A musing about the aesthetic of modular: My first 21st century "gadget" (for some obviously arbitrary definition of the term) was an ipod nano. I'm not very se

A musing about the aesthetic of modular: My first 21st century "gadget" (for some obviously arbitrary definition of the term) was an ipod nano. I'm not very sensitive to the niceness of things in general so I was pretty surprised at how much I liked how it looked and felt in my hands. It was, cold metallic, small, sleek and completely solid. It had no give in it at all and felt like a magic rock. The solidness of it made it feel futuristic. I find that I like my SSD laptop a lot more than the old HDD one for similar reasons. I think it has to do with it not revealing anything about how it works. I imagine artifacts of the future continuing along these lines. Impenetrable to analysis by the naked A solid mass of synthetic minerals arranged in a very precise way so that electrons are precisely directed this way or that way. But to the naked eye, there is no cause and effect beyond the minimal input and output. On the opposite side, I can get a lot of enjoyment from messing around with something like a foot-treadle loom or 18th century brass navigation instruments. Even just looking at them is fun. They are complicated enough to be very clever and interesting. Too clever to invent yourself. But, they are still simple enough to understand using your eyes. You can get an "aha!" from seeing the flying shuttle work on a loom. The objects themselves being so common in mythology also adds to the flavor. You can see the incredible potential of adding more gears and levers. It's an accessible cleverness that you can experience pretty directly. I find it fascinating that space cowboy fiction & steampunk exist. First, future tense nostalgia is an interesting concept. Second, I think it shows a kind of longing for objects that are both futuristic but understandable. The loom is obviously a human artifact. The ipod is something we intellectually understand to be an artifact, but emotionally it doesn't feel like human one. A magic object doesn't hint at its workings. Beyond the practical advantages of a modular device, I think there is a steampunk-esque appeal to the idea. We could weld together a brass spaceship using an energy crystal to power the electron sail (both naturally obtained by barter or pilage ).