Multifarious Threads

Existential aggression: the connective tissue of bigotry

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Racism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, disablism and xenophobia are forms of existential aggression. Existential aggression is behaviour that indicates that people don’t deserve to live or must be second-class citizens by virtue of what they are. Note that I said what they are, rather than who they are; this kind of aggression is based entirely on categorical groupings and not on individual traits.

Existential aggression is a term I’ve coined to refer to patterns I’ve seen repeated over and over again, but with no clear, agreed-upon name to describe the interrelationships between these forms of ostracism. Bigotry and prejudice don’t seem to capture the suffocating, annihilating force that is existential aggression. Eliminationism comes close, but not all existential aggressors necessarily want their victims to die. (One could argue, though, that they want their victims’ self-concept to be altered to fit their criteria for being a Real Person, which is possibly a form of death.)

Existential aggression is rooted in essentialist thinking. Essentialism, at least within a social context, is the idea that everyone exhibits transcendent, immutable traits that define their personhood, value and position within society. Authoritarians tend towards essentialist thought to define who should rule and who should serve…or be eliminated, for that matter. These attitudes result in a Manichaean worldview in which the forces of good must defeat the forces of evil, and goodness and evil are defined by people’s existence, rather than by their behaviour. I’ve discussed the relationships between Platonism, essentialism and authoritarianism in “The Problems with Closed Systems.”

Examples of existential aggression on an interpersonal scale include

  • Deliberately refusing to use names, pronouns and forms of address that a trans person has asked others to use
  • Referring to immigrants, especially undocumented ones, as ‘aliens’ or ‘illegal aliens’, in casual speech

Larger-scale versions of this phenomenon include

  • Refusing to grant legal recognition to LGBTQ people’s identities or relationships with other consenting adults
  • Directly allowing employers to fire people because of their race, gender, sexual orientation or disability
  • Xenophobic or disablist immigration laws
  • Eugenics, especially negative eugenics
  • Genocide

Far-rightists and their radical centrist enablers have their particular hobby horses of hate: religious fanatics’ fulmination about gay marriage and trans people using public bathrooms; so-called men’s rights activists’ rants about their inability to assault women with impunity; and white nationalists’ ardent desire to cleanse western countries of non-white people. That said, however, I suspect that the correlation coefficients between one form of existential aggression and another are not zero. Time and time again I see white nationalists expressing misogynistic, disablist, homophobic and transphobic views. Right-wing Christian fundamentalists may focus their ire on anyone who falls outside their idealised gender roles, but it’s not uncommon to see them haranguing about Muslims and undocumented immigrants. When you believe that there are some people who are less human than others, it’s likely that you may extend this reasoning to other groups, too. Websites where alt-righters and other hatemongers congregate are brimming with vitriolic attacks on all manner of people, from feminists to trans people to members of ‘weird’ subcultures.

These tendencies are not limited to the right, though I do think existential aggression is primarily the province of the right. I’ve noticed people on the left acting as though members of traditionally privileged groups are essentially bigoted, regardless of their own personal beliefs. A random white person may or may not be an ideological racist. European ancestry doesn’t make people automatically hateful. Having ancestors from continents other than Europe doesn’t make you automatically more credible or ‘woke’, either. Yes, white people benefit from systemic racism in the west, but it’s important to distinguish between social pressure and individual people’s behaviour and feelings. I’ve seen countless articles, tweets and Facebook statuses that imply that having a marginalised status makes you more enlightened. It doesn’t take much countervailing evidence to show this isn’t true. Ben Carson and Herman Cain wouldn’t be Republicans, anti-feminist women would be complete non-entities, and Milo Yiannopoulos wouldn’t have made a brief career out of terrorising other marginalised people. I’ll even make this personal and say that this applies to my own mother. My mother is a black Trinidadian immigrant who moved to the US in the late 1960s and spent the remainder of her childhood and adolescence in Queens. You would think that these demographic markers would make her an enthusiastic Democrat, right? Wrong: she hasn’t supported the Democrats in twenty years and is a Trump supporter. She likes Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly just as much as any other hardcore conservative Republican does. When my parents became evangelical Christians, they also became Republicans. I don’t think the assumptions made by people on the left about race and ideology are nearly as dangerous as those espoused on the right, but they’re still traps worth avoiding. People’s awareness of systemic oppression is dependent on their self-awareness, curiosity and attention to current affairs. Some people may sense that they’re being treated unfairly, but may not be able to articulate exactly why. Because they don’t have an explicit framework, either self-created, acquired or both, to explain their mistreatment, they may not use the correct ‘woke’ language du jour.

Existential aggression is dangerous because it focusses on people’s presence rather than their treatment of others. Simply existing is not a threat; mistreating others is. Be wary of any belief system that promotes existential aggression over good works.

Bullying in the service of ideology is still bullying

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I am exasperated with people who use their ideology, whether religious or secular or a combination thereof, to justify petty, bullying behaviour in the name of God, enlightenment, science or objectivity. I know some people are unabashed jerks. I’m not talking about them necessarily, since they’ll be rude and verbally hostile regardless of their beliefs. I know people who are entirely on my side ideologically but are still utterly vile people whom I’d avoid at all costs. I’m thinking more of people who cannot treat others with basic respect because their ideology supposedly disallows them to, regardless of what they themselves would think in the absence of ideological pressure. I’m going to use anti-LGBTQ behaviour as an example, but this doesn’t solely apply to attacks on people’s sexuality or gender.

Using homo- and transphobic slurs, pretending LGB relationships don’t exist, deliberate misgendering, and deadnaming are bog-standard, garden-variety meanness. Time and time again, I see people explaining their actions with statements like ‘It’s not God’s plan’ or ‘They’re crazy’ or ‘I won’t support their lifestyle’. Ultimately, though, this is less about belief than it is about behaviour. Like it or not, people will primarily judge you based on your behaviour. Misgendering, deadnaming, refusing to acknowledge queer relationships, and insisting on terms like ‘sodomites’ are examples of jerky behaviour, plain and simple. I agree with Greg Stevens: you can believe whatever you want about the ontological validity of transgender identity, but when it comes to personal interactions, call people what they want to be called1.

To people who aren’t already on board with your ideology, you just look like an asshole. I don’t think everyone who adopts these behaviour patterns is using ideology as a fig-leaf for petty cruelty, but the ringleaders probably are.

You don’t have to believe the same thing as others to treat them with basic decency. I’m not a Muslim, but I don’t use my disbelief in Islam to imply that Muslims don’t deserve to be recognised as Muslims, or that they can’t practise their religion. I am highly doubtful that intelligent, anthropomorphic supernatural beings exist outside human co-creative processes, but that does not preclude me from treating others with basic decency if they’re not using their beliefs as a cheap excuse to be nasty to me. Even if your belief system says that Janet Mock could never really be a woman, it does not mean that it is appropriate to call her ‘he’ or use the name she used before she transitioned. Even if you personally think that homosexuality is a sin, denying that a gay man has a boyfriend or insisting that his boyfriend is just his ‘friend’ is rude.

I know what it feels like to feel you have to be mean, or that you have to believe mean things. This may be especially true for abuse survivors and people who grew up in strict religious environments. I grew up with verbal abuse and religious indoctrination myself. Since I was convinced that my social skills were vastly worse than others’, I internalised the idea that to be socially acceptable, I had to adopt some of my bullies’ traits. I did things as a teenager that I now regret: using the Bible to justify homophobia, snubbing others for not being cool enough, going along with people who were obviously unkind, contorting myself to believe things I would otherwise shun. I felt awful when I was doing them, of course, but I think I felt I had to distrust my conscience and do those things to be ‘normal’. I now know that’s bullshit. Being mean for meanness’ sake is unhealthy. There are people I utterly despise. Not many – it’s very difficult for me to actively hate anyone – but there are some. Even when I’ve had to communicate with people I loathe, though, I haven’t gone out of my way to be petty.

If you legitimately want to express kindness and decency towards people with whom you disagree, then avoid this kind of cruelty. You’re not going to win souls if you sound as though you’re denying the existence of their soul in the first place.

  1. Note that I disagree that using simpler arguments is ‘dumbing down’. I do, though, agree that arguments about identity can be worded more simply. ↩

The shape of my (non-Marxist) leftism

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The ideas of Karl Marx and his ideological descendants are not and should not be the sole foundation for left-wing political thought. They’re certainly not the sole foundation of mine. I am not a Marxist. I have never been a Marxist. This is not the same as saying that Marx was wholly wrong; I think his ideas about worker alienation, for example, are useful in describing people’s relationship to their labour. I do not, however, care very much for his predilection for teleological explanations. Is it necessarily true that workers will eventually rebel against their capitalist overlords and establish a workers’ paradise, or is it merely your ardent desire that they do so? Is and ought are two different phenomena. The problem with prognostications like Marx’s inevitable dictatorship of the proletariat is that there’s no proof that the proposed events will in fact happen. I do consider myself left-wing, though, since I am largely egalitarian.

The following ideas, presented in bullet-point format, are an attempt to articulate my particular flavour of leftism.

  • People do not have identical abilities, backgrounds or proclivities; however, these differences do not require anti-egalitarian policies to maintain social equilibrium. Anti-egalitarianism based on group characteristics requires adopting a number of a priori assumptions that can be disproved easily with one or two social interactions. If you do deal with people categorically in a way that under- or overestimates them, then you may incur negative consequences from that erroneous assumption. It’s therefore optimal to adopt a politically egalitarian strategy to avoid fucking this up. There are some good explanations from game theory that show egalitarian or cooperative strategies to be better evolutionary strategies than adhering to a version of “nature, red in tooth and claw.”
  • I am a staunch individualist. That doesn’t mean I’m a libertarian or a fan of laissez-faire capitalism. I believe that each person has their own needs and characteristics that are distinct from those around them. An individual’s traits should not be subsumed by group characteristics if the characteristics associated with the group are inapt to describe that individual.
  • I value cooperation and humane social policy.
  • I am not immune to bias. You are not immune to bias. There is no such thing as total neutrality. We as a species have irrational tendencies deeply embedded in our lizard-brains. Bias is unavoidable, but you can question it. And by all means, you should.
  • Rights are, or should be, granted or rescinded based on the potential to materially harm another person’s existence. Allowing a same-gender couple to marry does not materially affect heterosexual couples’ existence; the latter can still marry and enjoy the same benefits they did before same-gender couples’ relationships were granted legal parity. Murder, rape and child abuse, however, are forms of material harm. Note that I include direct psychological harm as a form of material harm; I don’t find Cartesian dualism useful here. Emotional abusers inflict real, long-lasting effects on their victims.
  • I don’t think “natural rights” exist in an absolute sense. Humans created them. That’s not to say that human rights aren’t important, but that societies had a role in determining what those rights should be. We do not need to use Platonic forms to define what we believe is right.
  • I am vehemently anti-authoritarian. And no, expanding the rights of one designated group to match those of a group that has always had rights is not a form of authoritarianism.
  • I am pro-women, anti-racist, pro-LGBTQ, anti-disablist and anti-xenophobic because of my individualism, not in spite of it. “Mexicans are rapists” is a ridiculous generalisation. “Black people aren’t very intelligent” is an invidious and poorly substantiated claim.
  • I’ve become convinced that ontological debates about people’s identities are useless parlour games in the broader scheme of things. Debating the validity of someone’s gender identity, for example, is not particularly productive when more powerful people threaten people’s material existence. Let’s spend less time on how trans people will hypothetically destroy womanhood and more time on how authoritarian conservative politicians are hell-bent on abrogating women’s rights to control their own bodies. Even if we use a favourite reductio ad absurdum argument, like “I identify as an attack helicopter,” who cares? Does Attack Helicopter pose a direct threat to you by virtue of their identity?
  • I see the utility of group-based strategies to stop people from lumping people together and judging them categorically without knowing their individual circumstances. Strategies like affirmative action/positive discrimination, diversity recruiting and sensitivity trainings should be aimed at ultimately creating a society in which people are treated as unique individuals, not members of a stereotyped conglomerate. To stop unwarranted stereotyping, you have to recognise that said stereotyping actually exists. Ignoring it won’t lead to real change. That said, however, I am uncomfortable with the tendency towards elevating group identities over individual ones. This applies both to the left and to the right, though I obviously find the right-wing variety far worse. Certain conservatives, reactionaries and libertarians may protest that they care more about individuals than groups, but these very same people will complain that they’re not allowed to make claims about women’s unsuitability to work outside the home, black people’s low intelligence or the International Jewish Conspiracy. People like Richard Spencer and other blatant white supremacists may be the most nauseating of the lot, but at least they’re intellectually honest about their use of crude categories to unfairly stereotype people. I also believe that negative categorical stereotypes can lead to self-fulfilling prophecies that create positive feedback loops that continue inexorably until people have enough sense to disaggregate the people unfairly lumped together.
  • I do not think that privilege or oppression are static categories. I don’t believe in the eternal battle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, white people versus “people of colour,” or God and Satan. Rather, I see these relationships as fluid, spatially and temporally bound phenomena. (Yes, I put “people of colour” in dick quotes this time. I use it out of convenience, but it is not my favourite term. Since language intended for others should be understandable, I’m often stuck using words I’d rather not use instead of inventing my own.)
  • When people talk about “opposing capitalism,” they should be clear about what they actually mean. What we understand as capitalism contains a number of different concatenated ideas. Creating for-profit businesses does not require enslavement or worker exploitation; the idea that maximising profit before other concerns can very well lead to those human-rights abuses. If, however, economic policy is connected with the idea that people are entitled to full and fair participation within a given society, then it stands to reason that slavery and labour-rights abuses are inherently unacceptable. Neoliberalism is an even vaguer term; for some people, it appears to have developed the meaning of “thing I don’t like.” I’m hardly a supporter of laissez-faire capitalism, but I’m not a communist, either. I’m not against profit-making or the exchange of money for goods, but I am opposed to the idea that rampant social inequality should be acceptable. “That’s just the way it is” is a terrible defence. Yeah, that may be the way it is, but is that how it should be? Sometimes you really want the ought in an is/ought problem.
  • We exist within overlapping, often mutually reinforcing contexts; there is no one objectivity, but the confluence of several observed and experienced objectivities and subjectivities. We don’t know if an entity exists outside the known universe that defines reality, rather like the distinction between positive and negative space in art. (In this case, the known universe would be the positive space, while the reality-definer would be the negative space.) There’s no proof that one exists. I’ll agree that there is a consensus reality, since there are observations that have been corroborated over and over again across time. This is why I believe in the existence of natural phenomena like gravity, evolution and global warming. If I talk about objective reality, I’m technically referring to the consensus reality whose characteristics have been uncovered through empirical findings.

Are these definitive statements? Hardly; I’m hesitant to make declarations that may or may not hold true in the face of new, controverting evidence. Anti-authoritarianism, egalitarianism and individualism are the closest things I have to core beliefs, but otherwise, they’re subject to change and refinement over time. I find that I can’t keep myself trapped in a thought-loop without wanting to break out of it.

My current setup

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I imagine this will only be of interest to ridiculous geeks like me, but I thought I’d share anyway. I’ve enjoyed reading about others’ setups for years, though I’ve never actually managed to write about my own until now. 

Hardware

I use a late-2016 15-inch/38-centimetre MacBook Pro. Because this model has had some keyboard issues, I’ve been using the Apple extended keyboard to type. (I have AppleCare, but I haven’t taken my computer in for repairs yet because I would rather not go without my working machine for a week if I can reasonably avoid it.) I set up a makeshift bedside desk to use while lying down, using two horizontal 79-centimetre/30-inch-long stand-alone shelving/organising units. The units are placed back to back so they can work as a low-rise table that’s flush with the top of my bed. I use a tilted laptop stand that I received as a birthday present last year. I am admittedly one of Those People who exclusively uses Apple hardware; in addition to my computer, I have an iPhone 7 and a first-generation iPad Pro. I’m just not very fond of Windows or Android.

Operating system 

I’m currently running the MacOS Mojave public beta, which I installed a few days ago. Though it’s a beta, I haven’t had any major issues with it. My iPhone and iPad run iOS 11; I didn’t bother installing the iOS 12 beta. I’ve primarily used Macs for eight years. 

Browsers

On the Mac, I use both Firefox Developer Edition and Chrome for different reasons. On the iPhone and iPad, I just use mobile Safari. I haven’t used Mac Safari as a primary browser in years; I prefer the extensibility of Chrome and Firefox. 

Writing/blogging 

  • I typically write essays and long-form articles in Ulysses, and blog entries in either MarsEdit or Ulysses. Note that Ulysses has an unavoidable subscription system. I’m opposed to subscriptions for software that isn’t prohibitively expensive or highly specialised in general, but it had become an important part of my workflow by the time the developers announced the change in late 2017. I ended up signing up for Setapp – a sort of Netflix for Mac applications – to continue to use Ulysses’ updates, since I would have access to other programs, too. 
  • If I need to have more precise control over the layout of a document, I use Pages.
  • I only use MS Word to write or edit work-related documents that other people will also edit, or to ensure compatibility when I export from another program. Otherwise, I avoid it, since I find it unbearably clunky. The same applies to the rest of Microsoft Office except for Excel. 

Social-media and chat clients 

  • On the iPhone, I use Tweetbot, though I find it less useful these days thanks to Twitter’s hostility towards third-party developers. I’ve also tried Twitterriffic. I’m unsure which client to use on the desktop these days. 
  • I won’t use Facebook’s data-hogging mobile app and just use the website to post.
  • Flume is my go-to desktop Instagram client.
  • Adium is my favourite chat client, but it doesn’t seem to work well with certain modern messaging clients like Google Hangouts and Facebook Messenger. 

Design and development 

  • I do most of my design and layout work in Photoshop and Illustrator, with some help from Keynote, Preview and Pages. I’ve tried alternatives to Photoshop like Pixelmator and The GIMP, but I really depend on Adobe’s handling of type.
  • I write HTML and CSS in Panic’s Coda 2. I used to use Smultron and its fork Fraise, but they stopped working after the MacOS El Capitan update. I think it was El Capitan, anyway. 
  • I do all my presentations in Keynote, though I’m experimenting with using reveal.js to make HTML-based presentations that I can host and load online. I’m very particular about typography in my presentations and don’t want to be limited to system fonts or Google Docs freebies because a computer I’ve loaded my presentation on doesn’t have my fonts installed. If I self-host my presentations I can use embedded web fonts from Typekit or Cloud.Typography. 
  • I make custom WordPress localisations using the excellent Poedit app. 
  • I use the MacOS colour picker as an Automator app, so I can put it in my dock and use it to sample colours and get their hex codes when I’m coding. 
  • For tweaking XML in desktop programs and files, I use BBEdit. Both the free and paid-for versions have worked well for me.
  • I use self-hosted WordPress installations for most of my websites, typically with the Genesis Framework installed. Sometimes I’ll just use plain HTML/CSS, though, if I need a site with less overhead. 
  • I’ve used DreamHost to host sites and register domains for the past eight years, and have been pretty happy with them as a company. 

Productivity aids 

  • aText is a $5 text-expanding app that allows users to type in abbreviations of commonly used words, code snippets or other text to save keystrokes. aText is similar to TextExpander and other apps, though unlike TextExpander it’s a one-time purchase and doesn’t require a subscription. I’m not anti-subscription, but I have more than enough subscriptions (Adobe Creative Cloud, Setapp, iCloud, Netflix, Amazon Prime, a few newspapers and magazines, &c.) and am not keen to add another one if I can avoid it. It seems to work well on the Mojave beta, too.
  • Calcbot is my preferred replacement for the official MacOS/iOS calculator, mostly because it keeps track of calculations and expressions in a way that I don’t have to hold all the numbers I’m working with in short-term memory.  
  • I use Be Focused, a Mac- and iOS-based Pomodoro timer, to keep track of my time sometimes. 
  • I take notes with the built-in Apple Notes app to ensure they’re synced across my computer, iPad and phone. 
  • I use a simple Mac app, Alarm Clock 2, to wake me up every morning. I’m annoyed that Mojave is the last OS it’ll work on, though, since I believe it’s 32-bit. I’ll have to find a replacement unless Apple adds the alarm/stopwatch app from iOS to the Mac in a future MacOS release.
  • I’m still in search of the best to-do/reminders app; none of the ones I’ve tried have worked well with the way I think. In the meantime, I just make lists on paper or use the built-in Reminders and Calendar on my computer, phone and iPad.  
  • I primarily use iCloud for online storage, but also use Dropbox, Box and Google Drive to share files with other people.

Miscellaneous

  • I like to have my user interfaces set to English (UK), French or German; if a desktop program doesn’t come in one of these languages, I’m likely to make my own custom localisation. I use logical date formats (day-month-year or year-month-day) and the 24-hour clock.
  • I don’t do Windows, at least not as my primary operating system. Nothing I’ve seen in recent Windows releases has made me interested in going back after eight years of being a nearly exclusive Mac user.
  • If I were to switch away from Apple, I’d probably use Linux, but there are too many applications that run only on the Mac, or on the Mac and Windows, that I’d have to replace. The GIMP is an inadequate substitute for Photoshop. 
  • I’ve removed the DRM from ebooks I legally own so I can read them using Apple’s Books instead of other proprietary apps. 

Typinions 1: Proxima Nova

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Mark Simonson’s Proxima Nova is an extraordinarily popular geometric sans-serif typeface, especially on sites and apps that use custom web fonts. Over the past nine years or so, it’s proliferated on the internet, primarily because of its easy availability on web-font sites like Typekit and its similarity to Tobias Frere-Jones’s Gotham, the sans-serif font used in Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign. While Proxima was actually designed before Gotham – Simonson started working on it in the early 90s, while Frere-Jones published Gotham in the early 2000s after creating it for GQ magazine – its meteoric rise seems to be connected with Gotham’s popularity. People and companies who used Gotham as part of their branding substituted Proxima Nova on the web for several years because the latter was available as an embeddable font, whereas Gotham wasn’t available until 2013 or 2014. 

I will admit that I am not a fan of this typeface, though I like some of Simonson’s other typefaces, like Coquette, Bookmania and his brand-new Parkside. This post isn’t intended to be an attack on Simonson himself; from what I’ve seen of his work online, he’s a reasonably talented type designer who has friendly licensing policies and an excellent blog on type design and typography.

Proxima Nova feels like an unwieldy amalgamation of ideas and letterforms. The capitals on their own look good, as do many of the italic lowercase letters. The roman lowercase, however, feels more haphazard. Proxima Nova is neither controlled enough to be consistent, nor awkward enough to own its weirdnesses. Nowhere is this more evident than in the lowercase ‘a’. It’s awkwardly drawn and doesn’t seem to belong to the rest of the typeface. The letterforms in Avenir and Gotham, two similar typefaces by Adrian Frutiger and Tobias Frere-Jones respectively, have a more consistent, even rhythm than those of Proxima Nova, which can’t decide whether it should embrace its quirks or adopt a more staid, conservative form. Simonson himself has shown an ability to exhibit greater consistency within a typeface; his Muostra Nova utterly revels in its quirkiness. The awkwardness of Proxima Nova’s ‘a’ comes primarily from the abrupt transition between the stem, or the vertical line on the right-hand side, and the bowl, or the rounded portion of the letter. Gotham and Avenir make this transition smoother by using a teardrop shape for both the bowl and the negative space (counter) enclosed within the bowl. The bowl slopes gently downwards, while Proxima’s has a more severe-looking shape that would be better suited to a typeface that is more uniformly quirky like Process Type’s Colfax. The bowl feels tacked on to the stem in a rather graceless fashion.

A screenshot comparing three different sans-serif typefaces, Proxima Nova, Avenir and Gotham.

The spur of the a – the arc-shaped top portion of the letter – is also dangerously close to the bowl; there’s not enough room to breathe. Gotham and Avenir, in contrast, give just enough negative space between the spur and the bowl to make the ‘a’ look more open. The alternative character set, which swaps the bulbous two-storey a for a single-storey one, solves many of the problems in the default character set. Unfortunately, it’s far less common, possibly because accessing the alternative characters generally requires enabling an OpenType stylistic set in Photoshop, Illustrator or InDesign, or selecting alternates in a web-font host’s control panel. This awkward relationship between stems, bowls and counters in Proxima Nova isn’t limited to the lowercase a, either; you can also see it in the b and several other letters, though the a is probably the most ungainly of the lot.

Proxima Nova’s ubiquity on the internet makes its design flaws more obvious, since I’m constantly encountering web articles set in it. Web designers will use it for long passages, though it’s not ideal for reading at long measures because of its inconsistent contrast compared to other typefaces in its genre. I myself find it difficult to read and will usually switch a website into reader mode on Firefox or Mobile Safari when I see it, or will turn on custom CSS in Firefox or Chrome to have the website display in a different font. I think that Proxima has the chance to become an excellent typeface, but its uneasy relationship between conservative regularity and quirky playfulness make me hesitate to recommend it. It needs to own itself, which it doesn’t. 

My issues with Proxima Nova go beyond its flaws as a piece of type design. The rampant use of Proxima Nova in website body text is difficult to extricate from the increasing tendency towards boring, derivative web design that uses the same generic Bootstrap-inspired layouts. I’ve come to associate it with bland ‘modernisations’ of websites; there are countless websites that once used quirky, playful websites only to have those more original designs replaced with an identikit redesign complete with Proxima Nova, blue or other primary-coloured navigation bar, and irritatingly perky website copy. It’s part of a general tendency towards homogeneity that I find troubling, though I’ll refrain from going into detail about it in this specific post. I don’t think that Proxima Nova in and of itself is the cause of these derivative designs; rather, it is an unintentional beneficiary, as are Gotham and other geometric sans-serif typefaces that designers reach for as a sort of default. Though I doubt it was Simonson’s intent, Proxima Nova has started to become a default that designers use without thinking. It’s a victim of its own, and of Gotham’s, success. Designers think that because Proxima Nova is popular, it’s the ne plus ultra of geometric sans-serifs, even though there are thousands of equally good, or better, typefaces available on Typekit and other platforms. This is the same kind of thinking that leads non-designers to think that Times New Roman is the pinnacle of ‘serious’ typography. If you are a designer and are considering setting your next site in Proxima Nova, consider why you want to use it. Are you using it reflexively because it’s popular, or are you using it because it matches the tenor of your or your client’s website? Ignore asinine listicles that talk about the ‘top 10 fonts to use for the web’. Think about your intentions and what you and your client want to communicate. 

Is Proxima Nova an Arial, a parasitic interloper that rides the coattails of a classic like Helvetica? Hardly. But its legitimacy as a type design doesn’t mean that it’s always the best choice for all design tasks. Nor does it mean that its popularity justifies its structural flaws. I’m not telling you not to use Proxima Nova – it’s not my place, and I’ve used it myself in the past – but I am telling you to pay attention and think more critically about your role as a designer when using it or any other typeface.