In the nineteenth century the critic John Ruskin invented a very useful concept: the “pathetic fallacy.” We humans commit the pathetic fallacy when we project our human feelings onto symbolic externalities. The pathetic fallacy is a confusion between the powerful way we feel inside and the indifferent way that the world actually works. Ruskin’s most famous example is a dead girl in a rowboat. “They rowed her in across the rolling foam—the cruel, crawling foam.” Grief has so stricken the bereaved lover that he feels that even sea foam has an agenda: the crawling foam is cruel.

  The pathetic fallacy is a fallacy because, although lovers are responsive, the physical world is inert. The material world is cold clay, like the dead girl in the boat—it cannot respond to our needs and feelings.

  Or at least it didn’t used to respond. John Ruskin was the greatest design critic of the nineteenth century, but this is not John Ruskin’s time. A rather more contemporary figure, eminently suitable for the twenty-first century, is Professor Neil Gershenfeld of the MIT Media Lab. In 1999 Professor Gershenfeld published a remarkable book entitled When Things Start to Think.

  In Gershenfeld’s futuristic laboratory of cyberneticized physical objects, the dead things around you can remold themselves to suit human needs and feelings. Suddenly, it’s as if all the world loves a lover. Shoes, hats, bricks, milk bottles, the fridge, the sink, the phone—everything’s got a chip inside, and everything’s got an agenda. When things start to think, then the pathetic fallacy is no longer fallacious.

  With “ubiquitous computing,” the world becomes your darling! Bits seduce and juicily mingle with atoms! The cold clay twitches, opens camera eyes and microphone ears! What was once a distant, glassy “interface” becomes a hands-on, fleshy, sexy “interaction.”

  So across their gap of centuries, Gershenfeld and Ruskin have a grand common theme: a fierce engagement with materiality. Ubiquitous computing is Ruskin’s pathetic fallacy in a high-tech world. “Ubicomp” (as it’s coming to be known) is a new and scarily intimate relationship between humanity and its material surroundings.

  Mind you, “things that think” do not love us. They do not even think, strictly speaking, much less emote or write sonnets. Lacking embodiment, they have none of the sensorimotor skills that do most of the brain’s real work; lacking hormones, they have no desires. So a “smart” desk stapler cannot return my feelings.

  However, a chip-jazzed device is certainly in a cruelly fine position to do all the awful things that drive us crazy in dysfunctional love affairs. It can, for instance, drop dead when I really need it and depend on it. It can whine crazily for my attention, intrude on my privacy, even stalk me. Unicomp is a twenty-first-century technology that poses intimate, touchy-feely opportunities and problems. Suddenly, almost every object around us is capable of failed commitment, heartless exploitation, and sleazy personal betrayal. Can’t live with it, can’t live without it.

  John Ruskin, to his sorrow, could never live with love. His wife left him because he couldn’t bring himself to overcome his hypercritical squeamishness and consummate their marriage. So he fell to his own fallacy: he spurned a living human being and preached “faithfulness to materials” instead.

  Ruskin failed as a husband and became the supreme guru of the Arts and Crafts movement. This visionary act of Ruskin’s has some profound lessons for the twenty-first century.

  Ruskin had extremely firm ideas about materiality and how it should behave. The Arts and Crafts approach was a passionately engaged, demanding, intimate relationship between humans and material goods. According to Ruskin, objects and buildings should reflect their local culture and their local character, instead of getting above themselves in a jumped-up life of coquetry and crass pretense. Structures and objects should be built to last and should age gracefully. They should never, ever have flimsy, fraudulent veneers or the smeared, slutty makeup of stucco. Household goods should never cheat people by concealing faults in their construction. The objects cherished in the Arts and Crafts household should be frank and forthright: useful, beautiful, or both. No knickknacks, gadgets, lingerie, or fabulous funky fetishes.

  Like romance and marriage, Arts and Crafts has failed repeatedly. Its spirit is very persistent, however. The twenty-first century is quietly dissolving many of the roadblocks that always spoiled that romance.

  Since the dawn of mass production in Ruskin’s day, the finer feelings of people of taste have consistently been betrayed by cold, crass industrial clumsiness. Ruskin’s language of protest may be old-fashioned, but his indignation is thoroughly up-to-date. Every generation rediscovers the harsh truth that our material goods are grossly unworthy of our feelings. So every time Arts and Crafts is dismissed as corny, impractical, softhearted, and mushy, it reappears in some vigorous new guise.

  Anywhere that shopping looks like art and philosophy, there the lonely ghost of John Ruskin moves among us, giving his aching heart to the rough-hewn beams, the weathered slates—the lumpy wooden kid toys, the Guatemalan jackets, the bamboo wind chimes—to all things organic, warm, rustic, honest, sincere, and above all, to things that are committed and faithful.

  The dawn of the twenty-first century is a golden age of design. It is a period of disposable cash, flourishing designers, radically innovative goods, and an ardent and worshipful consumer base of ultrainformed connoisseurs.

  Our historical situation is radically distinct from Ruskin’s. There are technical feats we can accomplish that were beyond his imagination. Our materials aren’t natural, local, and authentic, like Ruskin’s were. They are fantastically ductile, global, and increasingly infested with programmed interactivity.

  We now manufacture a great many of our worldly goods out of “cruel, crawling foam.” Crawling foam, more formally known as “injection-molded plastic,” is a substance of tremendous significance, stunningly well suited to computerized design and manipulation. Injection-molded plastic is the least honest material that the human race has yet invented.

  It is impossible to be faithful to injection-molded plastic. John Ruskin was so picky that he couldn’t abide even cast iron—he considered it too gooey, liquid, and cheap, suitable only for madhouses. But today we have, along with all those old-fashioned “modern plastics” of the 1960s, a truly weird repertoire of ductile goos such as Styrofoam, nylon, Kevlar, urethane, epoxy, and silicone. These materials are so profoundly artificial that they are simply beyond the ken of Ruskin’s ideology and cannot ever be recuperated.

  The crawling foam has very few design limits and almost no material authenticity. It is not local to anything or anywhere, and it can have any property that you are willing to pay for. Everything about it is arbitrary: its grain, texture, color, weight, shape, elastic modulus, strength in compression—all these qualities can be specified on demand.

  These new powers and new materials have led to the design and creation of a singular totem object of contemporary times: the “blobject.” The term was coined by contemporary designer Karim Rashid, author of a book aptly titled I Want to Change the World. “Blobject” may sound like a comical bit of design jargon, but with a little coaching, one can learn to see that blobjects are thriving in fantastic numbers and littering the modern landscape. They are computer-modeled objects manufactured out of blown goo. They are rounded, humpy, bumpy plastic creations. They are often translucent. And though they’re merely made things, blobjects tend to be fleshy, pseudo-alive, and seductive: rubbery, grippy, flexy, squeezy, pettable, and cuddly.

  Some contemporary examples: the Gillette Mach 3 razor. The Oral-B toothbrush. The Swatch Twinphone and the Phillips USB desktop video camera. The Handspring Visor PDA. Gelatinous wrist rests. TechnoGel in office seating. “Morph” Cross pens with bulbous gel grips. The curvy, slithery Microsoft Explorer mouse. The curvy, plastic Oh chair and magnesium Go chair.

  Automobiles were among the first objects to enjoy the benefits of computer modeling. Taillights, windshields, hoods, and fenders often look strangely rounded and ductile nowadays, as if they had grown in place or had partially melted. The New Beetle, with its humpy retromodern look, looks like it was cast in aspic.

  Blobjects carry the flag in a world whose manifest destiny is “organic behavior in a technological matrix.” Chips shape them and make them behave. Computer-aided design and injection molding allow them to assume any form. They get their organic forms directly from us: from mimicking human flesh.

  Unlike classic twentieth-century industrial objects, their form does not follow their function. That’s because their functional parts, being chip-based, are too small to see. Form can no longer even see function, much less follow it. Since blobjects are made from molten goo, they can take on any shape, cheaply and dependably. So they have adapted themselves to the only remaining design limits: the sensorimotor needs and desires of the human body.

  Blobjects evolve from human ergonomics. Screens must be large enough for human eyes to see. Buttons must be properly sized for human fingertips. Telephones must be properly sized to the human mouth and ear. The ergonomically spectacular Oral-B toothbrush is all about human teeth and human gripping pads, right down to the crook of the little finger.

  Blobjects look like us because they stick around with us, and they live with us, and they try to please us—they are blobs because we’re blobs, too. We also grow, we’re spongy, we’re curvy, we’re pettable, we’re eager to please, and sometimes we’re even lovable, if people can only see us for who we are, swallow their distrust and distaste, and give us a chance to make them happy.

  Blobjects are not impressive industrial Molochs like the steam locomotive or the Saturn-V rocket. They are humble, disposable, and easy to miss. They resemble commensal organisms, little remoras or pilot fish, snuggling up to the human body, attaching themselves to belts and sneaking into purses and backpacks. They puff up like rubbery puffer fish to seal human feet with air pressure. They even worship our eyebrows as tinted designer sunglasses.

  Translucency has become their signifier of digital power. Translucency says that they do something strange inside themselves, something potent but hard to see.

  Blobjects are intimate and disposable: they don’t deal in permanence or monumentality. There are no great architectural blobjects, though the rippling metal extravaganzas of Frank Gehry come close. Future Systems of London has an unbuilt skyscraper project called the Blob, while Lord Foster of Thames Bank has riposted with a master plan for the Gherkin. Although blobjects creep and swarm about us in their very millions, they don’t dominate our skylines, and for good reason.

  This age is quite prosperous, and great things are being done, yet just as we have no proper way to conduct a love affair and no proper way to be married, we have no proper way for our buildings to look. Our period has no signature design style. The structures we build are reheated Arts and Crafts, reheated neoclassical, reheated Bauhaus, reheated everything, really—all the looks of the past, cut up and quoted all at once.

  Blobjects don’t offer us much help here. Very few people would choose to live in a fully blobjective environment, a wobbling inflatable tent furnished with beanbags. Contemporary people strongly prefer to live among ritual architectural symbols of personal heritage and continuity. These pastiche forms (“colonial,” “classical,” “Southwestern,” “Tudor”) used to be stark necessities from the past’s construction industries. Houses with these shapes are no longer technically necessary, but they hang around because of legislation, property values, and sentiment. These forms are technically known as “skeuomorphs,” old shapes patiently carried into a new culture because they bolster our self-image, define our identities, and somehow make us feel better about ourselves. Skeuomorphs are tastefully retro and carry a reassuring message of firm purpose and continuity.

  Blobjects don’t offer us these ritual comforts, because blobjects are the unreal thing. They are the genuine avatars of contemporary technological circumstances, which are formless, full of opportunity, ultraflexible, and radically flimsy. Blobjects have something genuinely unsettling and uncanny about them. Their lines are sometimes Pokémoncute, but they’re commonly fungal, epicene, and creepy.

  Although they look vaguely “organic,” they are profoundly unnatural, because they come from computer-aided design and manufacturing. CAD-CAM is a technological matrix of mathematically specified computer geometries. Blobjects are really new, a genuinely modern design trend, in the way that the Art Nouveau whiplash line was once new, in the way that streamlining was once new. Because they are small, temporary, and throwaway, they incarnate the spirit of the times.

  This computer in front of me (a poison-green Apple iMac) is a blobject. It’s also the center of my literary life; it’s a blobject that I’m quoting John Ruskin on, that I was using earlier to pick a minor fight with Robert Louis Stevenson, that has structured a book around a Shakespeare soliloquy. The machine assembling this text is translucent, “fun,” “designery,” “user-friendly,” “ergonomic,” and rather pricey, and it also has a tragically short life span.

  Nevertheless, I have a rather serious relationship with this device. I spend many hours in its company, and I earn my living with it. Of course it cannot sincerely and faithfully return my feelings. But it does have its own name. It’s demanding and temperamental and very unforgiving of abuse. I’m forced to pamper and pet it rather more than I do my cat.

  More to the point, since it’s networked, it is a relationship machine. My beloved wife and I boast a relationship that has gloriously outlasted whole generations of computers. She is by no means a corny “computer widow.” We both websurf constantly, and we send each other supportive, helpful, spousely e-mail through the Internet—even though we and our dual computers are in the same house.

  Art Nouveau once produced a profusion of sleek, curvilinear, handmade art objects. No mere thing had ever looked that weird and ripply before, but Art Nouveau was a counterculture, powered by strong feelings of rejection and reaction against a mass-produced industrial society. Its zealots chose to make their objects look that way in order to show up the crass, square, clunky products of early industrial factories.

  Art Nouveau’s ripply art vases and drippy mirror frames may seem best suited to people in egret feathers and tiaras. But blobjects are Art Nouveau products’ legitimate heirs. In fact, blobjects are their avengers. Blobjects are almost as ripply, whippy, and hysterical as Art Nouveau handicrafts at their most extreme. However, blobjects are not rebels against industrialism—they are the postindustrial conquerors. They survived, killed, and buried twentieth-century mass production. They are fully tied in to the dominant industries of the new century: computers and networks.

  The well-to-do bourgeois intelligentsia of an information age have a lot in common with the wealthy patrons of Arts and Crafts. They don’t dress for dinner as Edwardians did; they don’t keep footmen and use a full set of family silverware. But they are just as extravagant in their own way; they will lavish any amount of money, care, and attention on “tools.” I can see a swarm of tools around me as I type this. My iMac is a tool; my digital wristwatch is a tool; my Teva sandals are tools; my Kensington turbo-ball is a tool; so is my boom-box stereo and my Artemide e-light and my ergonomic office chair. Blobjects love to pass as tools. But they really thrive best when they are tools and entertainment at the same time.

  Edwardian status signifiers were horse-drawn carriages and high-button shoes. Ours are direct period equivalents, such as the sport utility vehicle, which is a fun, luxurious military-spec truck. And the cross-training shoe, which is high-performance athletic gear for daily office wear. Our possessions often seem best suited for the harsh demands of a mountain-climbing rescue squad, even though we use them to go get a cappuccino.

  Modern devices are overstuffed with functionality for two good reasons. First, because functionality is cheap and easy in an age of chips. Second and more important, because function-as-baroque is making symbolic promises to us and to other people, ardent promises that we very much want to hear from our toys, tools, and appliances.

  The goods produced by Arts and Crafts made an identity statement for the owner: I am sincere and committed; this is where I take my stand to defend my values. But a device with huge amounts of extra functionality says something very different: I will not be trapped and cornered by technical limits.

  Arts and Crafts objects and twenty-first-century blobjects have a great commonality. They are both elitist, and they both despise consumers. In their eyes, consumers are faceless, tasteless creatures of mass industrialism, mere passive drones with false consciousness hammered into them by commerce and bad media. Consumers buy whatever cheap good is most loudly promoted by hucksters.

  But blobjects are not made for the consumer. They are made for a knowing participant in the technocratic scramble for wealth, the “end user.” The end user does not consider himself a consumer. He’s not plucking random junk off the wire rack for the sake of having more stuff. He is deeply engaged in the system, exploiting and adapting it. End users are a brainy, fastidious, postindustrial ruling class.

  There was once a gray-flannel “consumer society,” but its day is gone. Half a century has passed, consumer society has been transformed, and the process is ongoing.

  But this kind of sociology always sounds remote and abstract, like referring to a kiss as “courting behavior.” Let’s try to get completely hands-on here. Let’s cozy up to the warm and sensitive place where human flesh physically touches the network.

  We can make this distinction clear by bringing some Ruskinian critical clarity to bear on certain telling details of design. Let me show you how two quite similar devices reflect two very different societies. We’ll take some time to critically examine two telephones: the Henry Dreyfuss Bell telephone of 1950 and the Motorola StarTAC cell phone of 1999.

  Henry Dreyfuss (1904–1972) was a titan of America’s consumer century. His Bell desk-set telephone, the Model 500, is a design icon; industrial designers still speak of it with hushed respect. A masterpiece of form and function, it came in Henry Ford basic black. It sat forthrightly on its square, heavy, sculpted base, and it had a dial, a grip-friendly handset, and a curly cord. This telephone was simple, direct, integral, and honest. The Model 500 is still instantly recognizable as “a telephone”—in some sense, it is the telephone, and its popular image can never be superseded. More than ninety million of them were manufactured.