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<!DOCTYPE html>
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<title>Armchair Philosophy - Comfortably Numbered</title>
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<a href="/"><span class="left-word">Comfortably</span> <span class="right-word">Numbered</span></a>
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<article id="postcontent" class="centered">
<section>
<h1>Armchair Philosophy</h1>
<center><em><p>An allegory.</p>
</em></center>
<h4>Friday, January 29, 2016 · 4 min read</h4>
<p>The IKEA Poäng is perhaps the company’s most comfortable and best-named
product: a chic, springy twist to the classic light armchair. The Poäng
comes in five or six different color schemes: generally variations on white,
beige, red, and coffee.</p>
<p>But what if it didn’t?</p>
<p>Let’s imagine an alternate universe, where the Poäng is advertised as a
medium of expression. Let’s imagine a world where the Poäng seat covers
are made of dye-able canvas. A world where customers are encouraged to decorate
their armchairs to reflect their own personalities.</p>
<p>Sounds like fun, doesn’t it? Well, uh, let’s see what happens. I present to you
an allegory in twelve parts.</p>
<hr>
<p><strong>January.</strong> The concept is first revealed during the keynote at the IKEA
Worldwide Developers Conference. The Twitterverse explodes. <em>The New York
Times</em> says, “What a time to be alive!”.</p>
<p><strong>February.</strong> IKEA sells out within the first 24 hours of sales; customers
waiting in line report being “disappointed, but contently stuffed with
meatballs”. Television commercials begin to feature contemporary artists
decorating their Poängs. There are rumors of AMC Theaters planning to
license Poängs for their cinemas. BuzzFeed publishes ten of their best
Poäng-assembling tips and tricks (you won’t <em>believe</em> #4).</p>
<hr>
<p><strong>March.</strong> Almost everyone now owns a Poäng. A dark blue Poäng
with the Presidential Seal is spotted in the White House.</p>
<p><strong>April.</strong> One’s Poäng-decoration becomes a profound statement of his or
her identity. After all, an armchair is where you spend some of your most
important hours. Reading, chatting, watching TV: these are all best done from a
familiar environment that should be optimized for your lifestyle.</p>
<p>A Berkeley establishment begins to sell tie-dyed Poäng covers.</p>
<hr>
<p><strong>May.</strong> Genres emerge.</p>
<p>There are the loud, skeuomorphic Poängs with too much color and design.
These generally belong to young children who decorate their Poängs in
Crayola colors.</p>
<p>Then there are the average adults, who choose the most suburban colors they can
find. Navy blue? Perfect. Olive green? Sounds like home.</p>
<p>Finally, there are the artistic adults, who go for a more refined look. They
pick neutral but subtle color schemes with tasteful accents.</p>
<hr>
<p><strong>June.</strong> The Average Adults realize that their Poängs look outmoded
compared to the beautiful Poängs of the Artistic Adults. Pastel colors are
the “in” thing, according to several popular Poäng-centered Instagram
accounts.</p>
<p><strong>July.</strong> The development of Poäng plugins spawns a new industry. Embedded
hardware for Poäng covers becomes cheap, resulting in increasingly
sophisticated Poängs.</p>
<hr>
<p><strong>August.</strong> The genres begin to homogenize into something the Chair Gurus call
the “material design revolution”. A combination of color palettes and design
guidelines assembled by experienced superstar designers guides every new
Poäng design.</p>
<p>An NPR survey reveals that while over 40% of the US population owns a
Poäng, only 12% of Poäng-owners report sitting in their armchairs
regularly.</p>
<hr>
<p><strong>September.</strong> IKEA begins selling readymade Poängs designed painstakingly
by expert designers and artists. They even deliver it—assembled—to your
doorstep. Most people choose to buy the readymade Poängs because they are
low-maintenance and don’t require as much effort to set up. They are also
stunningly beautiful, and the experienced designers probably took care of a lot
of corner-cases that you, as an amateur, wouldn’t really think of.</p>
<p><strong>October.</strong> Hand-decorated Poängs begin to look passé. Many of
them lack essential armchair features such as cupholders and localization
settings. They also ignore common best practices in the industry. Marketing
professionals say that hand-decorated Poängs are a poor business choice
for furnishing your waiting room because they “project an outdated look to
potential customers”.</p>
<p>“Don’t roll your own paint,” preaches one blog post that tops Hacker News.</p>
<p>Google publishes a framework to develop apps for the front end of Poängs.
They call it PoAngularJS. The average chair now weighs significantly more than
the average American.</p>
<hr>
<p><strong>November.</strong> IKEA sells one kind of Poäng now. Customers have occasional
problems with them, but you can find workarounds online. Besides, everything
else is so user-friendly. It’s really just a couple little things that bother
you, like the Wi-Fi crashing every once in a while.</p>
<p>Very few hand-decorated Poängs exist, mostly in educational institutions.
Old people complain that “see, them chairs had <em>character</em> in them”, but
they’ve been saying that for centuries.</p>
<hr>
<p><strong>December.</strong> IKEA discontinues the Poäng. Usage of armchairs is
deprecated in favor of the “one-person couch”, which is a remarkable new piece
of technology destined to revolutionize the way we think about sitting.</p>
<p>Nobody really remembers how to put together an old-fashioned armchair (just
like they don’t remember how to build a gramophone). Some engineers work
together to build their own version of the Poäng called the LibreChair.
However, it is only used by hardcore carpentry enthusiasts since the manual is
twelve pages long and building it requires you to weave your own cloth.</p>
<hr>
<p><strong>Epilogue.</strong> Let’s talk about customization. The etymology of the word
<em>custom</em> can be <a href="https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/consuetudo">traced</a> to the
Latin <em>consuetudo</em>, which means “habit”. But it means more than “habit”. It
means “experience”, “tradition”, “convention”, “familiarity”, “companionship”,
“conversation”… even “love affair”.</p>
<p>And it’s this dichotomy between the <em>individual</em> and the <em>communal</em> that makes
the idea of “customization” (which is so central to hackerdom) paradoxical. Our
identity is as much our own as not; we forfeit our identity to others.</p>
<p>There’s something to be said about having a fortress of solitude. A world which
you control, which you make your own with endless tweaks towards your ideals of
perfection. Programmers don’t need to carve their fortresses out of rocky
cliffs; they can find solace in editors, shells, browsers, and personal
websites.</p>
<p>The key is in <em>customization</em>.</p>
<p>Yet <em>even though</em> we spend hours making our tools “our own” with color schemes,
macros, and key bindings, we <em>still</em> choose to publish our dotfiles as
open-source “projects” on Github. We scarcely bother to read the original
documentation of our software, choosing instead to search for solutions written
already on StackOverflow. We happily hand over our content to the corporate
Cerberus that calls itself Medium. We choose to adhere to style guides written
by people who are not us. We foist upon others screenshots of artistically
themed editors, that are no better than gilded toothbrushes. We steal
boilerplate and eye-candy from others, believing somehow that we’re doing
ourselves favors.</p>
<p>It’s foreign, it’s homogeneous, it’s both beautiful and sickening: like a
fortress made of cotton candy.</p>
</section>
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