Whatever we make or encounter – a thing, an arrangement of things, a procedure to arrange such things – is haunted by design. Even if design is not there, it is already there. Thus the ontological status of design is a ghostly one. As Bruce Mau and Jennifer Leonard put it, “for most of us, design is invisible. Until it fails.” But design is a peculiar ghost, one that craves the tangible world of the living. Design is like Slimer, the gluttonous spectre from Ghostbusters: one that enjoys ingurgitating as much food as it can.

Slimer’s interactions with the material world are not seamless: they leave slime wherever they go. We can interpret such gelatinous secretions as design’s ability to reconceptualise things within its mode of comprehension: suddenly, a pebble starts having a form and a function, it gets liable to a process of improvement, a process that is itself subject to a method. What has happened? Design has digested the thing: the pebble is now an artefact, a designed object.

One of the great pioneers in this whole business, J. Tuzo Wilson, said “if you want to know whether a ship is moving, you don’t look at the deck, you have to look over the side”. And he argued that for hundreds of years geologists had only been looking at the decks of their ships and not the water flowing by. And so they were able to “disprove” — they called it disproof — ocean floor spreading, plate tectonics, by a whole series of arguments based on what they saw on “the deck of the ship”. And fundamentally, they were wrong. It was a very funny example of a case where they produced what they considered to be scientific disproofs of a theory, when in fact these disproofs have been falsified.

…We always talk about how science has these theories and they can be “disproved”, but the disproofs themselves can be disproved. So science is a much more fluid thing than just saying “I’ve managed to show you’re wrong”

Are not the sensations we get from the same object, for example, always the same? Does not the same piano key, struck with the same force, make us hear the same way? Does not the same grass, give us the same feeling of green, the same sky the same feeling of blue, and do we not get the same olfactory sensation no matter how many times we put our nose to the same flask of cologne? It seems a piece of metaphysical sophistry to suggest that we do not; and yet close attention to the matter shows that there is no proof that the same bodily sensation is ever got by us twice.

What is got twice is the same OBJECT. We hear the same note over and over again; we see the same quality of green, or smell the same objective perfume, or experience the same species of pain. The realities, concrete and abstract, physical and ideal, whose permanent existence we believe in, seem to be constantly coming up again before our thought, and lead us, in our carelessness, to suppose that our ‘ideas’ of them are the same ideas…The grass out of the window now looks to me of the same green in the sun as in the shade, and yet a painter would have to paint one part of it dark brown, another part bright yellow, to give its real sensational effect.

Researchers have drawn a distinction between “cognitive offloading” and “cognitive surrender.” Cognitive offloading comes when you shift a discrete task over to a tool like a calculator; cognitive surrender comes when, as Steven Shaw and Gideon Mave of the University of Pennsylvania put it, “the user relinquishes cognitive control and adopts the A.I.’s judgment as their own.” In practice, I wonder whether this distinction is so clean: My use of calculators has surely atrophied my math skills, as my use of mapping services has allowed my (already poor) sense of direction to diminish further.

But cognitive surrender is clearly real, and with it will come the atrophy of certain skills and capacities, or the absence of their development in the first place. The work I am doing now, struggling through yet another draft of this essay, is the work that deepens my thinking for later.

Companies weren’t interested, but renters were. The area has birthed 22,000 new apartments in the past 20 years, making it an inspiration for a strained housing supply. Architecturally, though, it’s one of the city’s great missed opportunities. Vast expanses of aluminum panels and budget glass, slabs that look like they were drawn with a hacksaw, façades checkered with air conditioners, stretches of dead street frontage—the whole neighborhood looks like a first draft. Now that the area is no longer one enormous construction zone (though new buildings continue to rise), we can see that it’s become the Olive Garden of New York real estate, offering a mediocre product and plenty of it. If only the prices were commensurately modest. Instead, the extended frenzy of construction has generated an illogical new rule of real estate: As supply increases, so does cost.

Gracious architecture can serve as a form of marketing, which may not be the art’s noblest role, but it’s better than having none. The new towers ply prospective tenants with ever-escalating menus of amenities, reassuring them that (a) they hardly ever need to go out and (b) they don’t need that much square footage of their own. The arrangement offers a cramped kind of luxury and a social life protected by doormen and security codes. The irony of Downtown Brooklyn is that it provides city living for people who don’t much care for the city, except for the parts you can see from high up and far away.