quote · Legacy record
Modernism isn't a design ethos any more, it's an economy of scale, and a marketing tool to sell the ordinary as something special, the sexless as erotic. A technological device without a specific, personalized identity has a subtext: it asserts the value of instrumentality. Its design is a reflection of its role... The anonymity of these objects is part of what they are: interchangeable commodities whose uniqueness in so far as they possess any is created by what is done with them. Function is an identity. And that identity is something we are encouraged to incorporate into our perception of self, that anonymity is proposed as something to emulate. Whimsy and uniqueness are indulgences.
Modernism isn't a design ethos any more, it's an economy of scale, and a marketing tool to sell the ordinary as something special, the sexless as erotic. A technological device without a specific, personalized identity has a subtext: it asserts the value of instrumentality. Its design is a reflection of its role... The anonymity of these objects is part of what they are: interchangeable commodities whose uniqueness in so far as they possess any is created by what is done with them. Function is an identity. And that identity is something we are encouraged to incorporate into our perception of self, that anonymity is proposed as something to emulate. Whimsy and uniqueness are indulgences.
Approximate author period: c. 1972 AD · modern
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- Author or tradition
- Nick Harkaway
Attribution: attributed - Country attributed
- Not established
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- Approximate author period: c. 1972 AD · modern
Approximate author-period anchor from documented birth year 1972; activity date not established; Wikidata Q1985398, https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q1985398 (accessed 2026-10-08). Not a quotation composition date.
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Supplied reference C; CSV row 296862; supplied attribution, independently unverified
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