The Pitfalls and the Potential of the New Minimalism
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Highlights
- Along the way, he offers sharp critiques of thing-oriented minimalism. The sleek, simple devices produced by Apple, which encourage us to seamlessly glide through the day by tapping and swiping on pocket-size screens, rely on a hidden “maximalist assemblage,” Chayka writes: “server farms absorbing massive amounts of electricity, Chinese factories where workers die by suicide, devastated mud pit mines that produce tin.” Also, he points out, the glass walls in Apple’s headquarters were marked with Post-it notes to keep employees from smacking into them, like birds
- This sort of aestheticized emptiness, Chayka argues, is “not particularly radical; it might even be conservative,” given its reliance on control and exclusion.
- In a way, Chayka’s book replicates the conflict he’s attempting to uncover—between the security and cleanliness of a frictionless affect and the necessity of friction for uncovering truth. He does have moments of productive discomfort: outside the concert hall where John Cage débuted “4’33”,” he wanders for four and a half minutes of silence in honor of Cage’s blank composition, and finds himself disappointed by the mundane sounds of leaf blowers and airplanes, before becoming unexpectedly attuned to the gentle sound of a hidden stream.
- Underneath the vision of “less” as an optimized life style lies the path to something stranger and more profound: a mode of living that strips away protective barriers and heightens the miracle of human presence, and the urgency, today, of what that miracle entails.
- This is also where the minimalism of ideas meets the minimalism of things—the latter argues that ridding yourself of possessions means ridding yourself of trouble and difficulty; the former suggests that the end point of stripping away excess is the realization that the world is more troubled, more difficult, more discomfiting, and also more wondrous and full of possibility than it seems.
The Pitfalls and the Potential of the New Minimalism
Metadata
Highlights
- Along the way, he offers sharp critiques of thing-oriented minimalism. The sleek, simple devices produced by Apple, which encourage us to seamlessly glide through the day by tapping and swiping on pocket-size screens, rely on a hidden “maximalist assemblage,” Chayka writes: “server farms absorbing massive amounts of electricity, Chinese factories where workers die by suicide, devastated mud pit mines that produce tin.” Also, he points out, the glass walls in Apple’s headquarters were marked with Post-it notes to keep employees from smacking into them, like birds
- This sort of aestheticized emptiness, Chayka argues, is “not particularly radical; it might even be conservative,” given its reliance on control and exclusion.
- In a way, Chayka’s book replicates the conflict he’s attempting to uncover—between the security and cleanliness of a frictionless affect and the necessity of friction for uncovering truth. He does have moments of productive discomfort: outside the concert hall where John Cage débuted “4’33”,” he wanders for four and a half minutes of silence in honor of Cage’s blank composition, and finds himself disappointed by the mundane sounds of leaf blowers and airplanes, before becoming unexpectedly attuned to the gentle sound of a hidden stream.
- Underneath the vision of “less” as an optimized life style lies the path to something stranger and more profound: a mode of living that strips away protective barriers and heightens the miracle of human presence, and the urgency, today, of what that miracle entails.
- This is also where the minimalism of ideas meets the minimalism of things—the latter argues that ridding yourself of possessions means ridding yourself of trouble and difficulty; the former suggests that the end point of stripping away excess is the realization that the world is more troubled, more difficult, more discomfiting, and also more wondrous and full of possibility than it seems.