Writer Ian Bogost says ‘The Small Stuff’ can help us reclaim our lives from too much convenience
Writer Ian Bogost says ‘The Small Stuff’ can help us reclaim our lives from too much convenience
作家 Ian Bogost 表示，“小事”可以帮助我们从过度的便利中找回生活
Has Silicon Valley been building the wrong things? Despite its self help-y title, writer/designer/academic Ian Bogost’s forthcoming book “The Small Stuff: How to Lead a More Gratifying Life” asks some pointed questions about how technology has transformed our experience of the physical world.
硅谷是否一直在制造错误的东西？尽管书名听起来像是一本自助读物，但作家、设计师兼学者 Ian Bogost 即将出版的新书《小事：如何过上更令人满足的生活》（The Small Stuff: How to Lead a More Gratifying Life）提出了一些尖锐的问题，探讨了技术如何改变了我们对物理世界的体验。
Using Bogost’s popular article in the Atlantic about the decline of stick shift cars as a springboard, “The Small Stuff” argues that many aspects of our daily existence — from cars to doors to bathrooms — have become dematerialized.
以 Bogost 在《大西洋月刊》上发表的关于手动挡汽车衰落的热门文章为跳板，《小事》一书指出，我们日常生活的许多方面——从汽车到门再到洗手间——都已经“去物质化”了。
“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 me, though he was quick to add that technology isn’t the only thing driving this change. “All sorts of factors — not just tech, and certainly not just Silicon Valley-style technology — have distanced people from the world that they inhabit, they have stripped away the texture of everyday life.”
“从根本上说，这是一种我们与感官世界脱节的观点，而导致这种情况的原因就是所谓的便利技术，” Bogost 告诉我，但他很快补充说，技术并不是推动这种变化的唯一因素。“各种各样的因素——不仅仅是技术，当然也不仅仅是硅谷式的技术——已经让人类与他们所居住的世界产生了距离，它们剥离了日常生活的质感。”
In fact, while Bogost nodded to other books criticizing the tech industry, he said he’s become “a little bored with the constant critique.” So he’s currently less focused on calling for broad societal change and more on finding “gratification” in everyday sensory experiences.
事实上，虽然 Bogost 对其他批评科技行业的书籍表示认可，但他表示自己已经“对持续不断的批评感到有点厌倦了”。因此，他目前不再专注于呼吁广泛的社会变革，而是更多地关注如何在日常感官体验中寻找“满足感”。
“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.”
“要求普通人去说‘好吧，我们只需要解决贫富差距或资本主义问题，然后我们就能重新充分体验生活’，这负担太重了，”他说。“普通人不需要等待这些问题的解决。”
During our interview (which I’ve edited for length and clarity), we also discussed the tradeoff between convenience and experience, how Silicon Valley can do better, and the “hipster reclamation of nostalgia.”
在我们的采访中（为了篇幅和清晰度，我进行了编辑），我们还讨论了便利与体验之间的权衡、硅谷如何做得更好，以及“嬉皮士对怀旧情绪的重拾”。
You wrote this great piece about the stick shift. How did that lead you to these bigger ideas about “the small stuff”? How did you realize there was a book in this?
你写了一篇关于手动挡汽车的精彩文章。那篇文章是如何引导你产生关于“小事”的这些宏大想法的？你是如何意识到这可以写成一本书的？
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’t have transmissions. Assuming that EVs are going to eventually become universally adopted, which I think is the case, then this really is the end.
我在 2022 年写了关于手动挡的故事。从宏观层面来看，情况是这样的：多年来人们一直在哀叹手动挡汽车的衰落，但电动汽车让这种衰落成为了现实，因为它们没有变速箱。假设电动汽车最终会普及——我认为这已成定局——那么这确实是手动挡的终结。
You [write] a story and you’re like, “Well, that was fun, it’s a nice little thing, I’ll put it out on the internet.” 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’t think so.
你写完一个故事，心想：“好吧，这很有趣，是个不错的小东西，我把它发到网上吧。”结果那篇文章反响巨大。回应非常热烈。我对此非常感兴趣，原因是什么？仅仅是因为人们真的热爱他们的手动挡汽车吗？我不这么认为。
I took a year of thinking about it, off-and-on [and] I realized, actually, I’ve 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’ve been doing. I just find ordinary life very, very alluring, and I’ve never understood quite why. Is there something wrong with me? Am I just a weirdo?
我花了一年时间断断续续地思考这个问题，然后我意识到，实际上，我研究这个课题的时间比我预想的要长。我回顾了自己关于烤面包机、冰沙或思乐冰的文章，以及我的兴趣目录和我一直在做的事情。我发现日常生活非常有吸引力，但我一直不明白为什么。是我有什么问题吗？我只是个怪人吗？
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’re like, “Oh yes, the breeze.”
通过手动挡汽车，我意识到日常生活不仅有趣，而且意义深远，而我们一直低估了它。像手动挡汽车这样被赋予了象征意义和现实意义的事物，就像打开了一扇窗，当你感受到微风吹进来时，你会想：“噢，没错，就是这阵微风。”
Let’s 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?
我们来谈谈“去物质化”这个概念，因为这本书就是围绕它构建的。前半部分是描述和诊断，后半部分讨论解决方案和解药。你想解释一下什么是去物质化吗？
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. Although it’s not just technologies; it’s also bureaucracy, it’s efficiency, it’s economics, it’s regulatory apparatuses. All sorts of factors — not just tech, and certainly not just Silicon Valley-style technology — have distanced people from the world that they inhabit, they have stripped away the texture of everyday life.
从根本上说，这是一种我们与感官世界脱节的观点，而导致这种情况的原因就是所谓的便利技术。虽然不仅仅是技术，还包括官僚主义、效率、经济学和监管机构。各种各样的因素——不仅仅是技术，当然也不仅仅是硅谷式的技术——已经让人类与他们所居住的世界产生了距离，它们剥离了日常生活的质感。
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 — or it doesn’t, right? It kind of doesn’t work, but that sense of: This thing that I used to do with my physical body and my senses, now I don’t do that anymore.
我最喜欢的例子，也是人们似乎总能理解的例子是：你去机场洗手间，刚下飞机，马桶自动为你冲水，水龙头自动出水，纸巾自动出纸，肥皂自动出液——或者它不出，对吧？它有时会失灵，但那种感觉是：我过去用身体和感官去做的事情，现在我不再做了。
That is so commonplace, and it’s, broadly speaking, been driven by things that have really benefited our lives. But we didn’t realize that we were making a tradeoff between progress and giving up that contact with the material world. So that’s what dematerialization names for me, this family of conditions that distanced us from our sensory lives.
这太普遍了，而且从广义上讲，它是由那些真正造福我们生活的事物所驱动的。但我们没有意识到，我们在进步与放弃对物质世界的接触之间做出了权衡。这就是“去物质化”对我而言的定义，即这一系列让我们远离感官生活的状况。
Image Credits: Simon & Schuster 图片来源：Simon & Schuster
That section about the restroom was really visceral for me, because you’re not just talking about the experience of using these things, but it’s the experience of having them not work for you. You notice them when they don’t work, and there’s some friction there that helps you see the problem. In a lot of cases, we don’t even realize there’s a problem, or we realize something’s wrong, but we don’t know what it is.
关于洗手间的那一段让我感触很深，因为你谈论的不仅仅是使用这些东西的体验，而是它们无法为你工作时的体验。当它们失灵时你才会注意到它们，而这种摩擦力有助于你发现问题。在很多情况下，我们甚至没有意识到有问题，或者我们意识到出了点问题，但不知道那是什么。
One of the things you also point out is: A lot of these changes have, in some ways, improved our lives. You said there’s a tradeoff, like in the case of the stick shift and automatic, and then you add electric vehicles —
你指出的另一件事是：许多这些变化在某些方面改善了我们的生活。你说过存在一种权衡，就像手动挡和自动挡的情况，然后你又加上了电动汽车——
There’s a lot of folks out there who’ve advocated for stick shift cars who are also like, “Internal combustion engines are the only way, and we have to be purists about burning dinosaurs.” I don’t feel that way at all. Hailing an Uber and streaming music and getting DoorDash and even some of the promises of the automated fixtures — I mean, some of them are bunk, but I get it, broadly — I think it’s really important to me that we recognize that our lives are better overall, but there was this thing that happened that we didn’t notice, in a frog boiling kind of way.
外面有很多支持手动挡汽车的人，他们同时也认为：“内燃机是唯一的出路，我们必须坚持燃烧恐龙（化石燃料）的纯粹主义。”我完全不这么认为。叫 Uber、流媒体音乐、点 DoorDash 外卖，甚至是一些自动化设施带来的承诺——我是说，有些是胡扯，但我大体上理解——我认为对我来说，重要的是我们要认识到我们的生活总体上变好了，但发生了一件我们没有注意到的事情，就像温水煮青蛙一样。