Thread by @PnictogenHorses

I am looking around this upstairs room where our desktop computer sits, and I note how almost all the plastic devices in the room are *black*. a few are white. but the dual monitors' plastics are black. both the computer itself and the attached speakers are black.

(cont'd)

the plastic on the lizard tank is black. the plastic housing of this spinny LED light fixture is black. there's a fan—no, *two* fans with a black housing. there's a black Kindle, a black smart phone, a black digital camera.

there's a good reason for this: it's *cheap*!

(cont'd)

carbon black is one of the cheapest pigments in industry, and it confers good physical properties when used as a filler for polymers. why *not* make everything out of black plastic?

"Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants, as long as it is black."

(cont'd)

@thehenryford is supposed to have said that—considering that the man also taught antisemitism to the Chancellor of the Third Reich, perhaps we ought to not to care what Henry Ford says about anything.

making all consumer products black, however, makes the world drab.

(cont'd)

colors are *difficult*. making dyestuffs is one of those tricky subdisciplines of chemistry that borders on art or even magic—the colors of pigments depend on a thousand subtle factors that are difficult to control, so making pigments tends to be somewhat unpredictable.

(cont'd)

and if you wish to offer a full range of colors, you have to have a wide range of dyestuffs. so much trouble! so expensive! so "inefficient", if you're the typical manager or executive in #business or #entrepreneurlife—i.e. all you really care about is counting money.

(cont'd)

it's much simpler just to make everything *black*.

carbon black is one of the oldest known pigments; you can make the stuff at home, if you want, by collecting soot from a smoky flame. there's nothing more "efficient" than making everything the same cheap basic color.

(cont'd)

*white* is probably the next easiest, thanks to the ready availability of titanium dioxide as a reliable white pigment. (just think, the "reliable white pigment" that used to be in everything was lead subcarbonate...which almost certainly is still used, here and there.)

(cont'd)

metal powders get you metallic shades; iron oxides get you a range of yellows and reds and browns.

expanding beyond that limited palette gets complicated, quickly. *color* is no solved problem; chemists and engineers haven't ever stopped coming up with better colors.

(cont'd)

it's a bit dispiriting, living in a world whose design choices seem to be dictated largely by minimization of cost. if you're a money-poisoned executive like @sama or @elonmusk then you're bound to think of such runaway cost-shaving as a good, "efficient" thing. but....

(cont'd)

...the end result is a drab and boring world, a world where everything's black or white or metallic grey, maybe with some blue LEDs or a splash of red paint or other accentuation. and for some reason...we're told that this obvious cost-cutting is in fact *stylish*.

(cont'd)

#marketing and marketers think they can sell anything to anyone—so of course they've tried to sell a limited color palette (dictated chiefly by what's cheapest to manufacture) as though it were futuristic and modern. and people believe it! they believe...well, THIS.

(cont'd)

@elonmusk's @Tesla "Cyber Truck" is an ugly grey box made of stainless steel, which might have seemed a good for a 1950s kitchen or a 1980s executive briefcase. it's not new, it's not attractive, but it can be *sold* as stylish and amazing—to the sufficiently gullible.

(cont'd)

and it certainly saves on the cost of *paint*! how convenient!

I'm rather tired of living in such a grey world. why have a metallic grey car when you can have magenta? unfortunately, there's an answer to that: the terminal *stinginess* of capitalism.

~Mona Drafter of Pnictogen