Has Silicon Valley been building the wrong things?

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 dematerialized.

“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 criticizing the tech industry, he said he’s 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 great piece about the stick shift. How did that lead you to these bigger ideas about “the small stuff”? How did you realize there was a book in this?

I did the stick shift story in 2022. At a high level, it was: People have been lamenting the decline of the stick shift for years and years, but electric vehicles made it real, because they don’t have transmissions. Assuming that EVs are going to eventually become universally adopted, which I think is the case, then this really is the end.

You [write] a story and you’re like, “Well, that was fun, it’s a nice little thing, I’ll put it out on the internet.” That one was just huge. The response was enormous. And I was really interested in why. Is it just that people really love their stick shift cars? I didn’t think so.

I took a year of thinking about it, off-and-on [and] I realized, actually, I’ve been working on this for longer than I expected. I went back and looked at writing about toasters and writing about smoothies or slushies, or my catalog of interests, and the things that 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 realization, through the stick shift, that ordinary life is not just interesting, but deeply, deeply meaningful, and we have undervalued it. Something like the stick shift, which is imbued with symbolic and real meaning for people, it just opens a window, and you feel the breeze come in, and you’re like, “Oh yes, the breeze.”

Let’s talk about the concept of dematerialization, because the book is structured around it. The first half is describing, diagnosing, and then [the second half talks] about solutions, antidotes. Do you want to explain what dematerialization 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, it’s efficiency, it’s economics, it’s 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 favorite example of this, the one that people seem to always get, is: 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, the soap dispenses for you — or it doesn’t, right? It kind of doesn’t work, but that sense of: This thing that 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 realize that we were making a tradeoff between progress and giving up that contact with the material world.

So that’s what dematerialization names for me, this family of conditions that distanced us from our sensory lives.

That section about the restroom was really visceral for me, because you’re not just talking about the experience of using these things, but it’s the experience of having them not work for you.

You notice them when they don’t work, and there’s some friction there that helps you see the problem. In a lot of cases, we don’t even realize there’s a problem, or we realize something’s wrong, but we don’t know what it is.

One of the things you also point out is: A lot of these changes have, in some ways, improved our lives. You said there’s a tradeoff, like in the case of the stick shift and automatic, and then you add electric vehicles — 

There’s a lot of folks out there who’ve advocated for stick shift cars who are also like, “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 get it, broadly — I think it’s really important to me that we recognize 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 these [arguments that,] “This system of economics and technological value systems are obviously the cause of all our problems, and I’m going to name it enshittification,” just to pick a very popular example. People clearly want an explanation, but then you’re like, “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 talking about Facebook and social media way, way, way before a lot of people were concerned, and that felt very lonely.

But I just feel a little 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, consumer services are focused on convenience, speed, 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 summarizing the last however many 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 really easy? You could romanticize that and say that [convenience] doesn’t matter, but it does.

Rather than blame either technologization, or industry, or ordinary people for being too stupid to notice or 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 organizations 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 amazing, sign me up.”

Actually, we felt like we understood the deal, but we didn’t fully understand the deal. We did not fully account for the fact that we are physical beings, we are embodied beings, and that is maybe somewhere where I’d put some of the blame more squarely on Silicon Valley-style 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 optimization, 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, we are not able to exit our bodies. But you go to the Valley and there’s still this weird sense that that embodied human experience is not needed, 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 optimizing purely for convenience, but maybe finding a balance between convenience and friction and sensory experience?

If you go back and you look at how computers turned from data analysis tools into cultural tools, which begins in the 1960s, really, there was this strong idea that you were going to be able to express yourself with [computers], but also that connecting to them in a human way was 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, of the fact that my body has to fit in the chair or has to go through the doorway, that was really, deeply important to computing for decades, until the ‘90s. Once we got to the 2000s, as the real takeover of culture by computation happened, I think that’s when we turned away from that process of trying to negotiate 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-emphasize the experience of doing things, and now we’re at the point where, if you talk about the experience of doing something with the bogeyman Silicon Valley-style entrepreneur, they’ll be like, “Why would you bother? We can automate that. AI is going to solve that. We can hand that off to the Philippines.”

There’s 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, it adds up, it’s deeply meaningful, and when you strip it all away, you really notice what’s 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 almost feels funny to say it out loud 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 doing that all the time, that’s highly valuable to us.”

But I don’t think they are. They think they’re doing it, but, 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 experience and in 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 romanticizing the way things were?

It is very, very easy to slip into nostalgia, and I think there’s a current strain of desire that’s oriented toward so-called analog culture. Like, “I’m gonna get a Walkman again and that’s going to solve my problems.”

I have a few thoughts about it. First, I make this argument pretty clearly in the book: We’re not going back. You live in the present, into the future, and we don’t live in the past. Lamenting what came before and has been lost is useful insofar as it can orient you, but it’s not really useful in helping you live your life.

I love, love, love the telephone, 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. And so instead of looking at that example and going, “Ah, if only we could go back and we can maybe through this hipster reclamation of nostalgia“ — okay, that’s an interesting signal. I remember that, and that was meaningful to me, and a good way to orient yourself toward your actual sensory life.

Now, the great 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 myself and with you, that 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 just purely mournful, what does that help?

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 hard 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 this question of the relationship between the small stuff in the book’s title and these bigger questions of how society is changing. I agree that our lives have become dematerialized and separated from sensory experience, but it doesn’t sound like you’re worried that at some point, the islands of physical or sensory pleasure or gratification are just going to disappear, or become vanishingly small.

I think it’s a really subtle, complicated matter. Yes, that’s what I’m saying, but 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, 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. I think 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.” 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 organizations did what they could, in their contexts, to build more small stuff-oriented, more gratifying opportunities for people.

An example is the whole discourse about remote work, office work, what it is that you’re doing every day at your email job or whatever. Clearly, if you run an organization, you have some control over what people are actually doing and how. But my neighbors, they don’t get to make that choice, your aunt doesn’t get to make that choice, but they still have to live in 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.