Kevin Kelly raises a number of interesting and well thought out points throughout his book, What Technology Wants, but as my brain is want to do, I have become fixated on one specific section. In the chapter named “Technology’s Trajectory,” Kelly answers the titularly begged question with 13 things that technology wants (270). The one that I am stuck on, though, is beauty.

First off, let’s take a quick step back from the text and examine that statement. “Technology wants to become more beautiful.” It’s a complicated statement that implies a lot of things that are dealt with elsewhere in the book, but deserve independent consideration in this context. When Kelly says that technology wants complexity or evolvability, he is referring to an, at least somewhat, intuitive notion of purpose. Technology exists to serve a purpose, and thus naturally tends to build off of what came before in ways that allow further building, etc. But beauty is not even remotely similar to “efficiency.” In fact, in a world predicted by much new media, a world of pure objectivity and function, beauty is meaningless.

Beauty exists only within the hands of those who can perceive it, and it is a wholly subjective idea. What is beautiful to one is not necessarily beautiful to another, and vice versa. Additionally, and claims made universally about beauty must be accompanied by disclaimers that that these notions were created within a specific context of time period and general aesthetic. You can’t say something is true about beauty in all cases because beauty is not a universal or objective idea.

Now let’s actually get to the text.

Immediately, Kelly dodges the issue of subjectivity by implying that beauty is that which is viewed as beautiful by a majority of people who view it. He raises this implication by speaking about what is successful in Hollywood film and what cities people have classically described as “eye sores” (318). This definition of beauty is inherently problematic, as it ignores the exception that I raised earlier. Everyone who has ever made a claim about what they find beautiful has been influenced by their context. When a large number of people claim that something is beautiful, all that tells us is that there is some confluence of contextual factors that have made this a common idea. In fact, the more widespread a shared idea of beauty is, the more likely it is to be exclusively a result of some specific cultural factor.

The easiest example to give for this is fashion in present day America. Fashion is one of the most common places that you will hear the word “beautiful,” but the entire industry exists not to serve anyone’s notion of beauty, but to serve capitalism. Capitalism dictates that clothing be perceived as beautiful, and thus it is made so. To make claims that fashion wants to be beautiful and that is why it has become more beautiful as time goes on would be ignoring the entire context in which fashion was created. Similarly, I think Kelly is missing these nuances in what makes technology beautiful.

He then speaks about tools and how craftspeople and workers love their tools. Again, I hesitate to refer to this as beauty over functionality. I fear he is conflating similar terms to make a grander point than he has. Eventually, Kelly wanders off to a discussion of his perception of the internet as beautiful (322). He, as a person who uses the internet as his tool, has lost himself in the internet in the way he has lost himself in beautiful art. But, here, again, he has forfeited his meaning of the concept of beauty. He is relating a secondary sensation caused by his notion of beauty and declaring their causes one and the same.

Maybe I am being too harsh. His arguments seem sound and, while I have issues with them, they serve well as functional norms to ascribe to, even if doing so with a grain of salt. And maybe some of my issues are purely semantic. I could be spending more time thinking about the specific language than the purpose of the language, but my cognitive dissonance needed to be addressed nonetheless.

Regardless, my question is this: What makes new media beautiful? Why do we perceive certain qualities of media more or less beautiful, especially as they do not relate to efficiency? We find beauty mostly outside of realms of functional production, so how can we relate those “unproductive” notions of beauty to aspects of new media?