In 2022, writer and designer Ian Bogost published an article in The Atlantic lamenting the decline of the manual transmission. The response was enormous — far larger than he expected. That reaction, he says, revealed something deeper: people weren’t just mourning a niche automotive feature. They were sensing a broader loss of connection to the physical world.
Now, two years later, that insight has become the foundation of Bogost’s forthcoming book, The Small Stuff: How to Lead a More Gratifying Life (Simon & Schuster, 2025). The book is not another Silicon Valley takedown. Instead, it offers a more nuanced argument: that the texture of everyday life has been quietly stripped away by forces far broader than technology alone, and that ordinary people can reclaim it without waiting for systemic change.
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From stick shifts to airport restrooms: diagnosing dematerialization
Bogost, a professor at Georgia Tech and a contributing writer at The Atlantic, has spent years writing about ordinary objects — toasters, slushies, telephone handsets. In The Small Stuff, he connects these interests into a coherent diagnosis of what he calls “dematerialization.”
“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 TechCrunch. But he is quick to add that technology is only part of the story. “All sorts of factors — not just tech, and certainly not just Silicon Valley-style technology — have distanced people from the world that they inhabit.”
His most vivid example: the airport restroom. The toilet flushes automatically. The sink turns on by itself. The soap dispenser and towel dispenser require no physical contact. “That thing that I used to do with my physical body and my senses, now I don’t do that anymore,” he said. “We didn’t realize that we were making a tradeoff between progress and giving up that contact with the material world.”
Why this critique differs from the usual tech backlash
The book arrives in a crowded field of technology criticism. Cory Doctorow’s “enshittification” framework and Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing have each offered compelling diagnoses of digital life’s degradations. But Bogost deliberately avoids their tone of moral urgency.
“I just feel a little bored with the constant critique,” he said. “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.”
Instead, Bogost acknowledges the genuine benefits of modern convenience. He still uses Uber, streams music, and orders DoorDash. “Our lives are broadly speaking better,” he said. The problem, he argues, is that the tradeoff happened so slowly — “in a frog boiling kind of way” — that people didn’t notice what they were giving up.
Experience matters more than outcomes
For entrepreneurs and product builders, Bogost offers a pointed critique of Silicon Valley’s design philosophy. The industry’s obsession with efficiency, automation, and scale has led it to prioritize outcomes over experiences.
“We got massively focused on the outcome, and then we de-emphasize the experience of doing things,” he said. “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.'”
Bogost points to an earlier era of computing — the 1970s at Xerox PARC and early Apple — when human factors engineering was central to design. “The experience of using products and services matters, not just the outcomes that they provide,” he said. “It almost feels funny to say it out loud, because I think if you asked any UX designer in Silicon Valley, ‘Do you do that?’ They’d be like, ‘Absolutely.’ But I don’t think they are.”
Nostalgia as orientation, not destination
A natural question arises: Is this just nostalgia for a past that never really existed? Bogost is careful to distinguish between useful remembrance and indulgent longing.
“We’re not going back,” he said flatly. “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.”
He also pushes back against the idea that the solution is to reintroduce “friction” into digital products. “You don’t really want things to be hard or to stand in your way,” he said. “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.'”
What ordinary people can do right now
Perhaps the most striking aspect of Bogost’s argument is its modesty. He is not calling for regulatory overhaul or mass boycotts of technology. Instead, he suggests that individuals can find small, daily opportunities for sensory engagement — and that those small moments add up.
“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.”
He points to the shift to remote work as an example where organizational leaders could make choices that preserve sensory experience. But even without that, he says, “there’s something [people] 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.”
The Small Stuff is scheduled for publication by Simon & Schuster in 2025.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is ‘The Small Stuff’ about?
The book explores how modern convenience technologies, from automatic toilets to electric vehicles, have dematerialized daily life and disconnected people from sensory experiences. Bogost offers ways to find gratification in ordinary physical interactions.
What does ‘dematerialization’ mean in the book?
Dematerialization refers to the gradual loss of sensory engagement with the physical world, driven by automation, efficiency, and digital interfaces. Examples include automatic faucets, touchscreens replacing buttons, and the decline of manual transmissions.
Is the book just another critique of Silicon Valley?
No. Bogost says he is ‘bored with the constant critique’ and instead focuses on how ordinary people can find meaning in small sensory experiences without waiting for broad societal or technological change.
What inspired Bogost to write this book?
The book grew out of his 2022 Atlantic article about the decline of stick-shift cars, which generated an enormous reader response. He realized that people deeply value ordinary physical interactions that are being lost.
