Aesthetics, identity, and Real objects

This issue has lots of pictures. You probably want to view it on the Substack website rather than in your email client.

Look at this cool thing I bought recently:

It’s a fully analogue hand-wound mechanical stop watch, apparently from the USSR. I ordered it second hand on ebay, and it arrived today. I really like it.

Part of why I like it is that it is Real. I’ve been trying to actually pay attention to my aesthetic preferences over the last year or two, and the strongest one is that I very strongly prefer things that are Real to things that are Fake.

Real (as opposed to merely real) is a category that exists only in my head and is highly subjective and idiosyncratic to me - it’s definitely got a bit of that Douglas Adams “Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things” character to it.

But it’s been very useful for me to identify the label, and I’d like to tell you a bit about Real things.

But first lets talk about my stopwatch before. I mostly hate mechanical clocks, and am not a huge fan of analogue clocks, for largely practical reasons, but somehow all of that goes away with a stopwatch, I think largely because it’s an intrinsically time-limited object. I don’t like winding clocks, I don’t like it when there’s a constant ticking noise, but having the winding needing only to be done when I use this, and only occasionally at that, seems at worst neutral and in some sense lightly positive. The ticking noise is, similarly, somewhere between harmless and slightly satisfying in the context of something that is only running for a short duration.

Part of what makes the stop watch Real is that it is exactly the thing that it is. It is singular in its purpose, made wholly out of Real materials, and doesn’t pretend to be anything other than it is. It’s also clearly been used for its purpose, and is reasonably well made and robust. Neither of these are strictly necessary to be Real, but certainly seem to help. Realness is mostly about not pretending to be other than it is

It’s not that it’s analogue. Here’s another Real thing:

This is my watch. It is, to me, absolutely the platonic form of watch. This is absolutely 100% because I’m a child of the 80s and 90s. Although if I were being truly authentic to my childhood, I would prefer this one:

But metal is more Real than plastic.

It’s not that plastic can’t be Real. For example my laptop is Real (I’m not so sure about my phone) and it contains a significant amount of plastic. A keyboard that wasn’t made out of plastic would be less Real. Keyboards are supposed to be made out of plastic.

Or, for example, consider Steve:

Steve may not be a real dinosaur, but he’s definitely Real.¹

Speaking of plastic, this pen knife is also Real:

This rock, which I use as my secondary anchor, is also definitely Real:

Rocks are usually Real, but not always. Here for example is a rock that is not Real:

It’s Fake for two important reasons:

1. It is clearly a rock that has been carved to look more rocklike.

2. In order to be Real, it should be solid rock, and this rock is clearly full of shit.

Importantly it’s not that it’s been carved. A rock wall is Real. It’s Fake because it is a rock that is trying to look like a rock rather than just being a rock.

The table I’m taking these pictures on is also Real. It’s covered in junk right now so I don’t want to take a picture of it, but here’s from when I first installed it at my last place:

Importantly it’s Real but not particularly high quality. It’s a piece of cheap pine garden furniture that I bought second hand for £10 and cleaned up and oiled to use as a desk. I keep thinking about replacing it with an actually good desk, but whatever I chose would be less Real.

This table is also Real:

In contrast, this table absolutely is not Real:

Very little furniture that Ikea sells is Real in fact. It’s all veneer over particle board, which is one of the most common sources of me judging something as not Real.

It’s not that wooden things have to be solid. Plywood is perfectly real. Particle board is not. I’m not precisely sure why - I think it’s something to do with the fact that plywood is obviously plywood, but particle board has to pretend to be something else in order to look good.

I still have a lot of IKEA you understand. It’s hard to avoid. As a result all of my books are on Fake Billy bookshelves (books, themselves, are of course Real). I don’t like this but I live with it for now.

I did insist my bed be Real though:

The bed is actually one of Ikea’s cheaper ones, in that it’s made of unfinished pine. It’s an interesting example where Real is cheaper (but not better) than Fake. The bedside tables sadly are not Real, though I think they’re veneer over some cheaper wood rather than chipboard. I’m not totally sure.

The alarm clock also isn’t entirely Real. It’s analogue but the analogue is powered by electronics behind the scenes. It’s more Real than a digital alarm clock would have been² in its place though, and the advantage of it being purely digital is that it’s silent.³

The art⁴ hanging above the bed isn’t as Real as I’d like. The squares are actually copper foil over plastic. I do keep thinking about remaking it, both to make it more Real and also to incorporate some lessons I learned in making the first one.

Albert Borgmann in his book “Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life” has this distinction between a Thing and a Device. A Device is something designed for “commoditisation”. It has a single clarity of purpose, and is largely interchangeable with anything else that achieves that purpose. In contrast, a Thing is something that has a rich embedding in human life that cannot easily be reduced to a single purpose. It is designed for convenience. Borgmann’s only really good example of this is that a space heater is a Device and a Fireplace is a thing. Another might be that a supermarket is a Device and a vegetable garden is a Thing.

I don’t think Real vs Fake is precisely the same distinction as Thing vs Device, but there’s definitely some sort of overlap between the two.

Something is Fake to the degree it’s pretending to be something it’s not, and I think Devices are prone to that. There’s a certain… desire to make your Device seem like it could be a Thing, when it’s not. You want the cheapness and commodification of a Device, but you don’t want to be seen to be doing that.

Additionally, I think Real things more naturally become things. By being Real, they’ve got a certain emotional weight to them that allows them to become load bearing. My rock is just a rock that I happen to have, but it’s got enough detail to it that if I swapped it out for another rock I would at least know the difference.

Are Real things inherently better than Fake things? I don’t know. Maybe. Certainly sometimes.

But it’s been very helpful to notice that, to me personally, this is an aesthetic distinction that actually matters to me, and to lean into it and look for things that satisfy it.

Aesthetics turns out to be a relatively light touch and accessible way to access a felt sense of how I want the world to be, and how I fit into it. One of the things I care about quite a lot is honesty, and this sensibility for Real vs Fake feels like an extension of that care, and I like that.