Daily Features

Ray Bradbury, Jaron Lanier, and “The Digital Flattening of Expression”

By Mark Fox March 19, 2014

I had never read Ray Bradbury until I started reading Fahrenheit 451 to my son Lukas last year. About halfway through the 1953 novel there is a conversation between Faber, a retired English professor, and Montag, a “fireman” whose profession now entails the burning of books. Faber is speaking:

Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 (Simon & Schuster), first published 1953

“Do you know why books such as this are so important? Because they have quality. And what does the word quality mean? To me it means texture. This book has pores. It has features. This book can go under the microscope. You’d find life under the glass, streaming past in infinite profusion. The more pores, the more truthfully recorded details of life per square inch you can get on a sheet of paper, the more ‘literary’ you are. That’s my definition, anyway. Telling detail. Fresh detail. The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies.”

In reading this passage I was struck by its empathy with themes in Jaron Lanier’s 2010 manifesto You Are Not a Gadget. Comparing an artifact with its digital representation, Lanier writes, “A real painting is a bottomless mystery, like any other real thing…. It has texture, odor, and a sense of presence and history.” A digital image or “digital fragment,” on the other hand, isn’t really “distinct from any other; they can be morphed and mashed up.” Like mediocre writing, it turns out that the digital copy has no pores.

Faber continues: “So now do you see why books are hated and feared? They show the pores in the face of life. The comfortable people want only wax moon faces, poreless, hairless, expressionless. We are living in a time when flowers are trying to live on flowers, instead of growing on good rain and black loam.”

Jaron Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget (Knopf), 2010

The culture that Faber describes is creatively bankrupt because it is disconnected from authentic experience; from life itself. Six decades later, aspects of Bradbury’s dystopian future feel disturbingly present tense. Lanier echoes the image of flowers living on flowers in You Are Not a Gadget when he describes contemporary culture as “effectively eating its own seed stock.” Lanier believes that “Authorship—the very idea of the individual point of view—is not a priority of the new ideology.” Our remix culture, which thrives by cannibalizing older, original works while simultaneously obscuring its sources, is responsible for “the digital flattening of expression into a global mush.”

As visual artists, what can we do to resist this flattening of culture? For one thing, we can continue to create artifacts—physical objects with texture and pores. Original, analog artifacts with quality: sketches, drawings, photographs, print designs, and paintings.

Published in Emigre in 2004, Randy Nakamura’s essay “The Grand Unified Theory of Nothing” posits that, “Yes, design is about analysis and problem-solving, but its fundamental impact on the world (for better or worse) is in the artifacts and form it produces. This is the only way ideas survive in design. To denigrate form and artifact making in design is to destroy its essence and reduce it to a generic role of think tank or consultant.”

As Nakamura notes, “The design artifacts you leave behind will be your ultimate legacy.” Our artifacts will also serve to enrich the larger culture. Go to it!

Mark Fox, partner in the graphic design studio Design is Play, was featured in Designers & Books’ Book List of the Week on March 10, 2014.

Book List of the Week: Mark Fox

Erik Spiekermann's Book List

10 Books on Making

Carlo Scarpa: Connecting the Glass Artist and the Architect

comments powered by Disqus

Announcements

Now is Better by Stefan Sagmeister

Now is Better

By Stefan Sagmeister
Publisher: Phaidon Press
Published: October 2023

Combining art, design, history, and quantitative analysis, transforms data sets into stunning artworks that underscore his positive view of human progress, inspiring us to think about the future with much-needed hope.

Order the book.

Design Emergency: Building a Better Future by Alice Rawsthorn and Paola Antonelli

Design Emergency: Building a Better Future

By Alice Rawsthorn and Paola Antonelli
Publisher: Phaidon Press
Published: May 2022

Rawsthorn and Antonelli tell the stories of the remarkable designers, architects, engineers, artists, scientists, and activists who are at the forefront of positive change worldwide. Focusing on four themes—Technology, Society, Communication, and Ecology—the authors present a unique portrait of how our great creative minds are developing new design solutions to the major challenges of our time, while helping us to benefit from advances in science and technology.

Order the book.

Love Letter to a Garden by Debbie Millman

Love Letter to a Garden

By Debbie Millman
Contributions by Roxane Gay
Publisher: Timber Press
Published: April 15, 2025

From the award-winning artist, designer, and the host of the podcast Design Matters, Debbie Millman, this book tells the visual story of falling in love with gardening—and the philosophies that work conjures. Spread throughout are simple recipes using the garden’s ingredients from Millman’s wife, best-selling author Roxane Gay.

Order the book.

Milton Glaser: POP by Steven Heller, Mirko Ilić, and Beth Kleber

Milton Glaser: POP

By Steven Heller, Mirko Ilić, and Beth Kleber
Publisher: The Monacelli Press
Published: March 2023

This collection of work from graphci design legend Milton Glaser’s Pop period features hundreds of examples of the designer’s work that have not been seen since their original publication, demonstrating the graphic revolution that transformed design and popular culture.

Order the book.

Meet Me by the Fountain: An Inside History of the Mall by Alexandra Lange

Meet Me by the Fountain: An Inside History of the Mall

By Alexandra Lange
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Published: June 2022

Chronicles postwar architects’ and merchants’ invention of the shopping mall, revealing how the design of these marketplaces played an integral role in their cultural ascent. Publishers Weekly writes, “Contending that malls answer ‘the basic human need’ of bringing people together, influential design critic Lange advocates for retrofitting abandoned shopping centers into college campuses, senior housing, and ‘ethnocentric marketplaces’ catering to immigrant communities. Lucid and well researched, this is an insightful study of an overlooked and undervalued architectural form.”

Order the book.

Die Fläche: Design and Lettering of the Vienna Secession, 1902–1911 (Facsimile Edition) by Diane V. Silverthorne, Dan Reynolds, and Megan Brandow-Faller

Die Fläche: Design and Lettering of the Vienna Secession, 1902–1911 (Facsimile Edition)

By Diane V. Silverthorne, Dan Reynolds, and Megan Brandow-Faller
Publisher: Letterform Archives Books
Published: October 2023

This facsimile edition of Die Fläche, recreates every page of the formative design periodical in full color and at original size, accompanied by essays that contextualize the work, highlighting contributions by pathbreaking women, innovative lettering artists, and key practitioners of the new “surface art,” including Rudolf von Larisch, Alfred Roller, and Wiener Werkstätte founders Koloman Moser and Josef Hoffmann.

Order the book.