Dilbert vs. The Aesthetic Imperative

There are two ways to interpret this week's Dilbert strips, which satirize aesthetic-oriented tech design, and probably both of them are right. As always, Scott Adams has a keen eye for corporate foolishness, especially when it involves taking good ideas and making them stupid. As Dilbert tries to suggest to his bosses, today's aesthetic imperative is not a drive to substitute style for function but to add style to function. One of the main causes is that quality as traditionally defined has gotten so high (and price so low) that businesses have to find a new dimension on which to compete. Slapping a pretty shell on a lousy product, or building a beautiful restaurant with lousy service and worse food, won't work.

But the strips also represent the engineer's rebellion against the idea that style has value--or that, on the margin, additional style might have more value than additional function. This objection, which often comes from people who consider themselves on the right of the political spectrum, echoes the left-wing critique that says consumer capitalism is all about deceiving peoople with pretty packaging. In chapter three of The Substance of Style, I look at the legitimate value of aesthetic pleasure, even in functional products, and at one point I argue with this post from Steve Den Beste's blog:

Today an engineer similarly condemns the latest iMac for using behind-the-curve chips and mocks buyers who've "been seduced by the case plastic":

After people get over the oh, cool! and start really looking at this, the only real reason for getting it will be to impress people, just as was the case with the Cube, because what is really innovative about this is the case. And you can't actually get any work done with a fancy case.

Missing the effects of the technological progress he sees as legitimate innovation, the engineer doesn't consider the tradeoffs. For a long time, ever-greater computing power was indeed what people looked for in a new machine. But computers are so capable these days that most customers don't need the absolutely fastest chip. To someone who doesn't plan to tax the machine's processing speed, a beautiful case may be worth more than cutting-edge technology, not just for status ("to impress people") but for personal enjoyment. At a given price, adding style will be more valuable, at least to some people, than adding power. True, you can't get any more work done with a fancy case, but you can enjoy the same work more.

Despite my qualms about its implicit argument, I did enjoy the Dilbert series, particularly yesterday's entry:

For a full archive and lots of other Dilbert stuff, go here. My Reason interview with Scott Adams is here.

Posted by Virginia Postrel on August 20, 2004 • Comments

More on Shoes

Tom McKendree sends this link to the MIT Alumni Association's story on Insolia. Some of the best lines have nothing to do with high heels specifically but with industry cultures and practices:

"We didn't understand the shoe business worked in fashion seasons. We finally got a line of shoes and brought them to the marketplace and the retailers said 'Fine. What are you doing for fall?' We realized then that a bunch of MIT folks trying to design women's shoes was a big mistake. We had this great technology...why not sell it to other people who make shoes and make their shoes better and let them deal with the fashion stuff?

"The shoe industry is more accepting of change as it relates to styling because they view that as the most critical thing. Of course, the high tech industry couldn't care less about fashion." (After all, it took the personal computer industry nearly two decades to realize there was life beyond eggshell white.) "The point is, industries change first in their own dimension, not all dimensions."

Posted by Virginia Postrel on August 20, 2004 • Comments

China: Threat or Opportunity for Designers?

It's not earth-shaking, but I enjoyed reading this practical article from the design site Core77. The tone is delightfully rational, a pleasant change from what you see in so much of the debate over international trade.

Posted by Virginia Postrel on August 20, 2004 • Comments

What Color Is Your Parachute?

For a future article, I'm interested in hearing from people who've had experience with any edition (going back to 1971) of the outrageously successful job-search manual What Color Is Your Parachute? (self-described as the job hunter's bible.)

Posted by Virginia Postrel on August 19, 2004 • Comments

Online Stopwatch

I'm trying my hand at radio commentary, where time limits are critical. But I didn't have a stopwatch to use for practice. A little Googling and, presto, I found an online version. It's actually easier to use than a "real" stopwatch. I love the Internet.

Posted by Virginia Postrel on August 19, 2004 • Comments

Reengineering Women's Shoes

The WaPost's smart fashion writer Robin Givhan looks at the ongoing struggle to develop women's shoes that are good for the feet without being butt-ugly. It's one of the most challenging technical problems ever conceived.

Posted by Virginia Postrel on August 19, 2004 • Comments

The (Other) Bush Legacy

Wonder why there are suddenly so many class-action job discrimination suits? This WaPost report, tied to the new case against Costco (the big-box store labor boosters usually praise), explains:

The prominent cases are rooted, in part, in 1991 civil rights legislation that allowed victims of employment discrimination to seek punitive and compensatory damages, according to academics and lawyers who represent both employers and employees. The change makes such lawsuits potentially more lucrative for law firms, which have begun building the expertise to pursue them.

The discrimination cases come from all over the country and make a variety of claims, but some common threads run through them. The claims tend to focus on pay and promotion rather than hiring, they rely heavily on statistical evidence of race or sex disparities, and so far, most of them haven't gone to trial. In most cases, either the employer wins when a judge or an appeals court refuses to allow the case to go forward as a group action or the employees win when the class is certified and the two sides settle.

Along with the Americans with Disabilities Act, the 1991 civil rights law was one of the proudest accomplishments of the Bush I administration.

Posted by Virginia Postrel on August 18, 2004 • Comments

Regulation Matters Most

An economist friend (and Bush supporter) writes to make the point I implied, but didn't state, in the post on regulation below:

The articles you cite are inadvertently a counter to the right-wing criticism of Bush's economic policies. His most severe anti-market move was the tariff on imported steel, which was highly porous legislation that did not even continue, and which may have served as a low-cost sop to protectionists in certain states. In contrast, on the more important and less easily observable work of micro-efficiencies -- the Bush skepticism of regulation, which is in fact the default position of the entire economic profession -- looks to be exactly the sort of thing free marketeers would want. Would people like Tyler Cowen or Dan Drezener really prefer a Kerry administration which was Clintonesque on visible free trade and biased in favor of activist legislation away from the public eye?

After all it's the day to day accretion of unexamined regulations that probably do as much if not more damage to the long run efficiency of the economy -- than the bigger-splash macro policies on the deficit and trade.

On economic policy, I always care most about regulation because it's capable of creating huge distortions, is largely unscrutinized by the public, and is almost impossible to get rid of once it's in place. Here's another reason to watch Arnold's veto pen.

Posted by Virginia Postrel on August 18, 2004 • Comments

Explaining Kerry's Cambodia Story

In response to my post below, Paul Donnelly sends this Boston Globe story by Michael Kranish, along with a plausible explanation of Kerry's bizarre Cambodia story:

Nobody has yet picked up on the single most incredible thing in Kerry's war story about being in Cambodia on Christmas Eve, 1968: he has been saying for years, unchallenged, that South Vietnamese troops were celebrating Christmas by shooting into the air.

Huh?

This has prompted me to a sorta Casey Stengel moment -- I mean, can't ANYBODY here play this game?

Kerry's story has five parts: 1) He was in Cambodia on a secret mission, 2) it was Christmas Eve, 1968, 3) South Vietnamese troops were shooting into the air to celebrate, 4) he was afraid he'd be killed by the friendly fire, and 5) he was worried that Nixon would lie to his family about his death, because it was a secret mission in an illegal war.

Points 1, 2, 4 and 5 have all been attacked by everybody from the Swifties first recruited by Nixon (see #5) to liberal columnists for the Boston Globe.

But nobody has attacked #3 -- which is the part that makes the least sense.

AND it's the part that most strongly suggests Kerry is essentially telling the truth.

ARVN, the South Vietnamese Army, was overwhelmingly Buddhist. (It was a Buddhist general. Big Minh, who had knocked off Diem, the Catholic, in 1963 and plunged us into the mess.) So they would have been most unlikely to be loudly celebrating Christmas -- which, in fact, is rarely if ever celebrated anywhere by firing off guns into the air.

But TET is celebrated with loud noises.

Kerry's biographer Doug Brinkley says that Kerry wasn't in Cambodia, or even close, on Christmas Eve 1968, which has been widely reported as proving that the story is false. But -- ain't that the LEAST important part of the story? The WSJ scoffed at Kerry's 'visions of sugar plums', but if you read what he actually said -- every time, he's been very consistent -- what 'seared' him is #s 1, 3, 4 and 5. Number two just happens to be a handle for the story, it's not essential.

And it is false. But the error tends to corrororate the rest of the story.

Cuz -- again, according to Brinkley, who has the documents -- Kerry WAS in Cambodia on several occasions, in late January and early February 1969. Kranish's reporting tends to support Brinkley in part and doesn't disprove him anywhere.

Tet was February 17, 1969.

Since you asked: there was a HUGE amount of activity along the border all through this period. The year before, remember, we'd gotten nailed in a surprise attack. In 1969, the First Air Cav launched a major offensive on February 23, shortly after Tet.

So it only makes sense that Kerry would have been putting spies into Cambodia at the time, to see if the trails were full, if weapons were being cached for another Tet offensive.

And Vietnamese soldiers were so notoriously fond of firing weapons to celebrate Tet, that (as every memoir shows) we initially disregarded the firing on Tet 1968, figuring it was just more celebration.

I dunno why the Kerry campaign didn't jump ahead of this, but it reminds me of Stephanopolous in 1992, when questions about Clinton's draft record came up, He was too young to know why this stuff was such a big deal for the Boomers. I get the impression nobody in the Kerry camp has the balls to go to him quick and set him straight on his own stories... but, geez: you know as well as I do that it's the guy whose war story checks out in EVERY detail who is most likely fibbing. People tend to remember the important thing (those assholes may kill me, and what would Nixon tell my family) and get details wrong (it was a Sunday, when it was a Tuesday).

In this case, the mistake on a detail tends to support everything else: he confused OUR holiday, with theirs -- and over 30 years of telling the tale, he's gotten the handle wrong.

But the evidence supports that he's telling a true story. Somebody should say so.

I personally don't care all that much about this ancient history (or, for that matter, about George Bush's Air National Guard service or Clinton's draft dodging). But obviously a lot of people DO care about it, and political reporters are in business to give people information about candidates. If they can't do their jobs on this story, they should switch to another beat. So, guys, here's another hypothesis worth checking out: Did Kerry simply confuse Christmas and Tet?

And once you're done checking out this story, could you give us some information on Kerry's likely policy toward Iranian nukes?

UPDATE: Those who can't get enough of this topic should check out Roger Simon's post on the Globe piece, including the comments.

Posted by Virginia Postrel on August 18, 2004 • Comments

Saudi Ads

I'm always in favor of Saudi money flowing to U.S. media companies, which in these troubled times can use the ad dough and, unlike other Saudi causes, do little harm (and sometimes even employ my friends). I doubt, however, that the latest propaganda campaign will convince Americans that the Saudis are on our side. (The latest ads, and others, are here on the Saudi embassy's website.)

Posted by Virginia Postrel on August 18, 2004 • Comments