The Aesthetic Dialectic

Karl Stolley’s The Lo-Fi Manifesto presents us with an interesting thought process regarding reliance on software solutions in writing or digital creation. According to Stolley, creators are simply trading knowledge for ease of action.

“Yet far too many of them, and their students, surrender writing and its demand for sophisticated production knowledge to any interface that promises to make an author’s life easier.”

In the early part of my college career, I studied psychology. In psychology, we covered an interesting dichotomy between “types” of learners. On the one hand, we find children who will focus on skill mastery. These types of learners want to achieve high performance by engaging with material and applying it with intention. On the other hand, we find performance-focused children. These are children who, either intelligently or not, understand that performance equates to a positive assessment by an authority. So, these children find ways to get the results that mastery-focused learners get without the hassle of deep engagement. I don’t believe that this dichotomy changes when we begin looking at adults; instead, I think that anyone who can be considered a learner will fall somewhere along a branch of this dichotomy, and it is this dichotomy that separates software solutions and Lo-Fi tech engagement.

The go-to move for software has long been to focus on user experience: easy-to-navigate user interfaces that hide complex functions behind the press of a button. We have to ask ourselves whether this approach by software developers is genuinely accommodating to the end user. On the one hand, we get to create digital works without investing time into learning the raw functions behind functionality. On the other hand, …. well actually, there is no other hand. It seems that this approach works off of the first principle that no one wants to learn how to engage with things like HTML, Markdown, CSS, or deeper tools like Python. While that may be somewhat true, I argue that this is only because the decision to engage wasn’t really in the hands of the end user to begin with.

Let’s think back to when we were kids. Many of us remember our computer labs where we learned to type or use things like PowerPoint. Imagine for a second that we swapped out learning PowerPoint for learning how to create the functions that the PowerPoint UI sums up in just one button. If that were the case, then it wouldn’t seem far-fetched to think that now, as adults, we would be averse to investing time into learning more complex technologies. We never learned to control computation; we learned how to decide between functions that we never had a say in implementing in the first place. The parameters of engaging with computer technology were set by corporations and pedagogical approaches. Stolley points out that this reliance on premade software is quite limiting to digital creation.

“In many ways, such as non-negotiable dependence on a specific piece of software to view the artifact, software programs are actually steps backward from the comparatively open access that books and other printed matter provide.”

Stolley says that what we see in a program like PowerPoint is what we get. The entire point Stolley is making is that, while involving a deep learning process, we have the power to choose what we, as well as an audience, sees in the first place. This exact point is what leads me to my next and most important one: if software decides what we see and what we get, then we are dependent on software in such a way that we cede some ownership of our creativity.

The implication of Stolley’s manifesto is that reliance on software like Word or PowerPoint is, at its core, a dialectic of ownership. Creative control found in using Lo-Fi technology is an important consideration, but creative control equates to the amount of ownership we have in our intellectual expression as a whole. Hidden underneath the performance-focused approach of the contemporary graphical interface lies the intentions of a corporation that creates these platforms. That intention is reliance and, subsequently, control of creations that are not theirs.

Modern software solutions, much like any other technology, contain the relations between social classes. Put simply, the working-class writer who creates in pursuit of an experience and use, who creates out of a need to communicate themselves to the world, has their creation subsumed into the machine of capital accumulation through the creative process’ reliance on software. In addition, the software that enables the writer “thrives on and maintains ignorance and fear”, thus limiting the writer in their ability to create and express themselves. Corporations promise to enable the creative, yet this is only an aesthetic promise. Software “solutions” are only solutions to a problem that the capital class brought into existence: fear and ignorance of technological capability.

Thus, the empowerment or enabling of creative expression in the working class is merely an aesthetic of modern capitalist interest. Software sure seems like a step forward in creative expression when the writer doesn’t consider the intended subordinate position they inhabit as a premise. Hi-Fi technology provides an aesthetic of creative freedom that veils the lack of true progress in creative freedom. This aesthetic blinds the creative to their static position, maintains a level of fear and ignorance, and ensures that the working-class writer stays without traction and without full control of their work. Nothing exemplifies the opposing tensions between the interests of the working class and the interests of the capital class more so than the contemporary ideology displayed in creative software: the aesthetic of progress and the substance of stagnation. Thus, this is the dialectical structure of digital creation.