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. Image Credits:Simon & Schuster 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 expe
