Texture
It was after my second shot that I leaned back to look up into the rafters of the barcade where I was commiserating with my boss. It was a converted metal shop. The noisy industrial machinery that accepted raw materials through the rolling garage doors, was replaced with noisy leisure machinery offering clacky tactile control schemes for quarters.
Distracted by my phone, I begin responding to a text message. The haptic buzz fires with every letter I type, and I can't help but be jealous of the mechanical switches of the nearby arcade machines. As our technology becomes more functional, more of its function becomes abstracted into the software. Instead of feeling the resistance of a key give way as a corresponding arm accelerates a striker toward an inky ribbon, I get a cheap, tinny, artificial whirr. Gone are the days when the very operation of a thing gives any indication of how it works. Instead, we have an arcane slab of black glass, with only the most superficial imitations of function. I hear no dial tone. The dual-tone sound I hear upon dialing numbers is a skeuomorphism. Modern technology has to utilize design choices that reference the past so that they can inform a conceptual model that is comfortable to people. Everything has been streamlined and polished to a smooth mirror shine. It's like magic.
"I think it's gonna be a much better business." my former boss says in between drags from a benevolently volunteered cigarette. Days prior he sold the entire shop to the original owner that he bought it from nine years ago. He is twenty-eight. "It is gonna be much more profit-driven... business." He sighs. "That's awful though!" I exclaimed.
"Did I ever tell you... okay so." He begins. "I was getting another round of investment when I wanted to start serving beer. I told them 'This is how much I'll need for the new bar.' The investor... she paused, 'So wait. You wanna sell and let people play console video games. You wanna serve beer, and in the back, you wanna make and sell pizza? What do you want to be when you grow up?' and I was like, 'I have no idea.' The business didn't make any sense."
When I was hired, I was shown the ropes by a guy who worked two nights a week, was in a band and worked part-time in an A/V shop. He told me in a bassy voice. "This place is a pirate ship. Like, all that matters is that you are confident working the bar, whatever you say goes." I got some actual procedure out of him involving opening and closing, but his instructions seemed more like guidelines than actual rules.
That night I wept. I wept for mass-produced clothes that never betray how they were made. Fast food restaurants with codified color palettes and sterile scripted interpersonal speech. For the beautiful bar that didn't make sense, that I got hired to because I kept showing up to set up my virtual reality rig. I wept for the generation that will have a harder time asking 'how?'
Texture and transparency of operation allow people to become attached. A march towards efficiency can leave everything too smooth to grasp, remember, or comprehend. Texture as I described it, is part of what makes dive bars, fidget cubes, and steampunk aesthetics desirable to human brains.
We like knowing. Right?
Distracted by my phone, I begin responding to a text message. The haptic buzz fires with every letter I type, and I can't help but be jealous of the mechanical switches of the nearby arcade machines. As our technology becomes more functional, more of its function becomes abstracted into the software. Instead of feeling the resistance of a key give way as a corresponding arm accelerates a striker toward an inky ribbon, I get a cheap, tinny, artificial whirr. Gone are the days when the very operation of a thing gives any indication of how it works. Instead, we have an arcane slab of black glass, with only the most superficial imitations of function. I hear no dial tone. The dual-tone sound I hear upon dialing numbers is a skeuomorphism. Modern technology has to utilize design choices that reference the past so that they can inform a conceptual model that is comfortable to people. Everything has been streamlined and polished to a smooth mirror shine. It's like magic.
"Did I ever tell you... okay so." He begins. "I was getting another round of investment when I wanted to start serving beer. I told them 'This is how much I'll need for the new bar.' The investor... she paused, 'So wait. You wanna sell and let people play console video games. You wanna serve beer, and in the back, you wanna make and sell pizza? What do you want to be when you grow up?' and I was like, 'I have no idea.' The business didn't make any sense."
When I was hired, I was shown the ropes by a guy who worked two nights a week, was in a band and worked part-time in an A/V shop. He told me in a bassy voice. "This place is a pirate ship. Like, all that matters is that you are confident working the bar, whatever you say goes." I got some actual procedure out of him involving opening and closing, but his instructions seemed more like guidelines than actual rules.
That night I wept. I wept for mass-produced clothes that never betray how they were made. Fast food restaurants with codified color palettes and sterile scripted interpersonal speech. For the beautiful bar that didn't make sense, that I got hired to because I kept showing up to set up my virtual reality rig. I wept for the generation that will have a harder time asking 'how?'
Texture and transparency of operation allow people to become attached. A march towards efficiency can leave everything too smooth to grasp, remember, or comprehend. Texture as I described it, is part of what makes dive bars, fidget cubes, and steampunk aesthetics desirable to human brains.
We like knowing. Right?
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