analog elites

It’s interesting to juxtapose this WSJ story about people building “analog rooms” in their houses with Jason Fried’s account of his parents’ “smart home”:

It’s new construction. No one has lived in it yet. It’s amped up with state of the art systems. You know, the ones with touchscreens of various sizes, IoT appliances, and interfaces that try too hard.

And it’s terrible. What a regression.

Consider also this:

“It is really important that steering, acceleration, braking, gear shifting, lights, wipers, all that stuff which enables you to actually drive the car, should be tactile,” says [Steven] Kyffin, who once worked on smart controls for Dutch electronics company Philips. “From an interaction design perspective, the shift to touchscreens strips away the natural affordances that made driving intuitive,” he says.

“Traditional buttons, dials, and levers had perceptible and actionable qualities — you could feel for them, adjust them without looking, and rely on muscle memory. A touchscreen obliterates this,” says Kyffin. “Now, you must look, think, and aim to adjust the temperature or volume. That’s a huge cognitive load, and completely at odds with how we evolved to interact with driving machines while keeping our attention on the road.”

(My one quibble here is with the phrase “we evolved”: natural selection has not been at work in the slightly-more-than-one-hundred-years that humans have been driving automobiles.) The question for me is whether this return to analog will trickle down to the average car models or will remain a luxury good. My bet is on the latter.

The more ubiquitous screens are the more people hate them, but often, it seems, only the rich have any real chance of escaping them. I’ve noticed the same phenomenon in stereo equipment: if you want to have the tactile button-dial-and-switch experience that everyone’s stereos had back in the Seventies and Eighties, you had better be prepared to open your wallet real wide, because you’ll either be buying an expensive high-end amplifier or (for roughly the same price) a restored vintage one.

We’ve collectively reached the point, I think, at which the words “digital” and “new” typically convey “cheap, unpredictable, frustrating slop.” This ought to be an opportunity for manufacturing businesses of many different kinds to differentiate themselves from their competitors, but that seems never to happen these days — and not just when the differentiation would involve avoiding touchscreens.

Consider, for instance, the toaster: All toasters are crap, no matter how much they cost, so you might as well buy a cheap one and expect to throw it out and buy another one after just a few years. So shouldn’t somebody be making a quality toaster? Apparently no one will: it would mean forging a supply chain that’s different than that of the competition, and that’s considered an unacceptable risk these days. So every single toaster manufacturer makes the same crappy product and tries to differentiate via marketing.

As far as I can tell, what’s happening in every part of the manufacturing sector is an absolute reliance on Chinese factories for components, and the only real factor is price. With a handful of products — say automobiles and cameras (Hasselblads and most Leicas are still hand-assembled) and audiophile stereo equipment — you can, if you’re wealthy enough, buy things that offer more mechanical components and fewer cheap-ass digital ones. And you can display some of your cool mechanical gadgets in your “analog rooms.” But those of us who are not among the one percent are probably gonna be stuck with touchscreen slop.

Last year, on a very rainy day, I was driving my 2013 Toyota RAV4 down a Texas highway and hydroplaned into a tree. I was unhurt, and was even able to drive the fifty miles to my house. But eventually my insurance company decided that the car was totaled, and when I learned that one of my first thoughts was “Oh great, now I’ll have to buy a car that shoves a stupid big screen in my face.” Ever since then I’ve been sharing a car with my wife while I try to decide whether I should buy a new car or take a chance on an aged but largely screenless used one. It’s a tough call.

Related: the Sam Vimes Boots Theory.