{"id":3354,"date":"2026-07-07T18:58:42","date_gmt":"2026-07-07T18:58:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/silvybrand.com\/?p=3354"},"modified":"2026-07-07T18:58:42","modified_gmt":"2026-07-07T18:58:42","slug":"loss-of-physical-world-book-excerpt-the-small-stuff-ian-bogost","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/silvybrand.com\/?p=3354","title":{"rendered":"People Used to Control Machines. They Don\u2019t Anymore"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><br \/>\n<\/p>\n<div>\n<p><span class=\"lead-in-text-callout\">If gratification is<\/span> so easy, why don\u2019t you feel more gratified already? Because it\u2019s gotten harder. It\u2019s still easy to experience individual feats of gratification when you find them (or they find you). But the ordinary circumstances that once produced so much gratification have gradually receded. Unseen choices in design, business, and social life have made it harder for you to engage directly with the sensory world.<\/p>\n<p class=\"paywall\">This problem snuck up on me, and probably on you as well. Slowly, over time, the world started withdrawing from us. Automation took over ordinary tasks. Things that used to have buttons suddenly did not. Basic activities got taken over by computers. I was slow to notice it happening, too. But once I did, I saw it everywhere and every day. I can\u2019t tell you when the realization formed fully in my brain. But a turning point came on an unassuming day as I piloted my car home from work.<\/p>\n<p class=\"paywall\">I drive a little Volkswagen hatchback, the kind fanatics call a hot hatch. It\u2019s not a sports car nor is it fancy, but it\u2019s a lot of fun to drive. In part that\u2019s because it comes with a manual transmission\u2014or at least it did when I bought mine more than 15 years ago. Manuals, or stick shifts, used to be popular because they were cheaper to buy, easier to maintain, and more cost-effective to operate compared to automatic transmissions.<\/p>\n<p class=\"paywall\">In America, where big cars, open roads, and freeway traffic have become cultural cornerstones, the stick shift has been on the decline for years. But also all around the world, even in Europe and Asia, where the high cost of gas had made a manual\u2019s better fuel economy worthwhile. In 2000, the auto retailer CarMax reported that more than 15 percent of its new and used cars were stick shifts. By 2020, that number had dropped to 2.4 percent. In recent years, Mercedes and Volkswagen, the maker of my little hot hatch, announced plans to sunset the manual transmission globally. Other makers followed suit.<\/p>\n<p class=\"paywall\">Car enthusiasts had been lamenting the stick-shift slump for years already. Car and Driver magazine even launched a campaign, Save the Manuals, in 2010, arguing that learning to \u201coperate the entire car\u201d would offer drivers a better experience. Around the same time, the philosopher Matthew Crawford devoted a large part of his bestselling book <em>Shop Class as Soulcraft<\/em> to explain how the difficult work of motorcycle repair had infused his life with rich meaning; in 2020 he published a follow-up, <em>Why We Drive<\/em>, which cast operating an automobile as an act of autonomy.<\/p>\n<p class=\"paywall\">Crawford took the Car and Driver position as a life philosophy. Maintaining \u201cnatural bonds between action and perception,\u201d as he put it, is necessary\u2014not only to operate a motor vehicle safely and effectively, but also to feel fully human in the age of machines. Like the clothes you wear, the food you eat, the apartment in which you live, machinery extends your experience while also changing it. A car (or a computer, a paintbrush, a marshmallow) is a prosthesis. When you put on a suit, you become yourself, but different. Just like the jockey who rides a horse\u2014or the driver who pilots an automobile.<\/p>\n<p class=\"paywall\">To illustrate the point, Crawford tells a story about test-driving a 400-horsepower Audi RS3 with all the options, including a paddle-shifting automatic transmission. It was powerful and capable, he says, but he \u201ccould not connect with the car.\u201d The human operator and the machine felt out of sync.<\/p>\n<p class=\"paywall\">This is a precious observation. Crawford\u2019s grievance might have felt a bit disconnected at the time, appealing to gearheads who still cared about clutching and shifting. But only a few years later, it became clear that soon enough, <em>nobody<\/em> would be able to do so because of electric vehicles (EVs).<\/p>\n<p class=\"paywall\">Internal-combustion-engine cars burn fuel to spin drivetrains that require gearing to transfer the power generated by the engine to the wheels. But EVs have a totally different drivetrain. Their electric motors more seamlessly transfer power to the wheels. When the manual finally does die, something bigger than driving will be lost, too: an essential, everyday device that someone\u2014even if not you\u2014can actually feel operating.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><br \/>\n<br \/><a href=\"https:\/\/www.wired.com\/story\/loss-of-physical-world-book-excerpt-the-small-stuff-ian-bogost\/\">Source link <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>If gratification is so easy, why don\u2019t you feel more gratified already? Because it\u2019s gotten harder. It\u2019s still easy to experience individual feats of gratification when you find them (or they find you). But the ordinary circumstances that once produced so much gratification have gradually receded. Unseen choices in design, business, and social life have [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3355,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[418,675,100,44,218,332,396,437],"class_list":["post-3354","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-gadgets","tag-automobiles","tag-book-excerpt","tag-books","tag-cars","tag-electric-vehicles","tag-engineering","tag-longreads","tag-self-driving-cars"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v28.0 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>People Used to Control Machines. They Don\u2019t Anymore - Silvybrand Lifestyle Blog<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"In a world regulated by devices, humanity has become disconnected from the physical world\u2014from stick-shift cars to postcards.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/silvybrand.com\/?p=3354\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"People Used to Control Machines. 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