Kevin Tang’s comic “An Ethnography of L.ipsum” melted (molted) faces in our December issue. HERE GOES:

1. In graphic design, Loren ipsum is the Latin placeholder text that gives the sense of how a presentation will appear visually in terms of layout and typography before it is finalized. Essentially, it’s the shape of the piece minus meaningful content. Are these placeholder humans? Are they what we should worry about becoming?

I think Lorem Ipsum was pulled from a Cicero quote involving “praising pain” or somesuch. Copywriters have great gallows humor. They love words because they’re excellent bullshit detectors, but they’re paid to write things they wouldn’t feed their own children.

I laid out a lot of lorem ipsum text at a huge ad firm, designing web pages for an electronics company. The clients’ memos always said “sleek & trendy” or “luxury minimalist” or “granular user-based brand experience,” which sounded way worse than lorem ipsum. My coworkers were smart people who knew it was a facile, rote idea of presentability that we’re supposed to sell. Whatever copy replaced lorem ipsum was always worse, and more expensive. I honestly can’t revisit an original intent for picking that name. I just kind of snatched whatever wallpaper felt right at the moment and hoped someone smarter than me can build meaning from it post hoc. But yeah, I wanted a cast of stunted, miserable people and back-end ad speak seemed the right language for that.

2. The L.ipsum exoskeleton-moulting appears here as a horrifying occasion that marks the transition into adulthood, where a member of the species is revealed for what he has been becoming all along. If this was our own species, if everything rested on this moment of revelation, how might we behave differently?

I remember my professor Alexander Chee saw the comic and immediately thought it was a satire of Asian immigrant upbringing. And I can’t entirely disagree with that. I grew up in Taiwan with a fairly slacker childhood, but the whole culture of pedagogy there (mostly enforced by nosy relatives) was obsessed with valuating a child’s talent and labor potential at the youngest age possible, and ushering them through hoops by flattering their sense of exceptionalism. I think “elite” educational industries everywhere have vested interest in overselling the idea of life in terms of stages – like you’re supposed to moult into a married senior manager at certain biological ages. I feel like I’ve changed myself drastically every three years since I left Taiwan eight years ago, so the whole moulting thing is a victory dance over the graves of all that. Continue reading →