🧠 Cybertruck Design, AI Boom, and Nazism

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Welcome back AI prodigies!

In today’s Sunday Special:

• 🍿Prelude

• 🤖Away From the Natural

• ⏳What’s Behind This Change?

• 🗺History is Our Guide

• ⚔️A Cautionary Tale

• 🔑Key Takeaway

Read Time: 8 minutes

🎓Key Terms

• CRISPR: also known as “molecular scissors,” is a tool that cuts DNA at specific locations to add, remove, or change genetic material.

• Nuclear Fusion: when two or more atomic nuclei combine to form a heavier nucleus, releasing a tremendous amount of energy that scientists hope will provide limitless clean energy.

🍿PRELUDE

Like many figures in our culture, Tesla’s Cybertruck makes friends and enemies. To say this vehicle has an unusual design is a gross understatement. Autoweek called the Cybertruck’s dramatic lines, sharp corners, and shiny stainless steel panels “a prominent middle finger to everything that has gone before it.” That sentiment is accurate, but Autoweek’s interpretation fails to capture the long history behind Cybertruck’s design. In reality, the Cybertruck is far more than a “F*** You” to traditional automaker styles; it reflects an emerging, technology-driven design aesthetic that will fundamentally shift how the world looks over the next few decades. This emerging style is rooted in another era that materialized nearly a century ago during a similar technological and social movement, ultimately leading to disaster.

🤖AWAY FROM THE NATURAL

Over the past two decades, visual design trends have moved further and further towards the natural, handmade, and organic. After a resurgence of the environmental movement in the late ’90s, the visual design world embraced muted, natural colors, curvy and subtle lines, handmade aesthetics, and earth-inspired materials. Consumers pivoted from the pointy, angular countertops and furniture of the ’80s and ’90s to earthy and organic designs using materials like granite, quartz, and sustainable bamboo. Rough and textured granite countertops became an American obsession.

Similarly, the boxy, functional Sports Utility Vehicles (SUVs) of the ’80s and ’90s were phased out in favor of vehicles with big swoopy lines, inoffensively muted colors, and gas-saving aerodynamic edges. In 1980, just 28% of cars sold were black, white, or gray; today, it’s 85%.

As the Dotcom Bubble burst in 1999 and the Great Recession hit in 2007, the ’90s obsession with technology faded. Design trends moved in the opposite direction, reflecting a yearning to return to something more natural and minimal. Though design trends are complex, researchers believe a growing resistance toward technology inspired these 2000s-era trends in an increasingly technological world.

The Tesla Cybertruck reflects a dramatic move away from this decades-long trend. Its robust, jagged angles are decidedly and deliberately human-created. Gleaming stainless steel would never occur in nature. As Autoweek so insightfully put it, the shiny, mirror-like surface of the Cybertruck is a big middle finger to the world of natural materials and organic forms. While the Cybertruck is one of the most visually dramatic examples of this new design trend, it’s hardly the only one.

Wildly popular cultural creations like the video game Minecraft, with 178 million monthly users, employ a similarly pointy, angular aesthetic. This trend towards the unnatural also appears in the broader design world, with general moves towards pre-Y2K pixelation, roughness, and angularity.

Contemporary artists, too, are increasingly moving away from the natural. Artsy interviewed seven prominent curators about the future of art and found that many artists are using brightly colored, grid-like squares in their newest work, adding mechanical elements, or even embracing aggressively unnatural items like neon signs. In interior design and fashion, many designers embrace sparkly, delineated stripes, monochromatic paint schemes, and other elements you’d never find in nature.

⏳WHAT’S BEHIND THIS CHANGE?

What’s behind these current changes? Just as the early 2000s shift towards the natural and organic reflected a rejection of technology and modernity, today’s evolving design trends reflect a sudden, hard pivot toward it. We’re living in a moment of incredibly fast-paced technological change. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is evolving so rapidly that our human minds and institutions can’t keep up. Three years ago, state-of-the-art AI models were laughably bad at carrying on a conversation and could do little more than generate pixelated images of avocado chairs.

Today, the most advanced generative AI systems can create movie-quality visuals, easily deepfake any person, mimic our voices, or write novels. Similar breakthroughs in medicine (e.g., CRISPR), clean energy (e.g., nuclear fusion), and other fields demonstrate how technology is advancing faster than we can comprehend. Today’s changing design trends reflect this exciting paradigm. Our newfound move towards starkly unnatural, angular designs, human-made materials, and boxy pixelation captures our fascination with the massive technological changes that are reshaping our lives. The Cybertruck doesn’t stand alone; it’s an aesthetic reflection of society’s collective embrace of fast-moving, world-changing new technologies.

🗺HISTORY IS OUR GUIDE

These technology-driven design trends feel new to us but have deep historical roots. In the 1920s, the world was emerging from the horrors of World War I and the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic. Like today, the 1920s were also a moment of incredible technological change. Electrification, the telephone, air travel, cheap cars, and many more new technologies rapidly reshaped the early 20th century. These changes gave birth to a prosperous era called the Roaring ’20s. But they also gave birth to an artistic movement, the Art Deco movement.

Art Deco design captures the technological optimism and excitement of that moment. With an emphasis on speed and progress, Art Deco stood in total opposition to the more naturalistic Arts and Crafts movement that preceded it. Embracing jagged, geometrical lines, human-made materials like chrome and enamel, streamlining, and soaring monumental aesthetics, the Art Deco movement reflected the era’s emphasis on change, novelty, and tech-inspired beauty. Perhaps the best example of the Art Deco style is the 1927 film Metropolis. Its imagined future city is an Art Deco wonderland that captures many of the aesthetics of the movement. The impact of the Art Deco movement was far-reaching and significant. Art Deco themes were integrated into architecture, art, and interior design. Buildings like New York City’s 30 Rockefeller Plaza exemplify the movement’s aesthetic.

The Art Deco movement even influenced automotive design. Zoom in on the jagged, stainless steel grille of an Art Deco automobile from the Roaring ’20s, and you’ll think you’re looking at a contemporary image of the Tesla Cybertruck. In many ways, the emerging design trends we’re seeing today mirror the aesthetics of the Art Deco movement. The same emphasis on embracing and celebrating technology, speed, geometric angles, and human-made materials is present in modern objects like the Cybertruck.

⚔️A CAUTIONARY TALE

Based on these similarities, the Tesla Cybertruck is just the tip of the iceberg. As AI continues to reshape society, contemporary design will embrace even more of the aesthetics we last saw during the Art Deco movement. Roughness, muted colors, minimalism, and organic elements will fade. Artificial materials, jagged angles, maximalism, and an emphasis on speed and technological excitement will replace them. But, as this newest aesthetic emerges, we must be careful.

The Art Deco movement produced some beautiful design innovations, including many structures that still stand today. The movement’s influence can be felt everywhere, from the walls of the Metropolitan Museum of Art to the aisles of Target.

However, Art Deco also has a dark side. As the Roaring ’20s gave way to the 1930s, leaders co-opted the movement’s excitement and dynamism by forming a cult of techno-devotion that ultimately created fascism. Architectural historian Giles Worsley points to the columns of light during choreographed Nazi performances, the zig-zag lines of the Swastika, and the aesthetic of the Swastika uniform. Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Germany both embraced the progress-oriented elements of Art Deco, perverting its technological optimism in horrifying and inhuman ways.

Though explicitly artificial designs may correlate with the rise of fascism, this should serve as a cautionary tale. Technological excitement is incredible. Given the power of today’s AI, it’s certainly warranted. But as we embrace the emergence of ultra-powerful AI and the new design aesthetic that appears to be accompanying it, we must maintain sight of the human and natural elements that technology risks displacing. Art Deco designs are beautiful, but they’re also cold and impersonal. They subtly redirect our attention away from our shared humanity while fomenting an illusion of human progress.

🔑KEY TAKEAWAY

In the design world and our interactions with emerging technology like generative AI, we need to embrace the excitement and power of our moment. However, we must also preserve the human and natural elements that Art Deco ignored or sought to destroy. Cybertrucks are beautifully designed to reflect emerging technological trends, but not every car should look like one.

📒FINAL NOTE

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