There is something sublime about low tech gadgets. An analog camera, a magnetic compass, a record player, a number 2 pencil, a swiss army knife, a skateboard. Tactile controls are royalty because they control something real.
A shot from my Minolta XD-5, a film camera I recently purchased cheap on eBay.
A certain subculture of the modern internet grasps for the simplicity and analog nature of times passed. You can spot it around the internet in places like Low Tech Mag, or on BIFL, or archivists saving music to their local disk, two-stroke fanatics, off-grid folks, woodworkers, frugal buyers, the list goes on and on. There is such joy and personality in the understandable mechanism with no frills or unnecessary features; the hum of an engine powered by pistons and not optimized by thousands of computers with proprietary code. The lack of a spaghetti-string wiring diagram for a toaster. A pair of original Doc Martens leather boots that have lasted 20 years. Cast iron pans. A grandfather clock older than the man himself, still ticking.
After I read about BMW adding a price to unlock the full range of the gas pedal, or farmers unable to fix their own tractors because they don’t have the computer code to unlock a part of the tractor that they own, or Photoshop software now being a subscription, I wonder how far these companies will test these limits. I wonder if our technology already peaked, because it sure seems that everything is simultaneously losing quality and becoming impossible to fix and own.
The allure of “low tech”, of “real” ownership, phone modularity, machine fix-ability, and the like, may stem as a response to the Orwellian moves of auto manufacturers, tech subscription models, or similar. Nobody wants a tech behemoth to play gatekeeper! Nobody wants to subscribe monthly for the heated seats in their own car! People want quality and functionality. It doesn’t really have to be perfectly efficient, beautiful, lightweight, or shiny, even less so if its functionality is going to be disabled sans a monthly payment.
I think that this allure is more linked to our innate human desires. Desire to not have life be augmented by a thousand useless apps and ever-changing UI touch screens is the raw desire to be human. To be powerful in reality and have control over your devices. To have personality sans the internet, to be present in the real moment, not the moment as shown on an LCD. I can’t just go into a touchscreen and do what I want to change what’s on the screen, change the functionality, make it mine, own it, direct it. I don’t live inside the code. I’m left helpless when I most want to change something if it’s controlled by a silicon wafer thinner than my fingernail. We’ve reached the human limit of what I can and cannot change or fix, as a human, in the things I own.
The transient nature of computer programs, of upgrades, versioning, subscription gatekeeping, and the “new” as forced upon us by planned obsolescence, only open doors for more issues to spring out of the added complexity. It drives the very real human desire to simply do away with the use of computers to solve the issue at hand entirely.
There is a threshold of complexity that digitization of devices can help us with. This threshold eventually bumps up against the human threshold of annoyance in dealing with UIs and computer chips flooding everything around us for no good reason. I truly just want a car to be a car. It drives. Of course I want the basic comforts of a radio, A/C, and the like, but why on earth is there an iPad on the dash now?? Shouldn’t I be driving? Why is there an infotainment system? Do I need a computer chip more powerful than the one we went to space with - to auto-adjust my A/C setting? Will I really be locked out of my own car due to a server outage?
Why is everything so overbaked? It’s like our hammer is computer chips, and everything looks like a nail. Our one trick is to add more complexity into simple devices and pretend like it’s a massive accomplishment to add it to the IoT or that we’ve revolutionized the electric shaver with bluetooth and AI for… something?
The demise of the human element of quality physical craftsmanship is the demise of the appreciation for the beauty of life. Our desire to live and breathe and be still, content, personable, powerful as humans with our minds and hands to maintain the things we buy, to take a picture without it being auto-edited, to flip a switch directly connected to our seat heaters with no hidden tricks. Over-digitization ropes us into a messy world of complex computer code that is unnecessary to perform the function we want, and infantilizes us by pretending that we couldn’t successfully operate the device without this complexity.
The software to operate simple devices was always in our heads, yet we seem to fight against ourselves by making simple devices more complex with no added benefit. Why does a toaster have to sense the bagel put into it with delicate microelectronics? Just give me a timer and a heat setting, what more is really here to do? When that chip fails, will the device stop working entirely? It’s absurd.
To learn how to draw or paint, you must go through the phase where you start a project not knowing the steps forward to get it to look like what you want. You may have to do many more steps than a pro, since you may mess up, or need to cover something up, or simply do things slower. So your finished project is much more “top-heavy” in its layers and presentation to the trained eye, since you spent a lot of time finessing the details after things get put onto the canvas, instead of knowing how to do them from the get-go, and setting up the canvas beforehand to accommodate the features appropriately. The mature artist touches the canvas the absolute minimum amount of times to make their product. The amateur struggles in self-doubt to not continue carving their spoon to get it just a little more round, and accidentally carves a hole in the wood.
This is the major difference between pros and amateurs in many fields, engineering included.
True craftsmanship displays an important element of maturity: knowing when to stop. Stop chiseling, stop sanding, stop pretending to improve a perfectly functional design. An overdone result reveals an unconfident, amateur artist.
So much of technology is overbaked with features, overdone in UI animations, overengineered with computer chips, devoid of its soul and personality and instead full of complexity, sensitivity, liability, and tedium. To the engineers: stop touching it! Or hand me something built from a time when engineers knew when they were done, and weren’t expecting to conjure up a “new version” in the next 2 months.
“To obsess over gadgetry is to court mental illness” –Unknown
Daniel