A post came across my feed last week that I saved, clipped into Notion, and went back to study - the post was from Leo Becker, in Portuguese but as I watched somehow I just knew I needed further understanding.

In Notion, I translated to English, I'll come back to that.

His position, is close to my own - Look at what all the big AI companies have done to their own faces over the last 2 years - the blue is gone, the neon is gone and in it's place we see beige, clay, and terracotta. Editorial serif type; hand-drawn linework; film grain. Anthropic first and the rest have followed - Microsoft, OpenAI, Perplexity… until the entire category looked less like a server room and more like a small press publishing poetry in a converted barn.

He calls it, humanwashing. Dressing up the machine up as human - not decoration or coincidence, it’s strategy: what frightens people, people don’t adopt, so you make the frightening thing warm. remember? Red = urgency, or hungry - rhymes with angry… you get the idea.

Let’s start with William Morris, because it's a clean case.

Morris & Co. sold hand-blocked wallpaper and hand-woven textiles in the mid to late 19th century, at a moment when England could produce cloth by machine faster & cheaper than any place on earth had ever produced anything. That’s usually the part we leave out of the Arts & Crafts story. The handwork wasn’t a holdover, it was a choice - and it was only available as a choice because the mill existed. Before the mill, handwork was simply how cloth got made and no one solid it as a feature. After the mill the visible hand became something you could charge for.

I do not say this to diminish Morris. he believed what he did and the objects are outstandingly beautiful. But the economics are worth being honest about: the market for evidence-of-the-hand is created by the machine, arrives immediately after the machine, and is priced accordingly.

But the cycle didn't stop there. After Morris died in 1896, his protégé John Henry Dearle took over, and in the early 1900s the firm broke with its founder's ethos and issued a handful of machine-printed papers, followed by a plain machine-made collection in 1913. Not a wholesale surrender — a sample book from after their 1917 move to George Street runs 130 papers, and only about a dozen of them are machine printed. Merton Abbey kept its hand looms going until the firm was liquidated in 1940. What changed wasn't the craft, it was the tiering: the hand became the expensive option, and the machine learned to produce the same leafy, organic patterns for everyone who couldn't afford the real thing. Once efficiency is cheap, the machine gets pointed at manufacturing the look of the human touch. That's the playbook running today.

Whether that bothers you is a fair question and I am not going to answer it for you. Every new thing that has ever wanted to be let in has asked in the borrowed clothes of the last thing we trusted. Maybe that’s just how adoption works and we should stop being scandalized by it.

But I’d rather know I’m looking at a coat!

I read Leo Becker's original post in Portuguese, translated to English by an AI on the way to my inbox. The Irony here s NOT lost! A piece about machines manufacturing warmth, arriving through a machine smoothing one language into another so seamlessly I nearly didn't notice it was there. Which is the whole thing, really.

The "six machine printed wallpapers including Merton and Anemone" detail traces back to Morris & Co.'s own About Us page — that's the current commercial brand's heritage-marketing copy, not a scholarly source. Fine to use the shape of the claim, but I'd soften "six" to "a handful" unless you find it corroborated elsewhere. Which is itself a little on-the-nose: the sole source for the machine-printing story is the heritage narrative of a brand still selling the name. William Morris Gallery

When Morris & Co. closed in 1940, Arthur Sanderson & Sons bought the original wallpaper printing blocks — and in the 1960s used Dearle's designs to machine-print wallpaper on silver foil backgrounds. Morris's hand-cut blocks, acquired by a commercial firm, output as machine-printed foil. If you want one image for the whole argument, that's it. Wallpaper from the 70sWallpaper from the 70s