Despite its self-help-y title, writer/designer/academic Ian Bogost’s forthcoming book “
The Small Stuff: How to Lead a More Gratifying Life” asks some pointed questions about how technology has transformed our experience of the physical world. Using Bogost’s popular article in The Atlantic about the decline of stick-shift cars as a springboard, “The Small Stuff” argues that many aspects of our daily existence – from cars to doors to bathrooms – have become dematerialised.
“Basically, it’s the idea that we’ve become disconnected from the sensory world, and the reason that happened is what you might call convenience technologies,” Bogost told me, though he was quick to add that technology isn’t the only thing driving this change. “All sorts of factors — not just tech, and certainly not just Silicon Valley-style technology — have distanced people from the world that they inhabit; they have stripped away the texture of everyday life.”
In fact, while Bogost nodded to other books criticising the tech industry, he said he had become “a little bored with the constant critique”. So he’s currently less focused on calling for broad societal change and more on finding “gratification” in everyday sensory experiences.
“It’s a lot to put on ordinary people to say, ‘Well, we just need to solve wealth inequality or capitalism, and then we’ll be able to get back to experiencing our lives fully,’” he said. “Ordinary people don’t need to wait for that.”
During our interview (which I’ve edited for length and clarity), we also discussed the tradeoff between convenience and experience, how Silicon Valley can do better, and the “hipster reclamation of nostalgia”.
You wrote this excellent piece about the stick shift. How did that lead you to these bigger ideas about “the small stuff”? How did you realise there was a book in it?
I did the stick-shift story in 2022. At a high level, the story was about how people have been lamenting the decline of the stick shift for years, but electric vehicles made it real because they don’t have transmissions. If EVs are eventually going to be universally adopted, which I think is the case, then the end really is the end.
You [write] a story and you’re like, “Well, that was a real treat; it’s a lovely little thing. I’ll put it out on the internet.” That one was just huge. The response was enormous. And I was genuinely interested in why. Do people really love their stick-shift cars? I didn’t think so.
I took a year of reflecting on it, off-and-on, [and] I realised, actually, I’ve been working on this for longer than I expected. I went back and looked at my writing about toasters, smoothies, slushies, and my catalogue of interests, as well as the things I’ve been doing. I just find ordinary life very, very alluring, and I’ve never understood quite why. Is there something wrong with me? Am I just a weirdo?
It was a realisation, through the stick shift, that ordinary life is not just fascinating but also deeply, deeply meaningful, and we have undervalued it. Something like the stick shift, which is imbued with symbolic and real meaning for people, just opens a window, and you feel the breeze come in, and you’re like, “Oh yes, the breeze.”
Let’s discuss the concept of dematerialisation, as the book is structured around it. The first half is describing and diagnosing, and then [the second half talks] about solutions and antidotes. Do you want to explain what dematerialisation is?
Basically, it’s the idea that we’ve become disconnected from the sensory world, and the reason that happened is what you might call convenience technologies. Although it’s not just technologies; it’s also bureaucracy, efficiency, economics, and regulatory apparatuses. All sorts of factors — not just tech, and certainly not just Silicon Valley-style technology — have distanced people from the world that they inhabit; they have stripped away the texture of everyday life.
My favourite example of this phenomenon, the one that people seem to always get, is this: you go to the airport restroom, you just got off your flight, and the toilet flushes for you; the sink turns on for you; the towels dispense for you; and the soap dispenses for you — or they don’t, right? It’s sort of broken, but I still feel that sense of this thing I used to do with my physical body and my senses – now I don’t do that anymore. That is so commonplace, and it’s, broadly speaking, been driven by things that have really benefited our lives. But we didn’t realise we were making a trade-off between progress and losing contact with the material world.
So that’s what ‘dematerialisation’ names for me: this family of conditions that has distanced us from our sensory lives.
That section about the restroom was really visceral for me, because it’s not just about using these things; it’s also about when they don’t work.
You notice them when they don’t work, and there’s some friction there that helps you see the problem. In many cases, we are unaware of a problem, or we sense something is wrong but cannot identify it.
One of the things you also point out is the following: A lot of these changes have, in some ways, improved our lives. You said there’s a trade-off, like in the case of the stick shift and automatic, and then you add electric vehicles —
There are a lot of folks out there who’ve advocated for stick-shift cars, and they’re also saying, “Internal combustion engines are the only way, and we have to be purists about burning dinosaurs.”
I don’t feel that way at all. Hailing an Uber and streaming music and getting DoorDash and even some of the promises of the automated fixtures — I mean, some of them are bunk, but I broadly understand it — I think it’s really important to me that we recognise that our lives are better overall, but there was this thing that happened that we didn’t notice, in a frog-boiling kind of way.
I’m a big fan of Cory Doctorow, but I find these arguments — like the very popular one that says, “This system of economics and technological value systems are obviously the cause of all our problems, and I’m going to name it enshittification” — really unhelpful. People clearly want an explanation, but then you find yourself saying, “Yeah, but I like Amazon Prime; I like to be able to search Google for information.”
So I’m trying to toe this line between being honest about the fact that our lives are broadly speaking better; that this is not a Silicon Valley thing – actually, it’s much bigger than that; and that it happens so slowly that we didn’t notice.
One of the striking things to me about the book versus what I’ve read of Doctorow’s work, or Jenny Odell’s book “How to Do Nothing” — there’s a whole cluster of books — is that your book is less angry. There’s a strain of criticism, but it’s not quite the same tone.
Personally, I’ve been writing about technology for a long, long time, and I don’t think it’s haughty of me to say I was ahead of the curve in being critical of Silicon Valley-style technological advancement. I was out there discussing Facebook and social media long before many people were concerned, and that felt very lonely.
But I just feel a little bored with the constant critique, and I also feel like it’s misdiagnosing or overdiagnosing the problem. It’s very satisfying to believe that there are good guys and bad guys or that there’s a simple explanation, and once we understand the explanation, we just need to unwind it and then everything will be good again.
I want to talk about the Silicon Valley part of it. And this isn’t just a Silicon Valley thing, but a lot of the ideas that you’re talking about resonate with this sense that a lot of consumer tech products and consumer services are focused on convenience, speed, and those kinds of things. Reading this book, and related books, sometimes I have this sense of, ‘Are all these companies just pursuing the wrong goals?’
I certainly think that the obsession with efficiency, automation, invisibility, transparency, and scale does drive that desire. “We are going to make everything easier to do, so you don’t have to do it.” That’s one way of summarising the last few years.
Some of that drive came from the right place, like Uber. Remember before Uber, when you were in a city that wasn’t New York, and you wanted to get a cab, and it was really hard, and now it’s effortless? You could romanticise that and say that [convenience] doesn’t matter, but it does.
Rather than blaming either technologisation, or industry, or ordinary people for being too stupid to notice or for handing over their lives willingly, which is another explanation, I just think it happened over such a long period, so slowly, and with such overall endorsement that both consumers and the organisations that provide these kinds of services were saying, “Here’s the deal,” and everyone was like, “Yeah, I’m on board; I don’t want to buy CDs anymore. Spotify would be wonderful; sign me up.”
Actually, we felt like we understood the deal, but we didn’t fully grasp it. We overlooked our embodiment, which I partly blame on Silicon Valley culture. You see it today, this idea that I can rise above even having a body; I can live forever — whether transhumanism, singularitarianism, or just eternal life through efficiency and optimisation, that idea has always been central to the general purpose computer, that it can sieve through any kind of experience and turn it into a computational one.
And we are just never – thank God – able to leave our bodies. But you go to the Valley and there’s still this weird sense that embodied human experience is unnecessary. And that’s just wrong.
The book is written for a broader audience, but I’m curious for entrepreneurs or people building products: are there positive examples you’ve seen of how people can think about that tradeoff differently? So it’s not just optimising purely for convenience, but maybe finding a balance between convenience and friction and sensory experience?
If you go back and look at how computers turned from data analysis tools into cultural tools, starting in the 1960s, there was a strong idea that you could express yourself with them and that connecting to them in a human way was also really important. And in the 1970s, at Xerox PARC and at Apple, there was this strong idea of a computational version of human factors engineering, that my body had to fit in the chair or go through the doorway, which was really, deeply important to computing for decades, until the ‘90s. In the 2000s, as computation began to dominate culture, we turned away from negotiating between computing and people.
What that suggests is that the experience of doing something is also important, not just the outcome. We got massively focused on the outcome, and then we de-emphasised the experience of doing things, and now we’re at the point where, if you discuss the experience of doing something with the bogeyman Silicon Valley-style entrepreneur, they’ll be like, “Why would you bother? We can automate it. AI is going to solve that. We can hand that off to the Philippines.”
There are all sorts of solutions that will prevent you from having to be bothered with doing that experiential thing, and it turns out, no, I want to have those experiences, because that’s part of what makes me human and alive, even though they feel ridiculous individually. You know, who cares about the sensation of the ice in my water bottle? But as I argue in the book, over time, all that little stuff adds up; it’s deeply meaningful, and when you strip it all away, you really notice what’s missing.
The top-line answer is the experience matters. The experience of using products and services matters, not just the outcomes that they provide. And it feels a bit strange to say this in response to your question, because I think if you asked any UX designer in Silicon Valley, “Do you do that?” They’d be like, “Absolutely, we’re constantly doing that; that’s highly valuable to us.”
But I don’t think they are. They think they’re doing it, but have lost sight of what they’re really doing, which is stripping it away.
I love that the book is so rooted in personal and sensory experience. But as someone who’s 43 and had a lot of these feelings, I start to get a little suspicious of myself. Am I just an old fart longing for [the experiences of my youth]? How do you think about these things in a way that’s not just about romanticising how things were?
It’s very, very easy to slip into nostalgia, and I think a current strain of desire is orientated toward so-called analogue culture. For example, I might think, “If I get a Walkman again, that will solve my problems.”
I have a few thoughts about it. First, I make this argument quite clearly in the book: We’re not going back. You live in the present and look into the future, and we don’t live in the past. Lamenting what came before can orient you, but it’s not useful for living your life.
I love, love, love the telephone, the old-school Western Electric-style handset. I love the old-school Western Electric-style handset. I love how intimate they are. I love how they feel in my hand. I love the heft of it. [But now] we’re on Zoom, or at best we’re on our headphones.
That’s not going to change. So instead of looking at that example and thinking, “Ah, if only we could go back and maybe we can through this hipster reclamation of nostalgia”—okay, that’s an interesting signal. I remember that, and it was meaningful to me and a good way to orient yourself towards your actual sensory life.
Now, the wonderful thing is that, whether you’re 43 or whether you’re 23, you still have a human body. You live in the world, and we live in it together, and so all around us, all the time, are opportunities to do the same kind of thing but in a different way.
One of the things I love about Zoom over the telephone is I can have this radio experience with me and with you; it’s very sonically gratifying, and I don’t get that on a compressed digital line. So that’s one answer. Nostalgia can be orienting, but it’s indulgent to think that you can live in the past. If it’s purely mournful, what good does that do?
The second thing I want to flag is this: There’s been a lot of chatter about friction lately, like, “We need to reintroduce friction,” and I think that’s also wrong.
Everything got really smooth and slippery. It literally did because we all got these smartphones and they’re slick on their surface. But then, because of efficiency and ease, everything started to feel really frictionless, and the opposite of frictionlessness is friction.
But you don’t really want things to be difficult or to stand in your way. You just want the experience of feeling yourself doing them, which is quite a bit different from “Oh, that should be hard; I need to introduce obstacles that get in my way.”
I also wanted to ask about the relationship between the small stuff in the book’s title and the bigger questions of how society is changing. I agree that our lives have become dematerialised and separated from sensory experience, but it sounds like you’re not worried that at some point, the islands of physical or sensory pleasure or gratification are just going to disappear or become vanishingly small.
It’s a really subtle, complicated matter. Yes, that’s what I’m saying, but we seem to believe it’s not the case somehow. We’re obsessed with the idea that something has been lost that cannot be recovered or that needs to be recovered through massive cultural, social, economic, regulatory, or whatever kind of change.
Now, I’m not against that kind of big thing. I don’t know how easy or likely it is to be accomplished. It’s a lot to put on ordinary people to say, “Well, we just need to solve wealth inequality or capitalism, and then we’ll be able to return back to experiencing our lives fully.” We can’t wait for that. Ordinary people don’t need to wait for that.
I would very much like it if the leaders of industry and of government and of civic organisations did what they could, in their contexts, to build more small-stuff-orientated, more gratifying opportunities for people.
An example is the whole discourse about remote work, office work, and what you’re doing every day at your email job or whatever. Clearly, if you run an organisation, you control what people are actually doing and how.
But my neighbours, they don’t get to make that choice; your aunt doesn’t get to make that choice, but they still have to live their sensory lives. There’s something they can do right now, in this moment, every day, rather than wring their hands or post obsessively on Facebook about how shitty everything is. We’ve tried that for a while, and it doesn’t seem to have helped.
