Even Christopher Nolan Prefers 70mm Film

It was when I was sitting with a friend, sharing memes through bouts of silence and chortling, that I noticed the reality of what we were really doing. We were sat a cushion apart, sending every image out of the room, through a server miles away, and back again to cross the couch. To share meaning through nothing more than technological mediation, while sitting physically next to one another, is just absurd. And yet it contains so many layers of historical human development that we sometimes forget that the technology we take for granted in our everyday lives is a product of the deepest waters of collective imagination, and a choice about what form that ought to take, writ large.

Today it’s AI this, AI that…but we have, in fact, been arguing about our technologies in the moral language of good and bad for a very long time. For more than 2000 years the optimists have been suggesting automated tools might finally deliver us from toil, while the pessimists have warned that they will deliver us from relevance. Human history nevertheless agrees, without ever quite saying so, that technology is a thing to be adopted or resisted, celebrated or mourned, diffused or banned.

How do we judge the tech we build in a way that resists good and bad, but instead focuses on what is more or less beautiful, and where the beautiful is not separable from the good? Instead of scale and capability, we chart a course through design and discernment, where all things should rightfully begin.

Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, capturing the zeitgeist of romanticism, speaks on this point from the vantage of an entire industry. Nolan shot the film from first frame to last on IMAX film stock, the first feature ever to be made this way, which means that in the few theaters equipped to run it as intended, one of the oldest stories we have still travels as a ribbon under precise tension, drawn through a frame, with human hands at either end of the machine. Nolan has intimated that once we strip away technical vocabulary, what we have are aesthetic reasons. The image, he believes, is simply more beautiful. Here is one of the most commercially powerful auteurs alive, working in the most thoroughly industrialized art form we have, and his advantage consists in refusing a kind of automation that the rest of his industry accepted twenty years ago.

The Greeks would have understood him, because their language performed the fusion automatically. To kalon, the construction Aristotle reaches for when he wants to praise an action, means beautiful and noble and fine all at once, and one of the highest compliments the Athenians paid a person was a compound: kalos kagathos, the beautiful-and-good, as though the two qualities could not be certified separately. Virtuous action, Aristotle writes in the Nicomachean Ethics, is undertaken for the sake of the beautiful (tou kalou heneka). Judgment of this kind proceeds by degree along a single scale, and not by verdict between two bins.

And yet when Aristotle enters our contemporary conversations about automation, he tends to enter as a sentence he never wrote. “When looms weave by themselves, man’s slavery will end” circulates on conference slides and in many a book about technology and employment. But it is a fabrication. What Aristotle actually wrote, in the first book of the Politics, is conditional about what is unreal: “for if each of the tools were able to complete its own work when commanded, or by perceiving in advance…if thusly shuttles wove themselves and plectra played lyres, master-craftsmen would now need no craft subordinates nor masters of slaves.” This is not a promise of emancipation, far from it. It is an account of why, in the absence of such instruments, some human beings must be owned, according to Aristotle, which means that automation enters Western political thought alongside an extreme form of despotism. I spent the better part of my time in academia with this single passage, and its long afterlife suggests that the association has never entirely left us.

Later thinkers inherited the burden of this ledger and have noted its dark undertones. Marx pauses over the same passage in Das Kapital and scoffs that Aristotle “dreamed,” and on the very same page he reaches back to Antipater, the Greek poet who had hailed the water-mill as a liberator because the enslaved women who ground the grain could at last sleep past the cockcrow, a wishful golden age restored. Norbert Wiener, writing at the birth of cybernetics, warned in turn that the automatic machine is “the precise economic equivalent of slave labor,” such that any human work forced into competition with it must accept the same terms. From the Politics to Das Kapital to the quarterly earnings call, the debate over automation has therefore been conducted in a single currency, namely who is freed, who is owned, and what it pays. Strikingly, beauty plays second fiddle, or no fiddle at all, to economics. What we have misplaced is to kalon.

The series of essays in this edition therefore begins with the neglected art of seeking beauty in one technological expanse at a time. The first concerns a sewing machine, and the choice is not accidental, since looms keep appearing at the hinges of this history: Jacquard’s punch cards were instructing looms a century before they instructed computers. From there the questions delight and provoke. Was churning butter a beautiful way to spend the day, or a chore to be automated away? Do we have to run off to the woods to remember what parts of the modern world we want to enjoy? What do Chinese fantasy dramas understand about imagining the future through a glorified past? What are solarpunk video games trying to teach us about how technology, society, and the natural world should be designed together? Should the future have more buttons and fewer screens? And what can it mean to age naturally, once nobody has to?

We are technological animals as much as we are political animals, and the Athenians fused their two highest qualities into a single compliment because they suspected that neither keeps for long without the other. As we choose the next century of how we make technology together, we owe ourselves a habit of judgment, before our vocabulary shrinks to make this too difficult. When the next tool arrives asking to be adopted or banned, we might decline the binary altogether and ask instead what the thing is beautiful for, and what it makes of the hands that use it. Everything we build already sits somewhere on this register, whether we grade it or not.

All of which returns me to the couch, and to my friend. Graded on this scale, our afternoon was only partly beautiful: the laughter, and the company. But the mediation, and the detour every joke took through a server to travel the length of a cushion, were decidedly less so. But we noticed. That noticing is where the habit begins, and the essays in this edition are an invitation to keep doing so.

This post is part of a collaboration with The Elysian. Check out their essay series and print pamphlet exploring how technology can create a more analog life, not a screen-addicted one.