I Don't Hate Technology When It Works.
This is the 2007 Subaru Legacy 2.5i Special Edition in White. It just happens to be the pinnacle of the automobile. Sure, cars have gotten faster. Cars have always been faster. Cars have gotten smarter. There are cars with better MPG, and there are cars that are undoubtably a better bang for your buck in today’s market. But there’s no car that is as good as this.
A few weeks ago, I found myself in Colorado, where we rented a car. This particular model of automobile was a 2023 Hyundai Santa Fe, and there were two huge issues with it. The first wasn’t really the car’s fault. It was snowy, and the cameras had gotten wet. The car could no longer tell if we were going to collide with the car in front of us, so it displayed a warning light the entire trip. This feature is critical, of course, as otherwise the driver might forget to take their foot off the accelerator and rear-end the car in front. The other issue was magnitudes more frustrating than a useless warning light: There was a half second delay between physical button presses and display updates to reflect that. When adjusting the volume, I would always overshoot due to this. It’s not just the Santa Fe of course. My favourite example must be from Rich Rebuilds, where they do a jumpcut to hide lag in a 100 thousand dollar car. The Santa Fe is a decent car, and so is the Lucid, but the 2007 Subaru Legacy does not lag. It always does what is asked when it is asked, and it doesn’t put up a fuss.
The Subaru Outback, however, loves to whine. When a bike rack is attached to the rear, the car is unable to distinguish the rack from a tree. It screams at you every single time you put the car in reverse, and it refuses to move. Every single time the backup camera appears, you must hold a button for 2.5 seconds before you are allowed to move, and hold it again to stop the screaming. The 2007 Subaru Legacy is never wrong, because it has no cameras. The car does not whine. It does what it is asked when it is asked. It’s not even the manufacturer’s fault, not completely anyway. Backup cameras are now federally mandated. This regulation exists because America fell out of love with the wagon; cars got bigger; and rear visibility got significantly worse. Create the problem, sell the solution.
Finally, I might add that in a quest for comfort, cars have lost soul. In this 2007 Legacy, you feel the road. I know I said it wasn’t fast, but it feels fast. It feels good to drive. It still feels like man and machine. When you press the accelerator, you hear the engine, you feel the change in speed. The SUVs with their perfect suspension, high riding height and CVTs have stolen the feeling of driving. It’s incredibly boring now, and while I read this quote in a different context, it really does ring true:
The majority of people […] are looking at vehicles as a tool to get you from point A to B and henceforth they will always value vehicle longevity and a low cost of ownership. Enthusiasts on the other hand, will embrace and value the driving experience and “quirks and features” of a vehicle. These individuals will tolerate a more expensive maintenance interval if it delivers a more thrilling and adventurous driving experience.
But I think we can go deeper. I think it’s a vicious cycle. People love their manual transmissions. There is no decent technical reason for this. They just love the way it feels, and automatic removes the spirit. As comfort increases and driving becomes easier, it is a whole lotta less. Less feeling. Less processing required. It is no surprise that people want comfort to escape the boredom (I heard self-driving cars are coming soon!), but it also doesn’t surprise me that comfort gave them the problem of boredom to begin with.
I really do like driving the Subaru Legacy 2.5i Special Edition in White, and people call me a Luddite. I’m not a Luddite. I just want shit that works, I don’t care what decade it came from. I didn’t ask for all these solutions to problems I don’t have, and the solutions they give me just make life worse1. I do buy new things. I just bought an iPhone 15 Pro (also, for the record, because I was tired of things on android not just working)
For whatever reason, at some point, Reddit decided to redesign their website into god-knows-what frontend framework, and change their server side rendering to an SPA architecture. I still use Old Reddit. That’s because New Reddit is (or rather, was (they recently changed to lit SSR)) slow. And it crashes. It crashes because if a network request fails in some types of ways, the whole page becomes an error.
Old Reddit didn’t do that. Yes, Old Reddit is uglier. I’d bet that not many people would argue that Old Reddit looks good (at least by modern beauty standards). But it fits more content on the page, which is generally a good thing for the usability of a threaded site. Most importantly, it just works. The content I’m looking at there doesn’t disappear before my very eyes if a request somehow fails, because once I see the page, it’s done making requests.
My point is that technology very much can enhance our lives. Apple does a wonderful job at this:
What a splendid application of AI! It has made my computer more intuitive. It gets out of my way.
I don’t hate technology, I just don’t use it for the sake of using technology. I certainly do hate technology that only gets in the way. As we make technological advancements, including with AI, we really do need to step back and ask if the products and features we are rushing to implement for the sake of it actually matter. There’s a chance they don’t. There’s a chance that the users were happy as things were.
👟 Footnotes
God I’m starting to sound like a boomer ↩︎