Can Technology be Beautiful?
A computational ode to beauty
What is beauty?
Here is one way to think about it. Beauty is a revealing of dimensional depth. Beauty starts when something on a surface arrests your attention, hinting at something more. The surface, you realize, is just a compression of greater depth. The allurement of the surface calls you to explore the depth, to decompress it, and in the process access dimensionality that the surface could only gesture at.
Beauty is what we experience when we decompress these depths. It is a form of optimal decompression.
Sensing that an elegant mathematical formula captures something of the universe is an experience of beauty. So is recognizing the patterns in nature that make it possible to grasp the vastness of its majesty. So is seeing in a woman all the possibility contained in life itself. All are examples of optimal forms of compression.1
Beauty is how we can access a depth of dimensionality that would otherwise overwhelm us. Beauty compresses dimensionality into something we can process. It makes dimensionality legible, not as comprehension but as allurement, as an invitation to explore a space that was deeper than we imagined.
This dimensional asymmetry between surface and depth accounts for the continual surprise that beauty invokes. Each engagement with beauty holds the potential to decompress more dimensionality than we can process in any single encounter. Beauty is thus inexhaustible.
The greater the asymmetry that is mediated between surface and depth, the more overwhelming that beauty becomes. Sometimes the asymmetry is so great that it exceeds our ability to process it. The dimensionality that is revealed breaks our model of reality, producing awe.
The unveiling of any revealed dimensionality is thus highly contingent to the subject, i.e. beauty is subjective. Yet the compression of depth itself leverages structures of meaning that are evolutionarily convergent, i.e. beauty is objective.2
Not all surfaces compress depth—some collapse it entirely. These surfaces perform a dimensional violence, eliminating rather than preserving what lies beneath. Where compression maintains dimensional integrity, collapse destroys it irreversibly. We experience such dimensional collapse as ugliness—surfaces that terminate rather than allure, that deaden rather than enliven.
Beauty is the manifestation of the true, in that the allurement of a surface is a promise of depth awaiting to be revealed. Beauty is a signal of the good in that it marks where dimensionality has been preserved rather than destroyed.
Can technology be beautiful?
At its best, technology both expands the dimensionality we can access and compresses it into forms we can process. A microscope reveals the dimensional depth hidden in a drop of water; a violin makes the physics of resonance accessible to human expression; the internet reveals the possibility of connection at almost infinite dimensionality. This is technology in service of beauty.
At its worst, technology collapses dimensionality—it can reduce human interaction to metrics, flatten experience into feeds, erase dimensional diversity through relentless optimization. This is technology in service of ugliness, deadening rather than enlivening, hiding depth rather than revealing it.
The beauty of technology often depends on our engagement with it. A large language model is a marvel of compression. It contains vast patterns of human knowledge encoded in weighted connections. But whether this reveals or conceals dimensionality depends on us. When we use an LLM to access dimensions of thought previously beyond our reach, to reveal connections invisible to us alone, to make accessible possibilities at the edge of our understanding, we participate in beauty. LLMs can be a surface that reveals inexhaustible depth.
But when we use the same technology to diminish our own dimensionality—to substitute for thinking rather than extend it, to close off inquiry rather than open it—then we let the surface become a barrier rather than an invitation. The depth remains available, but we refuse to access it.
Technology alone cannot create beauty—it can only create the conditions for beauty to emerge through our engagement. A microscope reveals nothing to someone who refuses to look; a violin is silent without someone to play it. Beauty requires both a surface that compresses depth and someone willing to explore it. The allurement of beauty is the promise that such an effort will be rewarded.
Technology becomes beautiful when it makes the world more alive to us, and us more alive to the world. This is technology in service of beauty, and in service of life itself.
For patterns of nature, consider Fibonacci sequences, golden ratio, fractals, symmetries, etc. The beauty of a woman isn’t an essentialist claim but rather describes the experience of recognizing the dimensionality that women, as literal progenitors of life, compress.
Christopher Alexander’s 15 Fundamental Properties of Wholeness and his “Nature of Order” is one such treatment. I’ll have more to say on this soon, particularly around evolutionary convergence.
John Dewey would love this!