went into the design and construction and that any unintentional side effects are negligible or at least mostly mitigated. You have some faith for example that the jacket is not lined with asbestos and that the price of warmth is a sizable risk of cancer.

You can trust that such obvious flaws were avoided out of concern and good craftsmanship. It doesn’t mean that there is a guarantee that the jacket is entirely not carcinogenic, just that it is not intentional or even likely accidental. Everyone involved in the production cared enough to make sure that it was the best it could be given all of the things we know about the world.

So, rather obviously if some accountant figured out how to save 0.1% of the costs as extra profit by substituting in a dangerous or inferior material, that new jacket is not beautiful, it is an abomination. A trick to pretend to be something it is not.

In that sense beautiful references not only its design and its construction but also that everybody along the way in its creation did their part with integrity and care. Beauty is not just how it looks, but is ingrained into every aspect of what it is.

We do have many beautiful technologies around us, although since the popularity of planned obsolescence, we are getting tricked far more often. Still, there are these technologies that we trust and that really do help make our lives better. They look good both externally and internally. You have to admire their conception. People cared about doing a good job and it shows.

Beauty is an artifact of craftsmanship. It is a manifestation of all of the skill, knowledge, patience, and understanding that went into it. It is the sum of its parts and all of its parts are beautiful. The way it was assembled was beautiful, everything in and around it was carefully labored over and done as best as it can be imagined to have been done. Beauty in that sense is holistic. All around.

Beauty is not more expensive, just rarer. If you were tricked into thinking something is beautiful when it is not, you have already priced it in, the difference is an increase in profit.

People always want easy money, so beauty is fleeting. The effort that went into something in the past is torn apart by those looking for money, thus negative tradeoffs get made. Things are a little cheaper in the hopes that people don’t notice. Little substitutions here and there that quietly devalue the technology in order to squeeze more money from it. Tarnished beauty, a sort of monument to the beauty of the past, but no longer present. Driven by greed and ambition, counter to the skilled craftsmanship of earlier times.

Technologies can be beautiful, but that comes from the care and skill of the people who create them. Too often in the modern world, this is discouraged, as if just profit all by itself is enough of a justification. It is not. Nobody wants to surround themselves with crap or cheap untrustworthy stuff. Somehow we have forgotten that.