The title is a lie. I love frutiger aero. One look at my neocities and personal website design philosophy will instantly prove it. But I hate what it's become post-2020; frutiger aero has become bastardized by a wrong form of nostalgia and a tiktok-isque community. Terms like "the future we were promised" and short form clips of a collage of frutiger aero images set me off.
The other day, I was hate-watching this youtube video called "Frutiger Aero: How a Cruel Lie Stole Our Future." I've seen it and heard it all before: the video starts with praising the mixture of beautiful glossy design elements, with nature, and technology. It's a "throwback to a time where we were optimistic, and hopeful about new technology!" But alas, this was a lie, because now we have superflat design and awful new tech because of evil evil tech engineers at Microsoft!
What makes me so irrationally mad at these slop videos that all parrot the same opinion is that I almost agree. I hate Microsoft and windows 11 with a burning passion, and I love frutiger aero in design principle so much I want to make my room, my computer, my electronics, all of it frutiger aero. What makes me so mad is the defeatist and hopeless attitudes that come from mass psychosis social media users. The same people who love frutiger aero so much that they are mass liking and scrolling on tiktotk, buying temu/tiktok shop (made by some child in china) products that are "frutiger aero themed" are the same ones who virtue signal about the environmentalism motifs in frutiger aero. The irony being, being on tiktok itself, buying slop things you did not need, is arguably one of the worst things you can do for the environment and is the opposite of the frutiger aero essence.
People on tiktok and instagram reels are most tied down by their desires. The frutiger aero tiktok fanbase thrive off of little slop trinkets instead of playing around with operating systems on their computers. Have you met any of these people who treat frutiger aero as an "aesthetic" who actually have tried reinstalling windows xp, vista, or 7? Or even downloading linux desktop environments (like my favorite, KDE), following a tutorial on how to turn it skeuomorphic? Or even try window managers like enlightenment e16 or even window maker?
There are companies, and there are mindless consumers. Companies love mindless consumers. Those who will just buy buy buy and use use use without a second thought. In capitalism, you get the option to choose your product. When I don't like the product, I don't buy it. Or I pirate it. Or I buy secondhand. The problem in the west, is that everyone is so rich, they throw their money and attention around like its nothing. And I don't want to hear the "You live in society, yet you participate in it" getback comic people always bring up. Tiktok is a luxury, starbucks is a luxury, temu is a luxury. You don't need any of these things in society.
Corporations are only as strong as people make it. Corporations sell products, and since they clearly don't want to listen to us, then why not stop using... their product? If 10% of windows users just felt like leaving because their product fucking sucks, microsoft would have a full blown meltdown. You hate google? Try duckduckgo or brave. You like frutiger aero? Try any linux distro with KDE in a VM and give ricing a shot.
I guess a better title would be "why I hate the frutiger aero community." I remember checking out the frutiger aero archive forums. And once again, I see the same problems. People all have the same 2 opinions. People talk about how awful the present day is, how much better the past was. Folks see frutiger aero as a sort of political/cultural movement, while what it really should be is a consumer movement. Quit throwing around phrases like "the future we were promised," because there is no divine intervention, if you want frutiger aero, make it yourself. You don't ACTUALLY trust microsoft to do it for you, do you?
