People Used to Control Machines. They don’t live anymore

If satisfied with easy, why don’t you feel satisfied already? Because it has been difficult. It’s easier to have personal satisfaction when you find it (or they find it for you). But the ordinary things that used to be so exciting have slowly started to diminish. Invisible choices in design, business, and social life have made it difficult to engage directly with the listening world.

This problem happened to me, and maybe you too. Slowly, over time, the world began to move away from us. The machine took over the common work. Things that had buttons suddenly didn’t. The basic operations were taken by computers. I was slow to realize that it was happening to me. But as soon as I did, I saw it everywhere and every day. I can’t tell you when the realization was fully formed in my brain. But things changed one day when I was driving home from work.

I drive a small Volkswagen hatchback, the kind fanatics call a hot hatch. It’s not a sports car or super, but it’s a lot of fun to drive. Part of that is because it comes with a manual transmission — or at least it did when I bought mine more than 15 years ago. Manuals, or adhesives, were popular because they were cheaper to buy, easier to maintain, and less expensive to use than protective containers.

In America, where supercars, open roads, and streetcars have become a cultural staple, stick shift has been on the decline for years. And all over the world, even in Europe and Asia, where the rise in gas prices made the book very important. In 2000, auto retailer CarMax reported that more than 15 percent of its new and used cars were convertibles. By 2020, this number had dropped to 2.4 percent. In recent years, Mercedes and Volkswagen, makers of my little hot hatch, have announced plans to introduce solar panels around the world. Other manufacturers followed suit.

Car enthusiasts have been complaining about stick fallout for years. Car and Driver magazine even launched a campaign, Save the Manuals, in 2010, arguing that learning to “drive the whole car” would give drivers a better experience. At the same time, philosopher Matthew Crawford contributed a large portion of his best-selling book. Buy a Class like Soulcraft explaining how the difficult job of repairing a motorcycle gave meaning to his life; in 2020 published the results, Why We Drivewhich makes driving a form of self-control.

Crawford adopted the role of Car and Driver as a philosophy of life. Maintaining the “natural bonds between action and perception,” as he puts it, is essential—not only to driving safely and efficiently, but also to feeling fully human in the age of machines. Like the clothes you wear, the food you eat, the house you live in, machines enhance your abilities as they change. A car (or a computer, a paint brush, a marshmallow) and a prosthesis. When you wear a suit, you are alone, but in a different way. Like a jockey riding a horse—or a chauffeur.

To illustrate this point, Crawford tells the story of test driving a 400-horsepower Audi RS3 with all the options, including a paddle-shifting automatic transmission. It was powerful and capable, he says, but he “couldn’t get along with the car.” The user and the machine found that they are not compatible.

This observation is priceless. Crawford’s appeal may have felt a little out of place at the time, appealing to gearheads who still care about grip and mobility. But after a few years, it became clear that soon, there is none they can because of electric vehicles (EVs).

Internal combustion engine vehicles burn fuel to rotate drivetrains that require gears to transfer the power produced by the engine to the wheels. But EVs have a completely different drivetrain. Their electric motors transfer power to the wheels infinitely. When this book dies, something bigger than driving will also be lost: a vital, everyday tool that someone – even if not you – can feel is working.