Ruben Pater was trained as a graphic designer and works in journalism, activism, education and graphic design under the name Untold Stories…. His first book, The Politics of Design (2016), has been an inspirational sourcebook for design students, artists and visual communicators in many different places and contexts; Eye on Design wrote: “It’s the kind of literature that should be handed out to all students on their first days at art school, along with all the Albers, Berger, Benjamin[,] and Sontag that form the backbone of the design curriculum―an up-to-date assessment of the landscape through which all modern visual practitioners must navigate.”
Pater’s CAPS LOCK (2021) is 552 dense pages, with even denser notes, bibliography, and image credits. (Any book that has quotes from Silvia Federici and Walter Benjamin on the title page is off to a great start.) Here is the central thesis of the book, from the text pp. 7-9: This book tries to understand how graphic design and capitalism have become caught in an infinite loop of creation and destruction. The central question of CAPS LOCK is twofold; first to historically retrace how graphic design and capitalism came to be intertwined, and secondly what strategies present themselves to unlink graphic design from capitalism, with the intended outcome of developing some kind of vision of a graphic design practice that can exist without capitalism.
Design serves capitalism by devising abstract forms—infographics, money, corporate identities, branding—that hide the fact that ‘the economy’ is a collection of social cooperative relations between people [see under “commodity fetishism”]. That’s why, as a critique of design itself, this book doesn’t follow the method of design theory, which usually centres designed objects. Precisely because capitalism manifests itself not only in the appearance of posters, books, or websites, but more in how they are produced, where they are they published, and how they are sold. The first part explains how the work of graphic designers bolsters capitalism and economic relations… The second part explores how designers themselves are economic actors too.
In Caps Lock, Ruben Pater provides a comprehensive and chronological history of the long and complicated entanglement between graphic design and capitalism, which he defines as ‘an economic system that is founded on three basic principles: everything should be privately owned, all production is for the market, and people work for a wage'[1]. He accomplishes this by meticulously examining twelve evolving roles that designers have played throughout history, beginning with ancient Mesopotamian scribes who kept financial records and concluding with interviews with contemporary design activists and activist collectives worldwide attempting to work ethically within the capitalist system. He covers the designer as engineer, brander, salesperson, worker, entrepreneur, amateur, educator, hacker, futurist, and philanthropist. While the list of roles may seem overwhelming, it accurately encompasses the many hats designers wear throughout their career, if not in one day.
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