empiricux.com

Once, I read an interview in which an aircraft designer said of a particular airplane that it would not fly because it was ugly.
At the time, this statement seemed almost anecdotal – an aesthetic whim disguised as professional conviction. Yet the longer I reflected on it, the clearer it became: the issue was not appearance. The engineer was speaking about structure, about the relationship between form, function, and environment. In this context, an “ugly” airplane meant an incoherent, overloaded, contradictory construction—one that lacked the internal logic necessary to lift off and remain airborne.

The Beautiful and the Ugly
Here, I do not use the concepts of “the beautiful” and “the ugly” in an aesthetic or taste-based sense. In what follows, they designate the quality of a technological system in its relationship to environment, user, and experience.

In the work of the French philosopher of technology Gilbert Simondon, technology is understood as a process of individuation rather than a finished object. A technology becomes beautiful when it is sufficiently concretized: when form, function, and environment are mutually aligned, and when side effects (energy, heat, noise, data) are integrated into the system’s internal logic, no longer requiring constant external correction. For Simondon, ugliness is not a defect of form but a sign of incomplete individuation – manifesting as fragmentation, excessive complexity, or dependence on forced external intervention.

Another French philosopher, Bernard Stiegler, complements this perspective by introducing the dimensions of experience and time. A technology becomes beautiful when it supports individuation by enabling learning, the accumulation of skill, and the formation of meaningful relationships with the world. An ugly technology, by contrast, is one that degrades experience: it disrupts structures of attention, narrows the horizon of perception, and replaces meaningful processes with intensity, fluctuation, or continuous stimulation.

This Beauty, However, Does Not Fly

For the aviation engineer mentioned at the outset, beauty is not a decorative layer. It is evidence that forces are in balance, that material works harmoniously with the laws of physics.

This insight becomes particularly sharp when transferred from aviation to contemporary digital technologies. There are systems that appear to function, that are present and widely used, generating immense activity and attention, yet still leave behind a strange sense of emptiness – they exist, but they are not experienced. A striking example is cryptocurrency.

Within the paradigms of Simondon and Stiegler, cryptocurrency may appear “beautiful” because it is mathematically elegant and grounded in a coherent algorithmic order. Yet this beauty lives in abstraction. The user does not see the material with which the system operates, does not feel resistance, and ultimately does not experience it. Instead, there are only fluctuations, waiting, and the promise of a brighter future.

Where Does the Empty Promise Begin?

In this sense, cryptocurrency structurally resembles a political promise that is never embodied in practice. It exists as a continuous projection into the future, in which action is replaced by waiting and responsibility is deferred to an abstract system. Like an empty political slogan, the promise operates on its own: it mobilizes attention, generates hope, and sustains the illusion of participation, without assuming the obligation to become lived experience. The future is endlessly postponed, while in the here and now neither new skills nor learning experiences take shape. In this regime, both cryptocurrency and the political promise may appear beautiful, yet neither transforms reality – they merely nourish expectations.

This parallel is also recognizable within the European political landscape, where trust in institutions rests on the ability to translate promises into procedures and regulation. When a promise remains purely narrative, it loses its aesthetic credibility in much the same way as a technology that never leaves the level of abstraction. Here, beauty ends where responsibility begins to be absent. This logic of the empty promise becomes visible when viewed through the lens of the European Union’s strategic horizon. For example, Europe’s resource governance and transition policy is being purposefully advanced, emphasizing the visibility of material cycles, responsibility toward resources, and long-term impact. In this context, beauty is not declarative.

In the case of cryptocurrency, however, such purposeful political initiative at the EU level has so far been fragmentary. Regulation has focused primarily on risk mitigation, financial stability, and consumer protection, rather than on how this technology might be integrated into the logic of Europe’s resource governance and transition policy. As a result, cryptocurrency remains outside the strategic narrative: it is neither clearly rejected nor purposefully guided, and thus is not connected to concrete value chains nor subjected to the requirement to generate experience, skill, or collective benefit – much like a political promise without a mechanism of implementation.

In this context, the ecological dimension cannot be avoided, and in the case of cryptocurrency it is particularly paradoxical. Not only because the technology consumes vast amounts of energy (every modern infrastructure does), but because this consumption is not experienced. Energy remains an anonymous background rather than a visible, politically and socially articulated relationship with the environment. An anonymous process that consumes real resources is not translated into skills, nor is anyone held responsible for its consequences. When a technology consumes resources without helping society understand that consumption, without generating new skills or sustainable value chains, its ecological “ugliness” is structural.

Perhaps it is precisely here that the aircraft designer’s remark becomes fully intelligible. Not because the airplane lacked elegance, but because it lacked ordered relationships with the forces that carry it.

* In Simondon’s understanding, individuation designates an ontological process through which the individual comes into being, rather than a merely social or psychological distinction.

References

Simondon, G. (2017). On the mode of existence of technical objects (C. Malaspina, Trans.). University of Minnesota Press.

Stiegler, B. (1998). Technics and time, 1: The fault of Epimetheus (R. Beardsworth & G. Collins, Trans.). Stanford University Press.