By Will Beaman
A small design story from May 2025 has been making the rounds on my newsfeed, about how car manufacturers are re-embracing physical buttons after years of migrating controls onto touchscreens. The given reason is practical, not nostalgic: glass-only interfaces increase cognitive load and reduce safety, and safety-rating criteria are beginning to incentivize tactile controls for core functions.
Yet I have to admit that when I read stories like this, I feel an outsized sense of relief that crosses over into something like political—or at least civic—joy. It’s the same thing I feel about any number of public backlashes to certain “inevitable” tech rollouts: growing skepticism toward forcing AI into every workplace, Gen Z consumer trends toward embracing analog technologies, and the more general sense that defaults no longer carry the same aura of inevitability. These reversals feel, to me, like a small rehearsal of democratic renewal. They hint at a shift from being treated primarily as users—actors managed through prompts, defaults, and friction—to being treated as citizens, for whom the design of coordination is a legitimate object of argument. There is no “market” that knows what we want better than we do.
Thinking this way about recent design reversals opens onto a broader question: how design itself is made to appear either inevitable or contestable, not just in technology, but in the institutions that organize its production and collective life more broadly.
Design as disappearance
In the dominant UX paradigm of the past 15 years, touchscreens did not merely replace buttons; they advanced a phenomenological claim about interaction itself. The ideal interface, we were told, is frictionless, general, infinitely adaptable, and ultimately invisible. One surface, endlessly reprogrammable, organizing every possible action.
A clear illustration of how design gains authority by disappearing itself can be found in the history of the UX language of “affordance.”
In design discourse, “affordances” are often treated as a neutral vocabulary for what objects and environments allow us to do, as if interaction simply presents itself to perception. But in their feminist historiography of the concept, Erica Robles-Anderson and Scott Ferguson show that this apparent common sense has a history—and that the history is not only conceptual, but institutional and gendered. They return to Eleanor Gibson, a central figure in the perceptual psychology from which affordance theory emerges, and show how her work and position were constitutively obscured in the way “affordance” later gets cited, simplified, and naturalized. Part of the story is explicitly institutional: in the mid-century university setting that shaped the Gibsons’ careers, rules and norms governing married women’s employment and professional legitimacy made it easier for a shared intellectual project to be remembered as the achievement of a single author-function. The result is not only an injustice in credit. It is a mechanism by which the concept itself comes to feel self-grounding.
The canonization of “affordance” required a specific kind of disappearance: the erasure of Eleanor Gibson’s institutional exclusion and intellectual labor helped “affordance” travel as common sense—stripped of the institutional conditions under which it was produced, and therefore easier to treat as a neutral description of how interaction simply presents itself. Neoliberal design aesthetics rely on the same operation. Interfaces and institutions present themselves as natural, frictionless, or inevitable by concealing the work that sustains them—maintenance, care, calibration, enforcement, repair, and the slow labor of keeping systems usable. Because these categories of work have been historically feminized, the disappearance of design is also the disappearance of feminized labor. What reads as neutrality or inevitability is produced through a systematic refusal to see its conditions of possibility.
The same logic governs the turn toward “smart” systems and generalized AI: intelligence as background condition rather than public instrument; decision-making as automation rather than judgment; design presented as destiny rather than choice. Survey research suggests the public’s stance is not simply enthusiasm or fear, but a demand for boundaries and control over where AI is inserted into daily life.
A key political effect of all this is not that interfaces disappear, but that the location of discretion is obscured. Complexity is absorbed elsewhere—into software updates, platform governance, subscription tiers, data extraction, and opaque model behavior—while users are trained to treat adaptation as the only mature posture. That same aesthetic reappears in institutional life, where “constraints” do similar work.
Design as “there is no alternative”
Neoliberal institutions follow the same design logic as dominant UX paradigms: they treat political choices as constraints and make the site of discretion difficult to see. In the United States, the clearest example is the ubiquitous appeal to “balancing the budget” as the baseline of responsibility. This is not simply an economic preference; it is a design principle. For most people, the phrase arrives preloaded with a household analogy: if a family must live within its means, then public authorities must do the same. That analogy quietly determines how public problems are allowed to appear. Needs must be translated into costs; proposals must arrive already paired with offsets; public programs must be justified as deviations from an assumed condition of scarcity.
This logic is not confined to rhetoric. At the state and local level, it is built directly into governance through balanced-budget requirements and administrative routines that treat public capacity as suspect until it is proven “affordable” within a given accounting schema of costs and assets. When public authorities are required to behave as if they were revenue-constrained in the same way as households—raising taxes, cutting services, or borrowing on terms dictated elsewhere—the design does its work. Discretion does not disappear, but it becomes harder to locate. Decisions come to appear as outputs of “the budget,” “the bond market,” or “technical constraints,” rather than as judgments about whose participation will be supported, deferred, or denied.
Central bank independence belongs to this same family of design choices. Whatever one thinks of its merits (we at Money on the Left are not fans), “independence” functions rhetorically as an insulation of monetary decision-making from contestation. It reinforces a familiar division of labor: monetary authorities act, while fiscal authorities are told to justify themselves. In practice, this trains the public to imagine that major questions about inflation, employment, and investment are handled by a separate apparatus not meaningfully available to democratic argument. Objectivity is promised through withdrawn legibility.
In both domains, design does not eliminate coordination; it obscures it. Responsibility is displaced upward and outward, while publics are trained to adapt.
It is worth noting that this withdrawal of legibility is often reinforced by a reflex on the left: treating design itself as synonymous with technocracy, as if naming design were already a concession to managerial rule.
Decoupling technocracy from design
One reason institutional design is so difficult to contest is that, for many people on the left, design talk already sounds like a technocratic trap. The worry is familiar: once politics is framed in terms of institutions, procedures, and constraints, democratic deliberation seems displaced by expertise, and movements risk becoming recruitment projects for a better class of managers.
This anxiety is playing out in real time within UK Green Party politics, where questions of monetary and fiscal capacity have become unusually explicit. In late 2025, the party’s leader, Zack Polanski, called for a more expansive economic vision, opening a live debate about whether Modern Monetary Theory should have a place in Green Party thinking. In this context, MMT matters less as a set of slogans than as a way of forcing institutional questions into the open: who is authorized to issue public credit, under what conditions, toward which ends, and with what forms of accountability? In that sense, it functions as a discourse about institutional design.
Grace Blakeley’s critique of MMT articulates the opposing reflex clearly. While she grants that MMT largely describes the operations of fiscal and monetary policy correctly, she frames the case for MMT as essentially technocratic—an argument about improving performance within existing constraints rather than altering the distribution of power that determines what the state does with its capacities. On this view, institutional argument itself risks narrowing politics into technique.
The problem is that treating design as necessarily technocratic quietly accepts one of neoliberalism’s central achievements: the identification of institutional architecture with a domain that is not publicly negotiable. If design names what experts do elsewhere, democratic politics can only appear as refusal, protest, or redistribution within fixed forms. Design becomes something to ignore or endure, but not to argue about.
The emergence of the Verdant think tank, positioned to keep MMT out of Green Party politics in the name of “credibility,” sharpens this dilemma. Whatever its stated intentions, the effect is to situate class politics within a flat design frame where the architecture itself—its authorization rules and monetary arrangements—cannot be challenged, only managed.
Rob Hawkes’ argument for Democratic Public Finance clarifies what is at stake. The point is not to replace democratic struggle with institutional fine-tuning, but to recognize that monetary and fiscal arrangements are already designed and continuously redesigned—typically in ways insulated from scrutiny. As Hawkes puts it, orthodoxy places money beyond the reach of democratic design, even though “the books” belong to a system we have designed and can design differently. The wager is that institutional design must be treated as a site of democratic struggle rather than as the technocrats’ backstage.
Beyond analog romance
It is crucial not to misread this moment as a simple return to the analog. Part of what makes the present shift tempting to narrate is that a familiar press story is already waiting: Gen Z is “bringing back the analog,” and analog media become a refuge from screens, algorithms, and AI saturation. In this telling, the appeal of older formats is not just practical; it is moral. Analog stands for authenticity, presence, and a reclaiming of agency from a digital world that has become too smooth to trust.
At the same time, not all contemporary interest in print or “analog” media takes this form. Some of the most compelling arguments for returning to bounded formats are explicitly political rather than nostalgic. Matt Seybold’s provocation that print functions as a kind of rent strike, and Cory Doctorow’s sustained critique of platform enshittification, both frame form as a site of contestation—an object of refusal and redesign rather than a refuge from mediation. In these accounts, the point is not that analog media are more real, but that digital infrastructures have been deliberately designed to extract rents, degrade public capacity, and foreclose alternatives. Amy Rust’s account of “analog nostalgia” helps clarify what is at stake in the contrast: the yearning for props, practical effects, and vintage objects is not a simple return to pre-digital life so much as a way of contracting distinctly digital demands into tactile forms that promise reassurance, even when the underlying media ecology remains thoroughly hybrid.
There is also a deeper theoretical inheritance shaping the more romantic version of this story. In a strand of post-structuralist thought associated with figures like Brian Massumi and Alexander Galloway, the analog is often affirmed as a privileged site of process, flux, or embodied immediacy beneath the rigidity of digital representation. Read critically, this move treats “the analog” as what might be called an exculpatory medium: a substrate that secures difference or vitality in advance, prior to institutional design or public negotiation.
What is striking, though, is that this romance of analogicity often ends up affirming many of the same design ideals that neoliberal tech has spent the past two decades promoting. The overlap is easy to miss because it operates through a denial of design rather than explicit design language. Analog media are rarely praised as immersive or seamless; they are praised as real, as life itself rather than as media at all—go outside, touch grass, be present.
But the qualities being affirmed are still familiar ones: touch, immediacy, continuity, flow, the sense that experience unfolds without interruption or formal mediation. These are also the values that organize dominant UX paradigms. Where digital systems promise to disappear into responsiveness and background automation, analog romance promises to disappear design altogether, recoding it as nature.
In both cases, the ideal is not a form open to debate, but an experience that presents itself as simply how things are.
Coordination without sameness
What makes these disputes intelligible across domains is that coordination does not depend on identity—perfect equivalence, balanced books, or one-to-one representation—but on analogical alignment: the capacity to relate heterogeneous claims, contributions, and obligations through shared but non-identical reference. Accounting works not because everything is the same, but because unlike things can be held together without being collapsed.
Seen this way, abstractions are democratic tools: a way of organizing shared reference at scale. The question is whether that tool is treated as an open design space, governed and revised in public, or as a background condition that can only be endured.
Money offers a clear case. Its horizon is not failed representation or commodification, but coordination through shared reference. It works because it can relate unlike claims without forcing them into identity or abandoning them to isolation. When money is treated analogically, it becomes legible as infrastructure rather than destiny.
The same is true of interfaces and institutions. The political task is not to eliminate design or abstraction, but to insist that the forms coordinating collective life can accommodate difference without erasing it, and remain open to contestation.
The return of public design
The current return of analog form—buttons, print, bounded interfaces, explicit commitments—is not mere nostalgia. It reflects a weakening of inevitability narratives that have long aligned technical sophistication with political foreclosure.
The examples that open this essay are not incidental. They signal that inevitability narratives are becoming harder to sustain. When people push back on touchscreen-only controls, compulsory AI integration, or the endless revision of the terms of competence, they are not rejecting technology. They are contesting the premise that the terms of coordination should be redesigned over their heads and then received as simply how things are.
That contestability does not guarantee democratic outcomes. Public backlash can lead to reaction as easily as collective experimentation. But once defaults are perceived as designed—once they are heard as choices—argument becomes possible again.
That weakening is not confined to one country or one sector. Across very different political contexts, the same question is now being argued about in public: whether the rules of the game are fixed background conditions that politics must accept, or whether they are themselves part of democratic life and therefore open to redesign.
Once design is revealed as design—as choice rather than destiny—democracy becomes possible again.
In the United States, even the most conventional political vocabularies are saturated with design language: constitutions, checks and balances, amendments, jurisdiction, representation, rights. The question is never simply whether the framers were wise technicians. It is whether constitutionalism is treated as a closed inheritance administered by guardians, or as a democratic design space that can be renewed in response to new demands for participation. In a moment of tenuous authoritarianism and the possibility of democratic renewal, the stakes of institutional design are not secondary to politics. They are one of its most publicly legible forms.
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