Shedding your skin

There is a change that is gradual. It appears as discomfort, a fever. A change that occurs slowly, without us noticing, until one day we discover we are different. A little less ourselves, a little more someone else. Not better. Not worse either. ‘Simply: I no longer do the things I used to do, or I do them differently.’

We live in an era that is no longer content with transforming our customs: it seeks to reconfigure our internal structures. And this process of ‘reinventing ourselves’ does not come alone. It presents itself as ‘progress.’ A relentless, unstoppable progress that could make Homer Simpson tremble, saying, ‘Why change? I'm fine the way I am!’¹. Progress is that train that moves forward, sweeping away everything in its path, while the angel of history looks back and sees the rubble piling up.²

The question is not whether we are going to change. The question is whether we are going to have a say in that change. Now more than ever, the medium is the message.³

Some prefer to go with the flow of the algorithm. Others, however, believe that the tool is never innocent, but neither should it make us feel guilty. The hand needs tools to do its work.⁴ The question is what kind of tools we want to use to design and, more importantly, what kind of tools are designing us.

Designing is not just about shaping objects. Designing is about shaping our relationship with the world. If we put a hammer in our hands, we will see nails everywhere. If we design a world of screens, our emotions are likely to start behaving like pop-up notifications.

And to the beat of ‘beeps’ and those unexpected rhythms, we continue, to this day, to dance. The dancing body does not do so only to externalise its reality. Nor even to interpret it. It dances to remember that there is a hand that trembles, a body that breathes, a time that wrinkles. It dances to invent a movement that does not need to be shared or commented on. A body that does not want to convince, but to resist.

To resist the empire of speed. The digital feudalism that Žižek talks about, where large corporations exercise a symbolic power that organises our desire. To resist the idea that only what can be measured, stored and analysed exists. To resist the latest ‘supercool’ packaging that wraps up the same old content, which doesn't change, but which we have to redesign to make it look like it does.

Because we know it well: design is the skin that shapes our desires. The liquid remains the same, but the container can turn it into a rock that I have and must consume to feel alive. What we hold in our hands, Bruno Latour would say, is not an accessory: it is part of who we are.⁶ Design is not superficial; it is surface. And the surface is the first thing the hand touches.

So instead of asking whether these new tools are good or bad, perhaps we should ask ourselves what kind of relationships they produce. Whether they make us think or simply manipulate us to be more productive. Whether they help us to speak or impose a prefabricated language on us. 

Haraway spoke of the cyborg as a figure of hybridisation: a body that does not distinguish between the biological and the artificial.⁷ Today we are all a little bit cyborg. Not because we have implanted chips, but because our emotions, decisions and even our identity are constructed in constant dialogue with our tools. We are devices that design and are designed.

And what to do with that? Design the objects we want to be designed for us. Start by imagining what cannot yet be imagined. Use design as a form of self-knowledge, as a geography of what we are not yet. Not to control everything, but to leave room for the unpredictable. To let the human emerge amid so much ‘science of the artificial.’

As Paul B. Preciado said, it is a subjective mutation.⁸ Not to improve, but to mutate. Learning to live in a world that never stops, without losing the ability to look at a stone and still see it as a mystery.

We don't have all the answers. But we have questions. And sometimes, a good question is better than a bad solution.

So we will continue dancing. Designing. Thinking. Not to adapt to speed, but to invent our own rhythms. Not to please machines, but to remember that there are things that cannot be programmed.

Apparently, we have to readapt. But not our wardrobe, like someone changing their shirt. Rather, our skin, to alter the way we are in the world.

Like someone who designs themselves.

Again and again.

¹ Homer Simpson in the episode ‘Homer vs. Patty and Selma’. Quote adapted for illustrative purposes.

² Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, in Illuminations, Taurus Publishing.

³ Marshall McLuhan, ‘Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man’, 1964. Central idea about how the medium conditions more than the content it transmits.

⁴ Martin Heidegger, ‘Being and Time’, 1927. On the relationship between the hand, the tool and the world.

⁵ Slavoj Žižek, ‘The Incontinence of the Void,’ Anagrama Publishing House, 2017. On digital feudalism and the symbolic power of corporations.

⁶ Bruno Latour, ‘We Have Never Been Modern,’ La Découverte, 1991. On the relationship between objects, humans, and networks of agency.

⁷ Donna Haraway, ‘A Cyborg Manifesto,’ 1985. On the cyborg as a metaphor for hybridisation and the subversion of boundaries between humans, machines and animals.

⁸ Paul B. Preciado, ‘Testo Yonqui,’ Editorial Espasa, 2008. On the body as a field of political experimentation and subjectivity as a process of mutation.