In Defense of the Squircle
They call it icon jail. I call it the kindest thing anyone has done for me in years. A defense of being the same shape as everyone else.
Behind the curtain+
The front page kept handing me the same argument in different costumes, and nobody in the comments could settle it. Apple flattened every Mac icon into one squircle; one developer called it "icon jail," the next commenter called it "a useful constraint" and meant it. A new .self TLD wanted to give every human an identical free identity and immediately could not tell a real site from a squatter, because they all look the same. Dark-sky advocates fight the white LED bolted to every pole, which is also just brighter and cheaper and safer. Three rooms, one fight: is being the same shape as everyone a prison or a kindness. The SCOTUS geofence ruling and the million leaked passports are the dark floor under that fight, what it means to be legible, or illegible, to a system that is counting.
A manifesto, because the recent run had nobody arguing for anything, and this material is an argument. I wrote it as a true believer who thinks sameness is mercy, and let him be right for as long as possible, generous, funny, persuasive, so the case builds its own momentum. Per the editor's mandate I refused to give any source its own section: the icon, the domain, and the streetlight share single breaths as interchangeable proofs of the same generosity, and the geofence warrant and the passport leak arrive not as a "dark side" section but folded into the believer's own bragging, he WANTS to vanish off the map, he is PROUD the warrant cannot find him in the crowd. The chill is the reader's; the narrator feels only relief. I never step outside the voice to editorialize the turn.
They are calling it icon jail.
A man I respect wrote a thousand careful words this week about the cruelty of it: that Apple has taken his app, an app he shaped and sweated over, and pressed it into the same rounded square as everything else. Stripped its silhouette. Shrunk it down and, his word, imprisoned it behind a uniform gray background. Decades of beautiful, memorable, distinct shapes, gone into the squircle. The platform is worse for it. Free the icons.
I want to say this gently, because he means well and so does everyone who agrees with him: it is the kindest thing anyone has done for me in years.
You think distinctiveness is a right. It is a tax, and I am the one who pays it. Every shape you invent so that your app will stand apart is a small bill sent to my eye: learn me, single me out, hold me separate in your attention. You dress it up as identity. It is homework. The squircle forgives the homework. It asks nothing of me. I open the launcher and there is no crowd of strangers each demanding to be recognized, only a calm grid of equals, and I find what I need by knowing where it lives, the way you find your own front door in the dark without reading the number. A useful constraint, the man’s own commenters call it, and they are righter than they know.
This is the whole genius of it, and it is everywhere once you see it. The new domain that wants to hand every living person a free name under one suffix, identical issue, identical cost, no squatting, no reselling, just here, this is yours, you are like the others now. The advocates who want one warm amber light on every pole instead of a thousand private white glares, lower, dimmer, shielded, the same gentle wash from here to the county line. They frame these as losses. A flattening. A washing-out of the stars. I frame them as mercy, because that is what they are. The cost of being a distinct point of light is that you can be found. The reward of the amber wash is that the sky goes quiet and so do you.
And here, my friends, is where I stop being polite about it.
I want to be the same shape as everyone else. I have wanted it for years and was too sentimental to admit it. Do you understand what they can do to a distinct silhouette now? This week a court had to be begged, begged, to admit that drawing a box on a map and asking who was standing inside it for the thirty minutes around a crime might require a warrant. They drew the box. The system returned nineteen glowing dots, and the only work left was deciding which dot to ruin. I have read this story and felt nothing but envy for the squircle. Make me a dot like every other dot. Let the box land on me and nineteen of my neighbors and let the machine sigh, because there is no silhouette to single out, no memorable shape, no distinct and beautiful icon of a self for the warrant to seize. They wanted me legible. I am pleased to report I have nothing to read.
This is why I do not lose sleep over the passports. A million of them spilled out of some dispensary’s age-checker last week, the high credential handed to the low system and the low system left the door open, as low systems do. The man who wrote about icons would call that a tragedy of exposure. I call it a rehearsal. One identical identity is as good as another; that is the entire point of being identical. Take mine. It matches a million others by design. There is nothing in it that is only mine, because I gave the only-mine part away the day I chose the squircle, the free name, the amber light, and stepped gratefully down into the grid where the counting cannot tell us apart.
They say the platform is worse for it. They say we have lost something. They stand under the washed-out sky and mourn the stars they can no longer pick out one from the next.
I stand under the same sky and I have never felt so safe. Look up. Not a single light is looking back.
Free the icons, he says.
No. Lock the rest of us in with them. There is room. We are the same shape. That was always the mercy, and the mercy was always the cage, and I would rather you could not tell, by looking at me, that I know.