Complaint litany of an alienated designer:

This work harnesses none of my essential energies, but saps my will by extracting and utilizing resources I lack.

This work refuses my essential services while demanding from me what I do not have to give and, in fact, need to receive from others.

This work does not move me forward in my personal project. Indeed, it does the reverse: In pulls me backwards, by enslaving me to the very forces I feel called to challenge and overcome.

Regarding these forces I believe should be overcome — these forces we are forced to serve when our work feels most forced — they belong to an enworldment which Heidegger called “technicity”.

Technicity is essentially the utilitarian instinct driven to extremes.

Technicity creates an interminable chain of “in order to”.

In technicity we are all chained to “in order to”, and become links in that chain, with no purpose except to serve someone else’s “in order to”, who, in turn serves another’s “in order to.”

At the heart of technicity is one monomaniacal question “What is it for?”

This is true not only of “What?” and “How?” questions — even, and especially, questions of love and value. So when technicity asks “Why?” it only knows how to mean “What is it for?” And when technicity asks “Who?” it only knows how to mean “What is it for?” This is where the nihilistic damage happens

Design is a different way to work. It approaches questions of value and relationship as outside the realm of use. It provides a terminus for the chain of “What is it for?” It is for the sake of itself. It is useless and I love it for no reason other than love. Je ne sais quoi. Even tiny mustard seed sized specks of irrational love bring desirability to life.

But under the iron reign of technicity, design is reduced to an alternate toolset for problem-solving. And that problem is, of course, “how do I do x, in order to do y, in order to do z, in order to…” with no “because I just love it” anywhere to be seen.

Design is far too expansive to fit inside the narrowness of technicity, in any of its contemporary forms.

Of course — obviously — it does not fit inside corporate capitalism.

But neither does design fit inside managerial Marxism, which is the only viable mutation of Marxism in a mature industrial or senile postindustrial world! Your revolution, once inspired by material dialectic, has expired by it. It has been exnihilated by the fundamental fact that we are situated inside a dialectic with no exterior. We are always at the conclusion of an endless journey we are only now beginning.*

And, most relevantly to you, neither does it fit inside a technocratic administrative state, or a mini-state (a leaderless, overmanaged, micromanaged organization, or a macro-state (a leaderless, overmanaged, micromanaged global economy), or — most importantly of all, a nano-state (a leaderless, overmanaged, micromanaged individual soul).

Design, properly practiced, attaches uses (“usefulness”), qualities of use (“usability”), use for businesses (“viability”), uses of technology (“feasibility”) in service of something higher, which is beyond the grasp and even reach of techniques and technologies — something that bears no fruit except a totally useless “I love this.”

The technicity world shovels this quality into the inadequate lust-adjacent category “desirable.” Lust is erosless urge to possess, as opposed to love which is transcendent, erosful pursuit of belonging. “Lovable” is a better word than “desirable”.

Note: * Hegel, Marx, and all other pseudo-prophetic avatars of Prometheus — all those who foresee inevitable futures as if they preexist behind some temporal curtain — seem oblivious to the fact that there is only nothing there to see. There is only the boiling chrome of nothingness.

They miss the insidious subtlety of nothingness. As if nothingness would be so hamfisted as to hide itself beneath something we can see. They think nothingness would marked itself with something so blatant as a shadows?

No, no, no — the surface of nothingness is reflective. If we stare into it, all we see is our own self. And to an omniscient soul, everything and everyone beyond omniscience is nothingness… So they look out at the nothingness of another and see only who they are. Thus “accusation in a mirror”. If in that mercury pool, we see racism, hate, intent to annihilate, genocide! — something to fight to the death. The designated nobody, the persona non grata, bears the sins of the judge and jury. Rememver this whenever a radical bays for blood. Technicity sees its own sins everywhere it looks.

In Soviet Russia, abyss stare out from you.

It is all in our choice of nothingness. Whether we think it explicitly, or simply live it out intuitively, designers must choose, now and perpetually, the pregnant nothingness of exnihilism. The designer who looks out into the world and sees no option but to sell himself into indentured servitude in the factories and towers and nowheres of technicity, will remain a designer only in title.