Modern software engineering is rotten. I should know — it’s been my livelihood since I graduated from college in late 2019. Last year, I decided I was done with it for a while. I started searching, waiting for inspiration to strike in the hopes that I could start pursuing something truly meaningful. An essay written by a friend of mine struck the fear of God into my heart on that front. It also gestured to a way out. In two words, Mr. Tivy suggested otium and providence. The former is the Roman conception of letting the mind wander, in whatever way it may, while spending as little time as possible on raw capitalist labor. The second is trusting in yourself and the world to deliver you what you need.

I began this period of focused leisure by going to one of the most glorious museums on the planet — The Met. While wandering, I stumbled into a strange section that housed the Arms and Armor collection. For those unaware, this collection contains things like the following:

I realized that the craftsmen of yore had elevated weaponry, a category of merely utilitarian objects, into some of the most exquisite things I had ever seen. They had taken objects of ubiquitous, vital importance in their respective eras and made them beautiful. My initial aesthetic shock was quickly replaced by jealousy — no one was lifting the most centrally important functional objects in our lives into the domain of beauty. The practice of these long-gone artisans had disappeared.

Consider the computer. Nearly everyone on the planet uses one, yet it has never gone through the same sort of treatment we see exemplified in the Arms and Armor collection. Note that there is no analogous computer collection in the Met. Nothing created as of yet has been deemed worthy, and it’s not difficult to see why. Ever since the release of the first personal computers, i.e. those with form factors small enough to fit comfortably inside one’s home, all we’ve gotten are plastic and metal boxes. As far as I can tell, no more than a handful of designers or engineers in the last 50 years of personal computing have thought: “We should consider the physical instantiation of these ubiquitous machines very seriously.” Rather, we have endured decade after decade of a totalizing Faustian fixation: improving performance and expanding capabilities with software and hardware. The computer’s aesthetics of form had been forgotten somewhere along the way.

It gets worse. Through years of discussions with friends in the software world, I had come to understand that computing suffers not only from a dearth of physical aesthetic care but also functional aesthetic care. The Faustian fixation on infinite expansion of power via software and hardware has had horrible effects on the everyday personal computer user. Suffice it to say that the typical person’s user experience in the year 2023 is characterized by being strip-mined for attention with every application they open (often dealing with absurd bugs and lag), complemented by a near-total inability to make changes to any layer of their experience other than choosing which apps to download and which to delete. We’ve had an untamed outgrowth of these apps with few fundamental reconsiderations of how things could be different.

With this two-pronged insight into how bad things had gotten, I set out to try and prove that there are other possible paths. The Mythic I is the result of my year-long inquiry and effort. It proffers an alternate computational reality.

Form

After my experience at The Met, I spent the next few months viewing and considering as much beauty as I could. I went to more museums. I spent weeks researching obscure Baroque furniture makers, legendary luthiers, prominent architects, naturalist illustrators, Italian car designers, and philosophers of aesthetics. What I came out the other side believing was that beauty must be created by human hands, and ornamentation is an essential part of beauty.

The word we use today for a person who creates things by hand in small numbers is craftsman. Tragically, phrases like “arts and crafts” have denigrated that very powerful Germanic term, and it now connotes one’s mom scrapbooking at the dining room table. The meaning of craft in Old Norse was “strength, virtue”, in Old English “power, physical strength”, and Proto-Germanic “strength, skill”. The word we use today for the creation of objects is manufacture. It was once a powerful Latin term that now, unfortunately, connotes behemoth, lifeless industrial machines. Its two roots, manus and facere, were Proto-Indo-European words meaning “hand” and “to set, to put”, respectively. Armed with this philology, we see a deep truth and power in the phrase “manufactured by craftsmen.” It contains thousands of years of wisdom from the most successful cultures in history. The process of “men of strength, skill, and virtue using their hands to enforce their will on materials” should not be forgotten.

Ornament has been mostly shunned in our time, shut out for the sake of efficiency, cost-savings, and production en masse. For thousands of years prior, it was thought to be essential. For instance, we find its necessity as a widely-held belief among Baroque Catholics. For them, it led to the flourishing of architecture, furniture, music, and many other forms of art. Same for the Egyptians, Assyrians, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, Turks, Moors, Indians, Chinese, Celts, Medieval Christians, and Renaissance Christians (to name a few).

In the Baroque example, we see an era when most of a continent could agree on a statement such as “God is the True, the Good, and the Beautiful, and the exaltation of His many forms is one of the highest kinds of worship”. For them, when exalting God, one must echo the beauty of His forms at all scales (which is what happens effortlessly in nature). This implies that the overall structure of a Baroque building must be given as much careful consideration as its minuscule details like door handles, candelabras, and moldings. The result is that no matter what portion of the thing you’re looking at, you are always seeing detailed exaltation, as in nature. Compare this with a modern building, and the divergence is immediately apparent. There is no smaller realm of beauty that I am confronted with as I get closer to a skyscraper, only bleak monotony.

There is hope for us yet though — some modern architects and academic philosophers have tried to publicly agree that “ornament is good”. One such counterculturalist is Mark Foster Gage. Gage, a classically-trained architect, would agree with the Baroque characterization of beauty as scale-invariant detail (his program prefers the term high-resolution design) but would break with the necessity of distinctly Christian motifs. Rather than aping anything that has been done before, he would implore designers to at least generate new libraries of motifs while embedding them at various scales of resolution in their work. Ideally, it seems he’d like designers to generate completely novel aesthetic methods of evoking the same sorts of emotions people feel when viewing older styles. I broadly agree with him — revivalist works are often garishly pastiche, and the designer’s primary focus should only be to comfort, awe, and delight people who see or interact with what they create. There must be other ways of bringing about those reactions than with the billion-and-first acanthus leaf. In addition to Gage’s fairly abstract program, there is also more concrete research that attempts to prove ornament by showing that biological stress responses in people are (unsurprisingly) lessened when inside ornamental buildings as opposed to concrete and glass monstrosities.

As to my first conclusion about beauty, the necessity of craftsman manufacturing, I did well. I carved the body of Mythic I by the strength of my hands alone. As to the second conclusion, the necessity of ornament, I did not do so well. For all my research and polemical thought, I ran out of time for this prototype. The thing about the scale-invariance requirement is that it takes a great deal of time (and therefore capital) to do. Indee