Perfection is now free. A generative model produces a flawless layout, on-brand copy, and seamless gradients in seconds, for nearly nothing. That has collapsed the value of polish as a signal of craft or care, and left an entire industry sprinting toward the one quality it can no longer be paid for. The pratfall effect, documented in 1966, is the sharpest frame for what is happening: when a highly competent person spills coffee on themselves, people like them more. The blunder on top of demonstrated skill reads as character. The same spill on someone who already fumbled reads as confirmation of failure.
The economics underneath this are specific. A 2012 study named the IKEA effect found that people consistently overvalue objects they built themselves, but only when the task was completed. A 2015 marketing study found that labeling a product handmade made people rate it more attractive and pay more, attributing it to a perceived transfer of the maker's effort. Neither finding is about aesthetics. Both are about what people believe went into the object. Automation is excellent at the output. It spends none of itself producing it, and buyers, it turns out, were always partly purchasing the spending.
The article's core argument is worth reading in full because it does not stop at 'embrace imperfection.' It maps the exact condition under which flaws work in your favor versus destroy you, walks through Whistler's 200-guinea defense of two days' work, and reaches a direct conclusion about what designers must now make legible in their work. The question it leaves open, about how to signal human effort without performing it cynically, is where the real problem lives.
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