Has Silicon Valley been building the wrong things? That’s the provocative question at the heart of Ian Bogost’s forthcoming book, “The Small Stuff: How to Lead a More Gratifying Life.” Despite its self-help-sounding title, Bogost—a writer, designer, and academic—delivers a pointed critique of how technology has reshaped our relationship with the physical world.
Drawing on his widely read Atlantic article about the decline of manual transmissions, Bogost argues that many aspects of daily life—from cars and doors to bathrooms—have become “dematerialized.” In other words, we’ve grown disconnected from the sensory richness of the world around us, largely due to what he calls “convenience technologies.”
“It’s not just tech, and certainly not just Silicon Valley-style technology,” Bogost explained in a recent interview. “All sorts of factors have stripped away the texture of everyday life.”
But unlike other tech critics, Bogost is wary of calling for sweeping societal change. “I’ve become a little bored with the constant critique,” he admitted. Instead, he focuses on finding “gratification” in ordinary sensory experiences. As he put it: “It’s a lot to put on ordinary people to say, ‘We just need to solve wealth inequality or capitalism, and then we’ll be able to experience our lives fully.’ Ordinary people don’t need to wait for that.”
In the conversation below—edited for length and clarity—Bogost explores the tradeoff between convenience and experience, how Silicon Valley could do better, and what he calls the “hipster reclamation of nostalgia.”
You wrote that great piece about the stick shift. How did it lead to these bigger ideas about “the small stuff”? How did you realize there was a book in it?
I did the stick shift story in 2022. At a high level: People had been lamenting the decline of manual transmissions for years, but electric vehicles made it real because they don’t have transmissions. Assuming EVs eventually become universally adopted—which I think is the case—this really is the end.
You write a story, and you think, “Well, that was fun. It’s a nice little thing. I’ll put it out on the internet.” But that one was huge. The response was enormous. I was really interested in why. Is it just that people love their stick shift cars? I didn’t think so.
I spent about a year thinking about it, off and on, and realized I’d actually been working on this longer than I expected. I went back and looked at my writing about toasters, smoothies, slushies—my whole catalog of interests. I just find ordinary life very, very alluring, and I’ve never quite understood why. Is there something wrong with me? Am I just a weirdo?
Through the stick shift, I realized that ordinary life is not something to escape—it’s something to inhabit more fully.
As we move through 2026, with AI agents, screenless interfaces, and ambient computing further eroding physical engagement, Bogost’s message feels increasingly urgent. Reclaiming “the small stuff” may be one of the few antidotes to a world that keeps dematerializing around us.
via TechCrunch