{"id":736061,"date":"2026-06-28T20:50:24","date_gmt":"2026-06-28T17:50:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/writer-ian-bogost-says-the-small-stuff-can-help-us-reclaim-our-lives-from-dematerialization\/"},"modified":"2026-06-28T20:50:24","modified_gmt":"2026-06-28T17:50:24","slug":"writer-ian-bogost-says-the-small-stuff-can-help-us-reclaim-our-lives-from-dematerialization","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/writer-ian-bogost-says-the-small-stuff-can-help-us-reclaim-our-lives-from-dematerialization\/","title":{"rendered":"Writer Ian Bogost says ‘The Small Stuff’ can help us reclaim our lives from dematerialization"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Has Silicon Valley been building the wrong things?<\/p>\n

Despite its self help-y title, writer\/designer\/academic Ian Bogost\u2019s forthcoming book \u201cThe Small Stuff: How to Lead a More Gratifying Life\u201d<\/a> asks some pointed questions about how technology<\/a> has transformed our experience of the physical world. Using Bogost\u2019s popular article in the Atlantic about the decline of stick shift cars<\/a> as a springboard, \u201cThe Small Stuff\u201d argues that many aspects of our daily existence \u2014 from cars to doors to bathrooms \u2014 have become dematerialized.<\/p>\n

\u201cBasically, it\u2019s the idea that we\u2019ve become disconnected from the sensory world, and the reason that happ<\/a>ened is what you might call convenience technologies,\u201d Bogost told me, though he was quick to add that technology isn\u2019t the only thing driving this change. \u201cAll sorts of factors \u2014 not just tech, and certainly not just Silicon Valley-style technology \u2014 have distanced people from the world that they inhabit, they have strip<\/a>ped away the texture of everyday life.\u201d<\/p>\n

In fact, while Bogost nodded to other books criticizing the tech industry, he said he\u2019s become \u201ca little bored with the constant critique.\u201d So he\u2019s currently less focused on calling for broad societal change and more on finding \u201cgratification\u201d in everyday sensory experiences.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a lot to put on ordinary people to say, \u2018Well, we just need to solve wealth inequality or capitalism, and then we\u2019ll be able to get back to experiencing our lives fully,\u2019\u201d he said. \u201cOrdinary people don\u2019t need to wait for that.\u201d<\/p>\n

During our interview (which I\u2019ve edited for length and clarity), we also discussed the tradeoff between convenience and experience, how Silicon Valley can do better, and the \u201chipster reclamation of nostalgia.\u201d<\/p>\n

You wrote this great piece <\/strong>about the stick shift<\/strong><\/a>. How did that lead you to these bigger ideas about \u201cthe small stuff\u201d? How did you realize there was a book in this?<\/strong><\/p>\n

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\u2019t have transmissions. Assuming that EVs are going to eventually become universally adopted, which I think is the case, then this really is<\/em> the end.<\/p>\n

You [write] a story and you\u2019re like, \u201cWell, that was fun, it\u2019s a nice little thing, I\u2019ll put it out on the internet.\u201d 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\u2019t think so.<\/p>\n

I took a year of thinking about it, off-and-on [and] I realized, actually, I\u2019ve 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\u2019ve been doing. I just find ordinary life very, very alluring, and I\u2019ve never understood quite why. Is there something wrong with me? Am I just a weirdo?\u00a0<\/p>\n

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\u2019re like, \u201cOh yes, the breeze.\u201d<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s 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?\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Basically, it\u2019s the idea that we\u2019ve become disconnected from the sensory world, and the reason that happened is what you might call convenience technologies. Although it\u2019s not just technologies; it\u2019s also bureaucracy, it\u2019s efficiency, it\u2019s economics, it\u2019s regulatory apparatuses. All sorts of factors \u2014 not just tech, and certainly not just Silicon Valley-style technology \u2014 have distanced people from the world that they inhabit, they have stripped away the texture of everyday life.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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 \u2014 or it doesn\u2019t, right? It kind of doesn\u2019t work, but that sense of: This thing that I used to do with my physical body and my senses, now I don\u2019t do that anymore. That is so commonplace, and it\u2019s, broadly speaking, been driven by things that have really benefited our lives. But we didn\u2019t realize that we were making a tradeoff between progress and giving up that contact with the material world.<\/p>\n

So that\u2019s what dematerialization names for me, this family of conditions that distanced us from our sensory lives.<\/p>\n

\"Book
Image Credits:<\/strong>Simon & Schuster<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

That section about the restroom was really visceral for me, because you\u2019re not just talking about the experience of using these things, but it\u2019s the experience of having them not <\/em>work for you.<\/strong><\/p>\n

You notice them when they don\u2019t work, and there\u2019s some friction there that helps you see the problem. In a lot of cases, we don\u2019t even realize there\u2019s a problem, or we realize something\u2019s wrong, but we don\u2019t know what it is.<\/p>\n

One of the things you also point out is: A lot of these changes have, in some ways, improved our lives. You said there\u2019s a tradeoff, like in the case of the stick shift and automatic, and then you add electric vehicles \u2014\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

There\u2019s a lot of folks out there who\u2019ve advocated for stick shift cars who are also like, \u201cInternal combustion engines are the only way, and we have to be purists about burning dinosaurs.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t feel that way at all. Hailing an Uber and streaming music and getting DoorDash and even some of the promises of the automated fixtures \u2014 I mean, some of them are bunk, but I get it, broadly \u2014 I think it\u2019s really important to me that we recognize that our lives are better overall, but there was this thing that happened that we didn\u2019t notice, in a frog boiling kind of way.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m a big fan of Cory Doctorow, but these [arguments that,] \u201cThis system of economics and technological value systems are obviously the cause of all our problems, and I\u2019m going to name it enshittification<\/a>,\u201d just to pick a very popular example. People clearly want an explanation, but then you\u2019re like, \u201cYeah, but I like Amazon Prime, I like to be able to search Google for information.\u201d<\/p>\n

So I\u2019m 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\u2019s much bigger than that, and that it happens so slowly that we didn\u2019t notice.<\/p>\n

One of the striking things to me about the book versus what I\u2019ve read of Doctorow\u2019s work, or [Jenny Odell\u2019s book] \u201cHow to do Nothing\u201d \u2014 there\u2019s a whole cluster of books \u2014 is that your book is less angry. There\u2019s a strain of criticism, but it\u2019s not quite the same tone.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Personally, I\u2019ve been writing about technology for a long, long time, and I don\u2019t think it\u2019s 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<\/a> way, way, way before a lot of people were concerned, and that felt very lonely.<\/p>\n

But I just feel a little a little bored with the constant critique, and I also feel like it\u2019s misdiagnosing or overdiagnosing the problem. It\u2019s very satisfying to believe that there are good guys and bad guys, or that there\u2019s a simple explanation, and once we understand the explanation we just need to unwind it and then everything will be good again.<\/p>\n

I want to talk about the Silicon Valley part of it. And this isn\u2019t just a Silicon Valley thing, but a lot of the ideas that you\u2019re 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?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I certainly think that the obsession with efficiency, automation, invisibility, transparency, and scale does drive that desire. \u201cWe are going to make everything easier to do, so you don\u2019t have to do it.\u201d That\u2019s one way of summarizing the last however many years.<\/p>\n

Some of that drive came from the right place, like Uber. Remember before Uber, when you were in a city that wasn\u2019t New York, and you wanted to get a cab, and it was really hard, and now it\u2019s really easy? You could romanticize that and say that [convenience] doesn\u2019t matter, but it does.<\/p>\n

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, \u201cHere\u2019s the deal,\u201d and everyone was like, \u201cYeah, I\u2019m on board, I don\u2019t want to buy CDs anymore, Spotify would be amazing, sign me up.\u201d<\/p>\n

Actually, we felt<\/em> like we understood the deal, but we didn\u2019t 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\u2019d 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 \u2014 whether transhumanism, singularitarianism, or just eternal life through efficiency and optimization, that idea has always been central to the general<\/a> purpose computer, that it can sieve through any kind of experience and turn it into a computational one.<\/p>\n

And we are just never, thank God, we are not able to exit our bodies. But you go to the Valley and there\u2019s still this weird sense that that embodied human experience is not needed, unnecessary. And that\u2019s just wrong.<\/p>\n

The book is written for a broader audience, but I\u2019m curious for entrepreneurs or people building products: Are there positive examples you\u2019ve seen of how people can think about that tradeoff differently? So it\u2019s not just optimizing purely for convenience, but maybe finding a balance between convenience and friction and sensory experience?<\/strong><\/p>\n

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 \u201890s. Once we got to the 2000s, as the real takeover of culture by computation happened, I think that\u2019s when we turned away from that process of trying to negotiate between computing and people.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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\u2019re at the point where, if you talk about the experience of doing something with the bogeyman Silicon Valley-style entrepreneur, they\u2019ll be like, \u201cWhy would you bother? We can automate that. AI is going to solve that. We can hand that off to the Philippines.\u201d<\/p>\n

There\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s deeply meaningful, and when you strip it all away, you really notice what\u2019s what\u2019s missing.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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, \u201cDo you do that?\u201d They\u2019d be like, \u201cAbsolutely, we\u2019re doing that all the time, that\u2019s highly valuable to us.\u201d<\/p>\n

But I don\u2019t think they are. They think<\/em> they\u2019re doing it, but, but have lost sight of what they\u2019re really doing, which is stripping it away.<\/p>\n

I love that the book is so rooted in personal experience and in sensory experience. But as someone who\u2019s 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\u2019s not just about romanticizing the way things were?<\/strong><\/p>\n

It is very, very easy to slip into nostalgia, and I think there\u2019s a current strain of desire that\u2019s oriented toward so-called analog culture. Like, \u201cI\u2019m gonna get a Walkman again and that\u2019s going to solve my problems.\u201d<\/p>\n

I have a few thoughts about it. First, I make this argument pretty clearly in the book: We\u2019re not going back. You live in the present, into the future, and we don\u2019t live in the past. Lamenting what came before and has been lost is useful insofar as it can orient you, but it\u2019s not really useful in helping you live your life.<\/p>\n

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\u2019re on Zoom, or at best we\u2019re on our headphones. That\u2019s not going to change. And so instead of looking at that example and going, \u201cAh, if only we could go back and we can maybe through this hipster reclamation of nostalgia \u201c \u2014 okay, that\u2019s an interesting signal. I remember that, and that was meaningful to me, and a good way to orient yourself toward your actual sensory life.<\/p>\n

Now, the great thing is that, whether you\u2019re 43, or whether you\u2019re 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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\u2019s very sonically gratifying, and I don\u2019t get that on a compressed digital line. So that\u2019s one answer. Nostalgia can be orienting, but it\u2019s indulgent to think that you can live in the past. If it\u2019s just purely mournful, what does that help?<\/p>\n

The second thing I want to flag is this: There\u2019s been a lot of chatter about friction lately, like, \u201cWe need to reintroduce friction,\u201d and I think that\u2019s also wrong.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Everything got really smooth and slippery. It literally did, because we all got these smartphones and they\u2019re slick on their surface. But then, because of efficiency and ease, everything started to feel<\/em> really frictionless, and the opposite of frictionlessness is friction.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But you don\u2019t 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 \u201cOh, that should be hard, I need to introduce obstacles that get in my way.\u201d<\/p>\n

I also wanted to ask about this question of the relationship between the small stuff in the book\u2019s 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\u2019t sound like you\u2019re worried that at some point, the islands of physical or sensory pleasure or gratification are just going to disappear, or become vanishingly small.<\/strong><\/p>\n

I think it\u2019s a really subtle, complicated matter. Yes, that\u2019s what I\u2019m saying, but we\u2019re 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Now, I\u2019m not against that kind of big thing. I don\u2019t know how easy or likely it is to be accomplished. I think it\u2019s a lot to put on ordinary people to say, \u201cWell, we just need to solve wealth inequality or capitalism, and then we\u2019ll be able to get back to experiencing our lives fully.\u201d We can\u2019t wait for that. Ordinary people don\u2019t need to wait for that.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

An example is the whole discourse about remote work, office work, what it is that you\u2019re 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\u2019t get to make that choice, your aunt doesn\u2019t get to make that choice, but they still have to live in their sensory lives, there\u2019s 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\u2019ve tried that for a while, and it doesn\u2019t seem to have helped.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Source<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Has Silicon Valley been building the wrong things? Despite its self help-y title, writer\/designer\/academic Ian Bogost\u2019s forthcoming book \u201cThe Small Stuff: How to Lead a More Gratifying Life\u201d asks some pointed questions about how technology has transformed our experience of the physical world. Using Bogost\u2019s popular article in the Atlantic about the decline of stick…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":736062,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/techcrunch.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/ian-bogost-headshot.jpg?resize=800,1200","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[52711,163013,151443,163014],"class_list":["post-736061","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-technology","tag-hardware","tag-ian-bogost","tag-media-entertainment","tag-the-small-stuff"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/736061","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=736061"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/736061\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/736062"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=736061"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=736061"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=736061"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}