AMMDI is an open-notebook hypertext writing experiment, authored by Mike Travers aka mtraven. It's a work in progress and some parts are more polished than others. Comments welcome! More.
Focusing on aesthetics might seem a bit shallow in the context of rationalism; that's the kind of stuff they usually disdain. But in fact one of the essays, LWMap/Naming the Nameless, was a critique of this specific practice and a defense of aesthetics and design. This suggests that the community is learning to appreciate the importance of the superficial.
There are a number of defensive strategies people (of varying political views) adopt against the cultural dominance of the left.
Respectability politics is a different tactic, and, in this context, usually takes the form of (not very credible) claims to be apolitical. Early forms of this include "Keep Your Identity Small" or "Politics is the Mind-Killer." By declaring the importance of not taking sides, you're already asserting that you're not wholly on one side; a progressive can reasonably infer that any avowedly "apolitical" person disagrees with them at least somewhere.
Claims of aloofness from politics have always, correctly, been identified as evidence of covert dissent from "good" politics: "formalism" was a political offense in Soviet Russia. There are many thinkpieces like this one observing (rightly) that Silicon Valley culture is nominally apolitical but implicitly capitalist.
The rationalist/nerd world view has some limitations, and a lack of respect for the superficial is one of them. In this piece the author acknowledges this and tries to work out ways to overcome this bias or compensate for it. Oscar Wilde said that "It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances", so this can be read as an earnest effort to overcome this shallowness, to come to grips with the lived social reality in which aesthetics plays an important role.
Nerds are almost definitionally people who don't pay much attention to normal things like grooming and clothing styles, for whatever reason. So the job of the author is to convince them that style and aesthetics might actually be important social signalling mechanisms and so in fact worth paying attention to.
And the things style is about tend to be fairly important. Stylistic preferences like color choice or typography or elegant interior design can be used as indicators of very significant things like level of education, or intellectual openness, or respect for intelligence, or general trustworthiness, or membership in certain elites. Normal people intrinsically know how to read these signals; designers know how to manipulate them. Their job is to take manufactured objects or web pages and make them into vessels of these codes, along with their more obviously pragmatic functions.
Note: this is only one kind of designer stance, and in fact one of my favorite books Design for the Real World (Victor Papanek) makes the case that design should not be about status games but really ought to be more like a creative, human oriented sort of engineering of practical solutions to real human problems. But mostly today "design" means the sort of thing Apple is good at, combining technology and human concerns and social signalling into products that purport to elevate their users.
The mapping of style to value can seem arbitrary (eg mappings of color to emotion), but she quite rightly argues that just because such mappings are created socially doesn't make them any less real. I'm entirely in sympathy with this point.
Style-blindness is a term coined to denote a nerdish blindness towards the social signals of style. The example given is someone who despite being interested in chasing down and exposing scam artists and crime, apparently lacks the author's ability to detect scamminess through sleazy web design.
I'm more like the author; I have a pretty good radar for that kind of thing. And perhaps I don't move in nerdy enough circles but I don't think I know anyone who is style blind to that extent, which sounds like it would be a serious handicap in navigating life in general.
Another part of the essay is devoted to worrying about the fact that the practice of good aesthetics seems to be dominated by the political left, which is a problem for the author because of her libertarian sympathies (I have to admit it was hard for me to get past my own political biases against libertarianism here).
She has some theories for why this might be so. Styles, according to her, begin in creative artistic subcultures which are heavily skewed left. As the mainstream corporate culture starts to adopt these original stylistic tropes for themselves, they also get contaminated with leftist values that they otherwise would avoid
I smell an inconsistency – in the first part of the essay; she is acknowledging and pretty much celebrating the fact that certain aesthetic styles are accurate signals of value (eg, the Apple / SF sort of warm, back-to-basics industrial look communicates taste and certain moral concerns). In the second, she seems to imply that the connection between aesthetics and political parties is some kind of unfortunate accidental epiphenomenon that needs to be fixed.
Or maybe not, Ayn Rand is praised for having created an aesthetic to match her politics, and the fact that both are deemed awful by the mainstream is treated as a point in her favor somehow. I have to admit I lost the thread around here.
Let me suggest that the author listen to herself and acknowledge that the aesthetics of political signalling are not arbitrary but, even more so than in the cases of computer hardware or Whole Foods Kombucha, an integral part of and an accurate reflection of what they are representing. They can't be readily separated. Bad morality, bad politics, and bad aesthetics go together. That Fox News employs ugly and aggressive design is not incidental to their mission, it's an integral part of it.
This belief that aesthetics can vary independently from the values they encode is oddly similar to the orthogonality thesis; it presumes that something high level is completely independent from its low-level implementation.
After reading the whole essay, I was not sure I had a sense of a coherent position. I see it as trying to do two things: one, repair the gap between nerdish rationalism and the idea of style, by elucidating a non-mysterious theory of how style operates and why it's important and connected to deeper values. That part worked well I thought.
The second part is trying to repair a disjunction in the author's own specific values and their stylistic expression. She likes modern, trendy, SF/Apple/WholeFoods-style design, but it's connected with political values she doesn't share, being more of a libertarian. From this standpoint, it's useful to think of style mappings as arbitrary and ask how her political values can be made to look better.