Why does shit look so ugly these days? It feels like everyone online is complaining about it, to the point that some billionaires are even trying to throw money at the problem.

Beyond our interminable craving for convenience, it looks like this aesthetic change can be attributed to a few factors: for one, developers are generally pretty risk averse — our country is incredibly litigious (‘sue-happy’), so they prioritize safety and price over potentially risky but inspiring aesthetic feats. Secondly, our technology used in architecture, like ARCAD, has gotten so damn advanced that architects are neglecting the ability to draw and also familiarize themselves with the actual materiality of the buildings. Laying out their plans in a sterile office miles away, architects are never the ones laying the brick of your precious home these days. Michelangelo may not have been one of the many people who physically constructed St. Peter’s Basilica, but he was there, overseeing the project, guiding its design.

In other words, because of generally good technological advancement, there’s an awkward, increasing distance between the architect and the building, leading to the architect feeling the building as an abstraction, a distant representation, rather than something real.

Ladies and gentlemen, I fear that this whole ‘abstraction’ thing doesn’t stop with our physical surroundings.

The impersonal abstraction of modernity is coming for us all. Even some of the biggest moments of our lives, like weddings, are being transformed by technology.

Your experience of your wedding, your greatest day on this godforsaken earth, is often driven by how much of it can be formatted, squeezed, and stuffed into an online version for online consumption to feed the little piggies we call our friends:

“The camera doesn’t document the wedding anymore. The wedding organizes itself around the camera…And when the self is extracted from data, averaged out across what works, you get artificiality. Which is not just that everyone’s wedding reel looks vaguely like everyone else’s. But also to say there is a loss of self. And thus, in the very process of being seen, you disappeared.”

Even if we fail in one area of our lives to strip it of its bearings, we go for the others.

Your health. They say you have a 1,000 problems until you have a health problem. Then you only have one problem. The temptation is great and all-consuming — buy all the gadgets and doodads you need to get all the info, because info is good, info is comforting, info gives you a feeling of control, clarity, solace. It’s the path to protect yourself, because to us, cloaked in the trappings of modernity, death is a nightmare, not a destination.

Despite your efforts, the current research suggests that there is no evidence wearables, like an Oura ring, WHOOP, or Apple watch, improve your health. YIKES. Are they fun though? Sure! But in your efforts to immortalize yourself, you beat, break, bust, condense, and atomize your beautiful life into a lifeless algorithm. The same life-force that calls you to have an afternoon cappuccino with your friends; that whispers in your ear to rip that one (or two) cigs outside on a crisp fall afternoon; to order that decadent burger that only a handful of people in your thousand-year bloodline have ever had the privilege to experience. Because that is life. Yet the eternal optimizers push on — insisting on doing what they must to preserve themselves in a mummified, imperishable body.

“Your worst sin is that you have destroyed and betrayed yourself for nothing.” - Dostoevsky

Your dating life is under fire, not just from your family (woof), but the algorithm — it compresses your spontaneous mosaic of a personality into cold, tawdry numbers, advertised like a holographic Pokémon card (no shade — I love Pokémon). This is by no means a crusade against dating apps (they have proven to be more useful than people think, especially for the LGBTQ community), but modernity’s pull is strong. As economist Maia Mindel points out, famed German sociologist Max Weber was one of the first to shed light on this phenomena:

“The big idea here is that Weber saw modernity as the process of rationalization, the replacement of all traditional and charismatic modes of life with calculation, efficiency, and universal rules grounded in logic…which leads to something called disenchantment, meant quite literally: a world without magic, where everything is understood but nothing is valued. Weber was worried this would work as an "iron cage" (or a "cog in a machine") where people know exactly what they're doing but not why or what for…”

Travel is often a wonderful experience — Americans are traveling more than ever before, and technology has made it easier and more accessible than ever, but as always, there comes the temptation to simplify entire places down to ‘hot takes’ and quantifiable numbers.

This website called Hood Maps is fun, entertaining, and even helpful in several ways, but it embodies our endless pursuit of abstraction.

For emphasis: I am not advocating against these things, but it’s important to recognize and resist the temptation to surrender every aspect of your life at the feet of the Digital Dashboard Gods and relentlessly try and quantify the unquantifiable.

Even the most powerful companies in the world are trying and often failing at this game.

Famous British adman, Rory Sutherland, captures the essence of the ‘unquantifiable’ (the non-abstractable) through his notion of the Doorman Fallacy:

In the world of geopolitics, there is always the allure to capture the opinions and activities of millions (if not billions) of constituents as simple metrics. And it can go to the extremes.

Prominent figures unabashedly praise China as a country that ‘thinks in centuries’ — as author Dan Wang describes, China is a ‘society of engineers’ that attempts to command and control by leveraging quantifiability. Sadly, as a result, the Chinese government has nearly abstracted themselves to the edge of extinction by way of the one-child policy.

The man in charge of the one-child policy, missile scientist Song Jian, "over-extrapolated straight lines on a population chart, then sterilized 108 million women in the name of the one-child policy.”

As Dan Wang wrote, China's leadership "can't stop at physical engineering. Sooner or later, they treat the population as if it were another building material, to be moulded or torn apart as the circumstances demand".

All this hooplah goes to say that data is NOT bad in and of itself, but it’s also no panacea. Tracking your macros (carbs, protein, fats) can be incredibly useful for achieving a certain body composition. Because of decades of government research and data collection, we can design, implement, and study the effects of policies aimed at things like reducing poverty.

However, the CEO of Shopify, Tobi Lütke, shares how and why you can’t quantify everything like ‘fun and delight.’, as relayed via Lenny’s Podcast:

“We are extremely data informed. We have invested enormous amounts of money and time into systems that give us basically everything at our fingertips… But what Shopify attempts to do is just not over-fit for what’s quantifiable.” People love optimizing for highly-quantifiable things because there’s immediate gratification that comes from seeing a number go up. But Tobi thinks that the most important aspects of a product are rarely quantifiable:

“The overlap of the most valuable things you can do with a product and the things that happen to be fully quantifiable are like maybe 20%. Which leaves 80% of a value space unaddressable by the people who only look at quantifiable things.”

And guess what, the most important elements of your life are often unquantifiable.

Thanks for taking the Pack,

Zach

_{The vibe-killer disclaimer: The opinions in this post and all other posts only represent myself and do not represent the opinions of my employer or any groups I am a member of.
This is not financial advice or recommendation for any investment. The Content is for informational purposes only, you should not construe any such information or other material as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice}