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.