“we left language / we came back”

The partial poem above starts off the article “Sleep Walks the Street, Part I” by Metahaven, who argue that “metaphors, metonyms, and allegories have become scalable political technologies obfuscating, undermining, and instrumentalizing the realities they represent.”

Another quote:

It is a reminder that the internet has long been a dimensional layer to world, not separate from it. For some, Facebook is their entire internet. We are still catching up to media literacy. The speed of everything is inhuman.

I viewed design often as visual metaphor. Design composition is a form of collage. Beautiful when poetic. Eventually gimmicky when clever. Insidious when deceitful. Somewhat inaccessible when innovative.

Metaphor is ingrained in how we think, speak, understand, make. Why do we find so much meaning in metaphor? Has its appropriation stained it? Can it be trusted?

When do words speak louder than actions?

Raw emotion is indigestible. We often understand it through a medium, a material, a product. It has to be processed and sold. Is that evidence of inhumanity? Or is it a result of emotion’s potency?

Storytelling and language feel essential to being a human though.

So often in design and art, metaphor is another layer to interpret. It complicates the process. What and how does it mean to be straightforward? Why has Trump’s language angered the progressives while illuminating rural white America and conservative immigrants? Do we truly listen to those who do not speak like us?