Chairs Will Be Chairs, Books Will Be Books
Humanity reinvents itself over and over again. Nothing is really new. Nothing is really old.
For the past few decades, threads have circulated over and over again: with the advent of technology, certain professions and objects are bound to disappear. The list includes, but is not limited to:
· Translators
· Designers
· Books
· Literature
Everything that I am, everything that I like and that I do, is destined for extinction.
But is it? Am I really?
American writer and humorist Mark Twain put it well:
There is no such thing as a new idea. It is impossible. We simply take a lot of old ideas and put them into a sort of mental kaleidoscope. We give them a turn and they make new and curious combinations. We keep on turning and making new combinations indefinitely; but they are the same old pieces of colored glass that have been in use through all the ages.
Humanity repeatedly reinvents itself; we take inspiration from other people’s ideas and work to build our own versions. I like to think that most often than not, it’s not about disappearance, but mutation: we adapt to new materials, new platforms, and new habits of use.
The pressure to be original, then, seems to vanish and, instead, we aim at recombination. Innovation, wouldn’t be so much inventing a brand-new piece of glass, but daring to see unexpected beauty in the patterns that emerge when we play with what’s already there.
Purpose kills design
Tech products are deliberately built to break, as part of the planned obsolescence that is the modern business model.
As much as we admire sleek, futuristic products, humanity consistently returns to the things that fulfil our purpose flawlessly. If we think of the wheel, the chair, a pair of scissors, a pencil, the spoon and fork, a mechanical clock, it’s easy to see that these objects remained the same, unaltered, for centuries, enduring the passing of time simply because their design is close to perfection.
The simplest designs endure because function outlasts fashion. A pencil works as well in 2025 as it did in 1625. A chair still serves the same purpose as it did in ancient Egypt. We can change the material, polish the surface, or make them ergonomic, but the essence remains intact.
Art in the age of mechanical reproduction
Technology copies what already exists, only with results that are tackier and built to break.
Digital technology rarely invents from scratch. More often than not, it imitates what already exists, strips it of tactile richness, and sometimes even makes it more tawdry. Just as Spanish writer Irene Vallejo put it in Papyrus: The Invention of Books in the Ancient World (the book is called El infinito en un junco in the original Spanish):
“the oldest objects, those who have been among us for centuries, shape new ones and put their stamp on them” (my translation).
IPads mimic books in their design, but cannot replicate the smell of paper or the sensation of back and forward in the pages, or the ritual of underlining with a pen.
Smartwatches echo the mechanical clock, but few of them last long enough to be passed on from father to son as an inheritance.
Social media feeds attempt to replace diaries or letters, but lack the intimacy, the privacy, the permanence that once defined personal writing.
And in many cases (ouch!) tech products are deliberately built to break, as part of the planned obsolescence that is the modern business model.
Designs carry meaning that technology cannot replace.
Simpler times
After decades of accelerating digitalization, many people are starting to feel the fatigue. I can see it happening all around me: there’s a growing desire to return to analog, tactile, enduring experiences: to playing a vinyl record instead of streaming a playlist, to shooting film photography instead of endless digital snaps, to writing in a notebook instead of another app, to owning a bookshelf instead of a cloud storage account.
I don’t think it is nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake. Rather it’s the recognition that certain designs carry meaning that technology cannot replace.
Books will be books
Among all enduring objects, the book is perhaps the most emblematic. Predictions of its death have echoed since the rise of radio, television, the internet, and now AI.
Yet the book endures. Not only as a vessel for knowledge, but as a cultural artifact, an aesthetic object, and an intimate companion.
Chairs will be chairs, books will be books. And despite the noise of innovation, some designs will always outlast disruption — because they are not just tools, but extensions of what it means to be human.
Humanity reinvents itself over and over again, taking what is already there and adapting it to new formats and materials. Just as Mark Twain put it, nothing is really new; or nothing is really old. We constantly find inspiration in other people’s work, words, ideas, to build our own.
In the fresco above, we see a woman, often referred to as Sappho, in reference to the great Greek poetess. We see her with a wax tablet with one hand while holding an object resembling a pencil (a stylus, to use the Roman term) up to her lips in a gesture that that tells us she’s recording her thoughts, the contemplative gesture of someone who writes.
I look at the fresco and I wonder what was going on in her head. What idea she was forming and waiting to be written down? An iPad, a notebook, a tablet, a pen, a pencil: in the end, it’s just us humans in front of a blank page, waiting to create. Nothing can ever erase that.
Bibliography and references
- Mark Twain, Mark Twain’s Own Autobiography: The Chapters from the North American Review (University of Wisconsin Press, 1990).
- Irene Vallejo. El infinito en un junco: la invención de los libros en el mundo antiguo (Siruela, 2019).
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