I’m gladly surprised to find out that What Design Can’t Do, often in pair with my friend Afonso Matos’s Who Can Afford to Be Critical?, happens to be frequently discussed in the latest issue of the Chilean journal Diseña – one of my favorite design journals. This issue is about decolonization, a subject I closely follow, though not one I directly address in my own work.

What I’m less surprised of is how easily these scholars move beyond the “attitudinal” reading of our work, as probably they were asked, times and again, such questions as “why are you so negative?”. This brings me to an important note on mood. Both Matos’s publication and mine are usually characterized as “moody”, that is, publications that express a particular sentiment – a negative one, ça va sans dire. But this doesn’t mean that the rest of design literature is devoid of an “emotional atmosphere”; it’s just that this atmosphere is taken for granted and, therefore, concealed. I’d describe it as either a hazy optimism or a kind of professional-scientific (over)confidence.

By acknowledging and manifesting our own prevalent sentiment, we show that there is no such thing as a lack of mood, even – if not especially – in academic publications. In light of this, an author must ask themselves: what passion drives my writing?

A few days ago, I took part in an “expert session” with a consortium consisting of the Institute of Network Cultures/Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences, NERO Editions, Aksioma and Echo Chamber. The purpose of the session was to share my perspective on Expanded Publishing, which is the focus of their research project. As I saw some worth in the notes I prepared for the event, I turned them into the following article.

You asked me to reflect on the ‘why’, the ‘how’ and the ‘who’ of publishing, understood respectively as its mission and politics, its tools and infrastructure, and its networks and communities. At the risk of stating the obvious, these aspects are for me necessarily intertwined. More: they’re co-determining. Let me explain.

My interest in publishing was originally sparked by my studies in art, design and media theory. As such, it had mostly to do with weird and experimental media, processes, tools and workflows that would shed light on the politics of “making public” and “the making of a public”. Here’s a couple of examples. On the one hand, I looked into digital rights management (DRM) as a form of enclosure; on the other hand, I was fascinated by the EPUB format as an opportunity of unanticipated circulation, remix and reuse. In practical terms, I was doing things like book trailers automatically generated from EPUB files and interviews with artists like Jesse England. England made a backup copy of 1984 after Amazon removed copies of George Orwell’s novels from Kindle devices without asking any permission to the customers involved.

At that time, I was also restructuring my aesthetic, technical and political values regarding publishing around the concept of poor media, which was inspired not only by Hito Steyerl but also Florian Cramer:

[…] poor media are able to “transform quality into accessibility,” like [Steyerl’s] poor image does. Poor media substantiate the book’s potential for duplication and dissemination. Conversely, rich media are the product of a commercial doctrine based on an ornamental understanding of digital technology, a Hollywoodian rhetoric of engagement, and a reactionary conception of the publishing process.

One of the projects I led at the PublishingLab exemplifies the frugal attitude of poor media. Developed by Thijmen van Brunshot and Stef Kors, it resulted in the conclusion that the newsletter could be a viable means to engage Millennial book readers. Here’s more or less what we wrote:

Millennials have a soft spot for gonzo-style self-satirical writing, especially when it addresses topical issues. They prefer this type of content to books because a “listicle” or a short personal essay can easily fit between emails, that is to say, in the middle of the gray literature of work that keeps us all busy swallowing most of our mental energies. However, the medium of email doesn’t need to be dreadful and tedious: it can be repurposed to channel meaningful, pleasurable literary content and interact more personally with its author.

Our client, the innovation office of a big Dutch trade publisher, looked very perplexed: email? That sounds like old news. This was January 2018. Substack had been just launched. Later that year, Craig Mod wrote on Wired that “[o]ur Future Book is composed of email, tweets, YouTube videos, mailing lists, crowdfunding campaigns, PDF to .mobi converters, Amazon warehouses, and a surge of hyper-affordable offset printers in places like Hong Kong.”

Later, the core of my interest in publishing shifted. This shift coincided, more or less, with the publication of my first ‘non-artist’ book, Entreprecariat. This book brought together, albeit reworked, a lot of different types of ‘content’ (for lack of a better word) which appeared in many different forms: zine, blogpost, longform, article, essay, paper, exhibition, artwork. The scattered nature of this experimental production made its ideas less likely to be taken seriously. At that point, I realized that for an ‘author’ (again, for lack of a better word) to be taken seriously, they have to go through the process of consolidating their intellectual production into the traditional form of a book. Here, ‘traditional’ means published by an established publishing house, provided with an ISBN, distributed in bookshops, archived in libraries, etc. Such an artifact still holds an aura of authoritativeness. Part of being taken seriously is a matter of time. Experimental formats like the ones I mentioned are highly volatile: a domain is not renewed and a viral article suddenly disappears from the web. The traditional book is another story. If it goes well, it can have a ‘shelf life’ of decades.

Why did I care about being taken seriously? The reason was not only ambition. Being taken seriously would allow me to keep doing what I was doing, that is, reading and writing. Now, the problem is that to bring to the world the authoritative artifact that is the book is not so easy – surely less easy than home-printing fifty copies of a cool zine.

If in order to be taken seriously I need to structure my work around the traditional book, and get that book published, my first and foremost concern becomes how to do so. For a writer whose interests span art, design, media and theory, the situation is pretty dire: publishers into that kind of stuff can be counted on the fingers of one hand, fees are ridiculous, royalties often a mirage. The Netherlands is an exception, given the availability of funding for the creative industries. But the funding structure is in peril due to the prominence of political figures that see art as a leftist hobby. The option of academia seems even worse , given the lengthy publishing process, explicit and implicit gatekeeping, the learned incompetence which we call “scientific rigor”, the meager improvements (when they can be called that) provided by peer review. “I’ve seen academic life destroy the best writers of my generation”, said Susan Sontag – imagine what it can do to average writers, then!

Where there is no funding and no tenure track, there is only good will, personal finances and like-minded individuals that share your aesthetic, theoretical or political view. In light of this situation, André Breton’s remark, “One publishes to find comrades!”, could now be reversed to: “One finds comrades to publish”. One of my ‘comrades’ is a person that has published half of the most interesting art and design books of the last decade, and continues to do so, mostly on his own. He reminds me of the infamous XKCD comic on the current state of web infrastructure, which I bootlegged for the occasion:

Keeping reading and writing, “keeping doing what I do”, might sound like a selfish goal but that’s not the case or, at least, it’s not just a selfish goal. In order to write I need to read, and in order to read I need good books, so I need – and I want – other people to keep doing what they do. I like to think that they feel the same about my work. In this sense, most actors involved in this mission aren’t passive. Each one does their part, however little, to let the good stuff happen. Here, the customary division of labor of publishing kinda breaks: an author does promotion for another one, the publisher is an author as well, the editor designs the book, etc. They do all this while walking in and out of the Institution’s corridors (I won’t define this term for conciseness, you know what I mean), because for most of us, there is no survival outside of it – the lucky few who make a living out of Patreon are indeed few and probably not that lucky.

Generally, these actors will have to work against the Institution. They will contribute to and draw from their own “undercommons”. They will covertly allocate resources (time, money, materials) to the ““projects”” they really care about (I put the word ‘project’ in double scare quotes because the very concept of a project is antagonistic to the mission I’m trying to describe). The mode of this practice is conspiration. So, what you call Expanded Publishing is for me first and foremost an issue of conspiring: how do you expand and solidify the network of conspirators? How do you make each one of them aware of the others? How do you stealthy allocate resources to a project? How do you even work on a mission without openly defining it? Those who get it, get it. No need for many words. Conspiration is necessarily tactical because long-term planning is simply not possible: people change jobs, budgets are cut, children are born. And yet, the ultimate mission remains the same, unaltered by the messiness of life.

Conspiration is about maintaining a mission-based secret society of sorts, developing your own steganographic language, acting as a covert agent or, in more contemporary terms, cosplaying the role you are given within the Institution in order to amass resources for the real goal. Am I romanticizing this attitude? Probably, perhaps because sometimes you need a bit of a poetic boost to keep going.

If you find this unethical, just zoom out. As Cornelius Castoriadis pointed out over and over, the Institution is a contradictory structure: it wants to organize people but it cannot allow that they organize too much. That explains the widespread feeling of one’s work being hindered by those who asked for this work in the first place. From this perspective, it is the Institution that is ‘unethical’. Actually, it is beyond ethics: it is deranged, because it presents individuals with an unsolvable double bind – you should do one thing and its opposite. To maintain sanity, better stick to one of the two.

I just posted on my personal website the transcript of a talk where I argue that, when it comes to AI Art, what you call weird is kitsch, what you call kitsch might be weird. The title is Deepdreaming Willy Wonka.

The talk was given on the 14th of June, 2024 during the Hidden Layers conference which took place at the Köln International School of Design and was organized by Prof. Dr. Lasse Scherffig, Matthias Grund, Jakob Kilian & Dzennifer Zachlod, whom I thank.

[Transcript of my intervention during Domus Academy’s roundtable, entitled “Design for Complexity: Plural Perspectives on Systems Ambiguity” with Allison Rowe, Georgina Voss and Matt Webb. The roundtable took place on the 18th of April, 2024.]

Bucky’s Nightmare by Mathieu Lehanneur.

Hi, today I would like to speak against complexity, extending some of the arguments I developed in my latest book, entitled What Design Can’t Do.

Our world is complex, right? So, how can one speak against something that just is? Let’s start from a very tangible image of complexity (specifically, disorganized complexity) by Warren Weaver, a pioneer of communication theory: “a large billiard table with millions of balls rolling over its surface, colliding with one another and with the side rails.” This is the level of multiplicity we speak about when we speak about complexity (as real-life examples, Weaver mentions a large telephone exchange network and a life insurance company).

Now, I find the image of the billiard table beautiful and straightforward, but also pretty much unusable, unless you are a physicist or a mathematician. Very few people work at that level of intricacy, and surely not most designers. Hence, my skepticism toward the idea of complexity as it is currently used in design.

I only became interested in it when I started noticing that, not complexity, but the very talk of complexity was becoming, in the design field, a cultural practice in its own right. As Guy Julier puts it, “it has become an orthodoxy to talk of the growing complexity of design in our ‘complex world’”.

Furthermore, the idea that the complexity is growing in our society is actually untenable. In his viral (and bacterial) “Design Thinking is Kind of Like Syphilis” article, Lee Vinsel asks: “What does this claim even mean? Complex in what way? Increasingly complex with respect to what metric? I have asked many professional historians this question, and they believe this increasing complexity claim is unsupportable.”

Theodor Adorno would have agreed, as he once stated that “society, wrongly scolded for its complexity, has in fact become too transparent”.

How many times per day do you think about the Roman Empire? Today, it will be at least one. To show that the world has always been shaped by distant, “nonlinear” and obscurely related factors, I will mention a couple of interesting theories about the fall of the Roman Empire. According to one of them, the fall wasn’t due to short-sighted politics or war, but to the lead present in the cups that the members of the Roman elite used to drink, a substance that slowly poisoned them. Marshall McLuhan, on the other hand, suggested that the real cause of the fall was a shortage of papyrus, which prevented effective communication on such a vast territory.

If complexity (in a broad sense) is not a new phenomenon, and complexity (in a narrow sense) is practically useless, why is it so present in conversations and articles? This means that it has to play another function. To understand this function we need to think of how disciplines, and in particular the design discipline, work.

Disciplines are arbitrary compartments of knowledge: they strategically define their boundaries in order to demarcate some particular problems and solve them, or at least address them. Sociology, for example, was born in the early 19th century to address the problem (and, therefore, problems) of society. However, disciplines won’t meekly confine themselves within their artificial boundary; rather, their internal discourse will push the border, extending it. This tendency is especially evident in the design field, where you often hear that “everything is design”.

Besides the physiological swelling of the disciplines, we witness a phenomenon which is historically specific. Martin Oppenheimer (quoted by philosopher Donald Schön) called it a “proletarianization of the professions”. When everyone can call themselves a professional, the reputational and financial returns of being one shrink. Furthermore, there is a tangible distrust toward the figure of the expert. Just think of the field of economy or virology…

So, what do professionals do to regain prestige? They accelerate the expansion of the disciplinary confines, creating connections in an almost conspiratorial, apophenic mode. Carlo Bramanti, who is currently working on the notion of “conspiratorial design”, points out not only the visual but also the conceptual similarities between diagrams made by legitimized design figures like Victor Papanek and paranoid-style infographics about “Covid 5G” by an obscure graphic artist named Dylan Louis Monroe. What do they have a in common? They want to produce and project a sense of control on the messiness of the world (Richard Hofstadter: “the paranoid mentality is far more coherent than the real world, since it leaves no room for mistakes, failures, or ambiguities”). How do they do so? By means of hypertrophy: by adding always more relations to their system, which becomes a totalizing one: it becomes the system.

This is why complexity is ultimately a reassuring category. Reassuring to whom? To the professionals, who are there to explain and clarify it, to seal it with “the authoritative stain of scientific enquiry”, as Georgina Voss puts it. And there is a further paradox. Do you remember the Game of Thrones “It’s not that simple” meme? Well, to reassure themselves, experts will have an incentive to expand their system of reference, and therefore create more links and relationships. This leads to the ever-increasingly intricate diagrams, to what Voss calls “the airport-bookshop model of systems thinking which tends to involve a lot of graphs and urges to ‘shift your mindset’”. But by adding links and relationships one doesn’t necessarily reach galaxy brain level. More likely they will just generate more confusion, more noise, more chaos.

Chaos is a mysterious concept, but also one that doesn’t require any specific expertise – everyone knows what a chaotic room is. Chaos is the professional-disciplinary repressed that returns. We hardly find the word ‘chaos’ in design article and papers, because chaos is truly scary: it resists organization, it escapes any idea of controllable totality, it leaves us with undecipherable fragments. Whereas complexity reassures us, chaos forces us to confronts our own powerlessness.

Shall we then just surrender to it? Not necessarily. As we have seen, complexity as a cultural practice is about totality: the world is complex, society is complex, etc. However, philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis points out that the idea of a totality that can be encompassed by the intellect is nothing but a phantom of speculative philosophy. What’s more: we do not actually need it in order to act in the world. Praxis, our acting in the world, is not a plan (closed and exact) but a project (open but not aimless): “every movement is a movement toward”. And yet, there is something real and concrete about totality. Who, among us, has never felt like the whole world is working against them? This is why, the material upon which praxis acts “does not give itself as totality, [but] it is as totality that evades us.”

Praxis is an ongoing negotiation between a general programmatic vision and a partial set of interventions on an “open, self-making unity”. While keeping track of its general ‘mission’, praxis recognizes that it belongs to a given space and time. Seeing its own specific point of view as a feature instead of a bug brings it close to what feminist scholarship calls “situated epistemology”. Ultimately, praxis means that we exist within the billiard table, not outside of it. And as ivory balls we must roll, hoping not to end up in a pocket too soon.

Working with Midjourney is like running into an overly proactive Starbucks barista. “I’d like a coffee.” And they bring you a Caramel Macchiato. “But I didn’t want caramel.” So they bring you an Espresso Macchiato. “I’m lactose intolerant.” A little impatient, they bring you a Coffee Americano. “But there’s too much coffee here.” Now visibly annoyed, they bring you a Sugar Cookie Almondmilk Latte. “Who asked you that?!” “That’ll be $14.99” and they go on misspelling your name on the cup.

Immagine non generata con l’IA bensì con il buon vecchio Content Aware Fill di Photoshop.

Le immagini generate con l’ausilio dell’intelligenza artificiale sono doppiamente retrospettive. In primo luogo in senso tecnico, in quanto costituite a partire da un dataset preesistente. In certa misura ciò vale per qualsiasi immagine, tuttavia i dataset sono caratterizzati da una soglia precisa: i materiali raccolti, ad esempio, si possono fermare al 2021. In secondo luogo, queste immagini sintetiche sono retrospettive in senso culturale: osservandole si ha già il presentimento che il trend visivo di oggi sarà obsoleto dopo il weekend. Da ciò derivano tutti i tentativi di collegare, serializzare, commentare, catalogare, musealizzare… insomma giustificare tali immagini. Tramite una canonizzazione fai-da-te si cerca di salvarle dall’abisso imminente.

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Almost there. My new book What Design Can’t Do will be out in late October with Set Margins’, but you can already pre-order it. Here is the cover, designed by Federico Antonini.

Design is broken. Young and not-so-young designers are becoming increasingly aware of this. Many feel impotent: they were told they had the tools to make the world a better place, but instead the world takes its toll on them. Beyond a haze of hype and bold claims lies a barren land of self-doubt and impostor syndrome. Although these ‘feels’ might be the Millennial norm, design culture reinforces them. In conferences we learn that “with great power comes great responsibility” but, when it comes to real-life clients, all they ask is to “make the logo bigger.”

This book probes the disillusionment that permeates design. It tackles the deskilling effects provoked by digital semi-automation, the instances of ornamental politics fashioned to please the museum-educational complex, the nebulous promises of design schools. While reviving historical expressions of disenchantment, Silvio Lorusso examines present-day memes and social media rants. To depict this disheartening crisis, he crafts a new critical vocabulary for readers to build upon. What this exposé reveals is both worrying and refreshing: rather than producing a meaningful order, design might be just about inhabiting chaos.

What was once a promising field rooted in problem-solving has become a problem in itself. The skill set of designers appears shaky and insubstantial – their expertise is received with indifference, their know-how is trivialised by online services, their work is compromised by a series of unruly external factors. If you see yourself as a designer without qualities; if you feel cheated, disappointed or betrayed by design, this book is for you.

“What happens once design is a smokescreen and can no longer claim to be a blueprint for change? This is the question Silvio Lorusso puts on the table. How did form, no matter how cool and disruptive, become so futile and tired? Read this with caution: we can no longer design ourselves out of this painful realisation.”
– Geert Lovink, author of Stuck on the Platform

Every year, one or two months before graduation time, I receive invitations from students of various institutions to contribute to their final project with an interview, a podcast, a short text, a talk, etc. Some of these requests derive from projects that are genuinely interesting and related to what I do, while some other requests feel, to be frank, a shot in the dark. But that’s not the point.

The point is that some time ago I stopped accepting most of these invitations directly. The reason is not that I find student projects unworthy of my attention. On the very contrary, I dedicate a lot of my work to the dissemination of theses and projects born in school, sometimes believing in them more than the students themselves. See, for example, the Other Worlds journal, in which I published various excerpts from MA theses; and P-DPA, an archive of experimental publishing, populated by many school projects.

The reason of my embargo is instead structural. Students are encouraged to get in touch with practitioners external to their institutions to get the knowledge, points of view and expertise that they don’t have ‘in house’. If we would live in a society devoid of remunerative issues, there wouldn’t be any problem: exchange is good and necessary. The problem arises when the income of creative practitioners becomes low and intermittent, and academies begin to cut down on staff, both hour- and people-wise.

From the point of view of the student who is working on their final project, a contribution from someone external is a nice gesture justified by the fact that nobody is making money anyway. The urge to write this short text came, in fact, from people working on a project that is “student-initiated and maintained — no profit is being made and no one is making an income.” But there is another perspective to consider: the designer who takes part in the podcast contributes to the ‘buzz’ of the school’s final show, the artist who is interviewed might appear in the academy’s website, the writer who gives a talk at the student-organized panel is bringing visibility and prestige to the institution. From this perspective, these practitioners, enthusiastically invited by students, are doing unpaid work for their schools.

I came to think that carelessly accepting most invitations aggravates this state of affairs, because it hides the fact that while schools expand their reach via the innocent requests of students, their core of knowledge, expertise and culture is shrinking as a result of casualization of staff. One can envision a dystopian institution where there is no actual staff but a growing list of email addresses for students to write to… I’m exaggerating, of course, but I honestly believe that students need to be made aware of this process. This is why I’m writing this.

What to do, then? How to avoid disappointing those students who are genuinely excited about my work? Here’s what I generally do: after thanking the students for their interest, I encourage them to ‘re-route’ their informal invitation, that is, I ask them to ask the school to invite me formally for a talk, a ‘crit’, an article, etc. And you know what? It works, sometimes. This way, I got a few paid gigs as guest tutor, and thanks to that, I could dedicate the necessary attention not only to the project of the inviting student, but also to those of their peers. Needless to say, institutions are often slow, and by the time that a student’s request is approved, they might be already graduated. But there is no harm in trying, and if things seem to take too long, the guest can always decide to proceed informally.

This text was written as a contribution to the project “Structurally Screwed: Political Configurations within Design Education” by Mariana Neves and Urjuan Toosy, Experimental Communication students of the MA Visual Communication at the Royal College of Art.

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