Is the World Getting Uglier?

The Ezra Klein Show

Ezra Klein interviews design expert Debbie Millman to explore why the modern world feels increasingly drab or vulgar. They trace contemporary aesthetic

Key takeaways

• Millman distinguishes between 'ugly' (often intentional or subversive) and 'vulgar' (accidental and lacking proportion), citing the Cybertruck, Gen Z fashion, and oversized housing as examples of design that assaults rather than communicates.
• The episode links architectural and product homogenization to market logic: homes are painted gray for resale value, cars are streamlined for aerodynamics and regulations, and public transit spaces are flooded with ads because commercial optimization prioritizes liquidity over character.
• Design is framed as manufactured meaning and social signaling, tracing back 50,000 years to tribal symbols and extending to modern brand tribes like Nike or luxury handbags that telegraph identity and status.
• Klein and Millman note a cultural tension between convenience and individuality, arguing that frictionless, algorithm-driven environments strip objects of emotional resonance, turning lived spaces into 'soulless service.'
• The modern right's embrace of neoclassical architecture and gilded interiors (e.g., Trump's Oval Office) is interpreted less as a return to traditional beauty and more as a deliberate visualization of power, tradition, and reactionary nostalgia.

Main topics

• Design aesthetics and proportion
• Market logic vs. individuality
• Political symbolism in architecture

Notable quotes

"Good design makes me feel better about whatever I'm doing... For the world, I think good design makes the world better."

Conclusion

The episode provides a framework for understanding contemporary aesthetic fatigue as a

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) Hey, it's Anna Martin from The New York Times. What if I told you you'll never have to hear this line again? Speaker 4 (0:06) Wherever you get your podcasts. Speaker 1 (0:08) Yeah, no, I actually can't tell you that. But you know what I can tell you? A place I think you might want to go. It's the Shows tab in The New York Times app. The place to listen to and now watch full episodes of New York Times shows. The Shows tab. Find it in The New York Times app. Explore The Shows tab and follow a show today. Speaker 4 (0:53) Why is everything so drab right now? Why is it all so same, same? You got these coffee shops, they all look the same. Architecture looks standardized. Buildings are colorless. Cars Speaker 3 (1:04) are interchangeable. Speaker 4 (1:06) Then on the other side, you have Trump's gilded Oval Office, his Speaker 3 (1:10) imagined arch, Speaker 4 (1:12) his garish vision for the reflecting pool. Say what you will about Donald Trump. He and the modern right, they have a theory of beauty. Not my theory of beauty, but a theory. For a while now, I've been wanting to do an episode on this question that I've seen a lot of other people ask and that has bothered me too. Is the world getting uglier? And if so, why? Why do we seem to design so much that looks so boring or on the other side, so loud? And in this moment when the right has a clear theory of beauty, does the left have any answer at all? Debbie Millman teaches at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. She's a longtime graphic brand designer. She revamped logos for companies like Burger King, 7-Up, and Haagen-Dazs. And for over 20 years, she's hosted a podcast called Design Matters, where she talks to creative people about design. She joins me now. Speaker 4 (2:11) Debbie Millman, welcome to the show. Thank you, Ezra. It's great to be here. So over the past couple of years, I feel like I've read or watched a dozen essays on why everything is getting uglier. And I just read a piece from you with the title, Is the World Getting Uglier? So is it? Speaker 2 (2:27) Depends on who you ask. I'm asking you. My opinion, it's getting more vulgar. In some ways, ugliness can be very intentional. Speaker 2 (2:41) Vulgar is accidental because it doesn't have intention. Nobody really sets out to make something that's truly vulgar. Certain ugly can be seen through the lens of a trend as being really glamorous or sexy or interesting or subversive. But vulgar is always pretty awful. And I think that is the real word about vulgarity. where we're moving. Give me some examples of Speaker 4 (3:13) this vulgarity. Speaker 2 (3:15) Well, the Cybertruck. There's really no need for a car to look that imposing and that bloviated. Housing, where houses are now being raised that fit sort of sweetly on their lots with a front yard and a backyard and maybe little alleys on either side. And now they're being squeezed into the property so that there's maybe six or seven inches of grass between the house and the sidewalk. We're seeing it in clothing, particularly in Gen Z fashion, which I know that the New York Times has been writing about quite a lot. And Speaker 4 (3:53) if there's anything I'm an expert on, it's Gen Z fashion. But Speaker 2 (3:56) Gen Z fashion is not forever. Fashion by nature is a type of expression that has an expiration date in it. or certainly a pause date. It might come back, but for a while it goes out of style. Some of it is forced obsolescence. Some of it is just trends in style. Whereas houses, cars, vehicles, airplanes, things like that tend not to transition very often in the way that they fundamentally look and work. Speaker 4 (4:35) How do you distinguish, and I know this is like the oldest, hardest question in taste, but one woman's vulgarity is another woman's interesting, ugly, is another person's, oh, that's a cool cyberpunk truck. Speaker 2 (4:53) I think a lot of it has to do with proportion. And a lot of proportion has to do with mathematics. And so there are things that are just more lyrically beautiful because they are in proportion. And generally speaking, humans can assess when something is out of proportion, not knowing anything about the math of it, whether it be a building or a car or a coffee mug. And so if something is out of proportion, it will... Give us a sense of discombobulation. And it could be the disproportion of a handbag, a skateboard. It could be the disproportion of anything. But things essentially make us feel things. Everything makes us feel something. And when something is out of proportion, it changes the DNA around us. I'm Speaker 4 (5:44) very interested in the way. That we notice what the environment around us or the objects around us are making us feel. I always thought a big reason you had that Marie Kondo craze some years back was that there was a real genius to her giving people a practice of noticing what their objects made them feel. Speaker 2 (6:06) People Speaker 4 (6:06) had previously told people to tidy up. What she offered was a way to say. you can tune in to the way your environment is making you feel. But there too, I think you run into this question of much that we now consider beautiful, when it was built, when it was designed, it was out of proportion. It was brash. It was aggressive. And so the early reviews of it were very negative. So then you get into this interesting question of can you trust what you're feeling in the moment? Speaker 2 (6:40) There's so much to talk about just from that sentence. I want to go back to the first part of what you were saying about how things make us feel. We are social mammals, and every single way in which we've been socialized to experience the world around us is based on our social skills. on objects and things around us. And that goes all the way back. That goes back 50,000 years ago when we started to create symbols to designate our reality. So the very first marks was what we were seeing around us. So we started to draw on the walls of caves. After that, we started to advance and move into tribes. What was the first thing we did when we moved into tribes? We designated where we belonged and what we believed in with a symbol. I belong to this religion. You belong to that religion. We signify and telegraph that through the use of this symbol. And it means as much for the people that are part of the same tribe as those that aren't. And that safety in numbers, that security in we all believe the same thing. So we're not going to go off and kill each other because we all believe in this. It allowed us to prosper and create bigger, stronger social ties when we're in those groups. So that's the whole sort of how do we feel around symbols. We've been trained, socialized to experience the world through symbols, objects, and now brands. since prehistoric times. Speaker 2 (8:25) So if you're wearing a certain type of sneaker, you're part of a Nike tribe, a certain handbag, and that is telegraphing that you're a wealthy woman who bought her handbag on Rodeo Drive. We're even doing that now. This is really, really interesting to me with plastic surgery. So we can reconstruct a nose or reconstruct lips or reconstruct our butts to look a certain way to signify to others that those values, that that thing we think looks good. looks good to me and to you. And you know that I know that you know that I know that we both did that and we both look good. Now, it also does the same thing for the people that don't like a big butt or a certain type of veneer. So I think that we have to look back at the trajectory of our evolution because looks, size, fashion. Hair, all of those things have so much to do with the politics of our time, with religion, and with socialization. For Speaker 4 (9:35) you, what is good design and what is bad design? Speaker 2 (9:38) Good design makes me feel better about whatever I'm doing and whatever I'm doing it with. It's entirely subjective for me. what my specific definition of good design is for me. It makes me feel better. For the world, I think good design makes the world better. The experiences that people have, the way in which they're able to move through the world, it's easy, it's respectful. When I was coming to New York, I was in LAX, and I was in a sneaky line. where I had to stand behind a bunch of people in three lines that were all waiting to put their things in a container to then push onto a line. There's no rhyme or reason about it. where the three are. So even if you're in that position, you're not first. It's whoever got there first and somebody's managing it. And then you have to sort of really fast push your things through so that it gets through. And I said to the guy, because I knew I was coming here today, I said, who designed this? This is a billion dollar system that's in airports all over the world. And it is the worst design system. I have ever witnessed where people are fighting to get their containers into the queue. They're fighting to go next. The whole thing was just a design disaster. Speaker 2 (11:11) I think design that's disrespectful. I think design that is greedy. I think that design that is... Speaker 2 (11:21) immoral is bad design. Speaker 4 (11:24) One thing I've been thinking about as I've been reading and thinking about these essays over some period of time, my team and I wanted to do a show on this for a little bit, is, is the world getting uglier as a genre? It has sort of two different lines of critique happening in it at once. One is a critique sort of you're offering here, which is that it's getting uglier. The world makes you feel something. And the thing that makes you feel is bad. It's a negative feeling tone in the Buddhist terminology. And the other is that the world is getting not what I would call uglier, though people often use that word, drabber. It is getting more drab. It is making you feel. nothing more often. So one of the, I think, foundational essays here is an N plus one essay from 2023. And in that they talk about the drab sublime. The drab sublime unites flat pack furniture and home electronics, municipal infrastructure and commercial graphic design, an ocean of stuff so homogenous and underthought that the world it is inundated can feel like a digital rendering. One reason I sort of like the Cybertruck is I don't find it beautiful. What it makes me feel is not good, Speaker 7 (12:40) but Speaker 4 (12:41) it makes me feel something. Compared to so much else on the road right now, it reflects somebody's vision. I believe somebody somewhere found it beautiful. Speaker 2 (12:52) Yeah, there are people that buy it. So I think a lot of it comes down to taste. And then also, how well do things go with other things? The thing about the Cybertruck. is that the Cybertruck infringes. On the landscape. Maybe there's a strategy behind it, but I'm not entirely sure what that strategy is. Is it to command attention? Is it to intimidate? What is the intention of this? And when I think about the world getting uglier in its purest form, is the world getting uglier? because we're making bad design decisions? Or is the world getting uglier because we don't care about what anybody else thinks but ourselves? And is the world getting uglier because we're behaving in ugly ways? Once you start to see people behaving in ugly ways, it's inevitable. that that is going to trickle down into everybody else's behavior. Because we see if this could happen here, if somebody can get away with doing this, well, then why can't I do it? Speaker 4 (14:00) Well, I want to really position myself here because I think this type of trick is interesting to argue for, but around, but I want to really agree that it's ugly. It's not my taste. Speaker 2 (14:12) But Speaker 1 (14:12) you see, that's important for you to declare. But there is a Speaker 4 (14:14) trend here, right? So I feel like you could imagine two axes here. So there's... whether something makes you feel anything at all, how much it makes you feel. And then there's whether or not that feeling is good or bad. But there's so much that surrounds us now, so many apartment buildings. I don't find them ugly, but I find them as inoffensive. I feel nothing when I look at them. They are mute to me. So many cars that they're mute to me. Speaker 2 (14:40) When something doesn't have any real intention to it, when it's built without any sense of... purpose or strategy or respect for its surroundings. And that, I think, is worse than ugly and maybe even worse than vulgar. Speaker 4 (14:59) I think we have been in a period where a tremendous amount of the world around us, from the fashion to the way apartments are designed, to the way cars are designed, to the way places we stay are designed, people describe this in many different ways, but it has been a flattening. But now what I'm seeing is a reaction to that, right? You're talking about this, I think, a little bit in your essay. You talk about this move towards vulgarity, towards a bloviating style. You can think about Donald Trump festooning the Oval Office in gold. You can think about this very attention-grabbing fashion style in Gen Z. You can think about the Cybertruck. There was recently, I mean, this has Speaker 3 (15:38) been Speaker 4 (15:38) covered in other places, a move towards more maximalist design. We've Speaker 3 (15:42) gone from... Looks maxing. Yeah, Speaker 4 (15:43) looks maxing is another one, actually. But I actually meant in decor. Speaker 3 (15:47) And Speaker 4 (15:47) so you write that we're living in an attention economy and attention rewards extremity, that the more design is rewarded for being instantly visible, recognizable, and shareable, the easier it becomes to lose sight of proportion, purpose, and the people have to live alongside it. But I think maybe the other side of it is that we do live in an attention economy, and the more everything is served to us by algorithm, the more also things like feel the same everywhere. You go to coffee shops. I mean, there's a point the writer Kyle Chayka has made. You go to coffee shops in New York and L.A. and Mexico City and Buenos Aires and Tokyo, and they're all kind of the same coffee shop. And all of a sudden, people begin Speaker 2 (16:26) to- Speaker 4 (16:26) I Speaker 2 (16:26) mean, you Speaker 4 (16:26) can't even Speaker 2 (16:26) differentiate airports anymore. Yeah. You go into an airport and it could be any airport in any city of the world. Speaker 4 (16:33) So how do you think about the relationship and the tension between those two things? The feeling of- Maybe the people rejecting, but then it creates this, it's creating, I think, a move towards what you're describing as a kind of a vulgar or obloviating answer to that. Speaker 2 (16:48) Well, I mean, if you look back to the original visual language of the iPod, you know, six weeks after 9-11, Apple introduced the first iPod. And that came with the white earbuds. I Speaker 4 (17:01) did not know that was six weeks after 9-11. Those are two events I had not put together in my head. Speaker 2 (17:05) Yeah, yeah. And... There was a really interesting period of time where as people began to acquire the iPod, they were able to showcase their allegiance with these white earbuds. It was actually really brilliant because the iPod wasn't sitting around, you know, outside of your clothing. It was in a pocket. But the earbuds gave you away. And there was this sense of like, I know that, you know, that we're the early adopters here. And people were very proud of that. super minimalist, super minimalist to really be able to cut through all the cacophony of that time. There was still a real sense of minimalism to it. And it's now, what, 26 years later, and that is still primarily the language. So much so that every other tech company has taken on that same vernacular. So they all look a certain way because people have an