What’s left when you can’t use it
On Aesthetics, the general and the specific
Aesthetics can’t be general, because then it would be a utility1.
Useful things are, by their nature, swappable. A hammer is a hammer for whoever picks it up. A kilowatt does the same work in any wire. A dollar is a dollar in any hand. That’s the whole point of a tool. It doesn’t care who’s holding it, and you can trade it for any other tool that does the job as well or better. Usefulness lives in the world of the interchangeable. And anything you can boil down to a rule has already moved into that world. The recipe, the spec, the formula: these are things anyone can run to get the result. They’re general because that’s what makes them useful.