Ian Bogost’s The Small Stuff lands on 7 July 2026, and its central argument is more pointed than the self-help subtitle suggests: convenience technologies have quietly stripped away the sensory texture of ordinary life, and most of us didn’t notice until we found ourselves waving at a soap dispenser that had already given up on us.
The book, published by Simon & Schuster under its Atria Books imprint and running to 240 pages, grew out of a 2022 Atlantic piece that turned out to be unexpectedly enormous. Bogost’s essay ‘The End of Manual Transmission’ argued that when the stick shift finally disappears, ‘something bigger than driving will be lost.’ The response surprised even its author. ‘Is it just that people really love their stick shift cars?’ Bogost recalled wondering. ‘I didn’t think so.’
What followed was a year of on-and-off thinking, a look back through earlier writing on toasters, smoothies, and slushies, and eventually a book.
What Ian Bogost’s The Small Stuff Actually Argues
Bogost’s frame for all of this is ‘dematerialisation’: the process by which everyday physical contact with the world has been designed away. His go-to example is the airport bathroom, where the toilet flushes, the tap runs, the paper towels emerge and the soap dispenses, all without you doing anything. ‘This thing that I used to do with my physical body and my senses, now I don’t do that anymore,’ he explained. The kicker, of course, is when the sensor fails, because that’s the moment you register what you’ve surrendered.
Bogost is careful not to lay this entirely at Silicon Valley’s door. ‘All sorts of factors, not just tech, and certainly not just Silicon Valley-style technology, have distanced people from the world that they inhabit,’ he said. Bureaucracy, economics, regulatory apparatus: all contribute. And he’s equally clear that the trade was not a con. Uber in a city that wasn’t New York, Spotify instead of a shelf of CDs, DoorDash at 11pm: broadly, he thinks, lives improved. ‘We felt like we understood the deal, but we didn’t fully understand the deal.’
The blind spot, in Bogost’s telling, is that ‘we are physical beings, we are embodied beings,’ and Silicon Valley-style culture has long harboured a fantasy of transcending that inconvenient fact. Transhumanism, singularitarianism, eternal optimisation: all are expressions of the same basic impulse. ‘You go to the Valley and there’s still this weird sense that that embodied human experience is not needed, unnecessary. And that’s just wrong.’
Bogost, who holds the Barbara and David Thomas Distinguished Professorship at Washington University in St. Louis, where he teaches computer science, film and media studies, and art and design, is the author of eleven previous books. He also contributes regularly to The Atlantic. He’s not, in other words, a tech outsider lobbing complaints from a distance. He was, he says, writing critically about Facebook and social media ‘way, way, way before a lot of people were concerned.’ Which may be why he now finds the mode of constant critique a little tired. ‘I just feel a little bored with the constant critique,’ he told the interviewer, ‘and I also feel like it’s misdiagnosing or overdiagnosing the problem.’
The book is listed on the Boswell Book Company site, among others, and its structure reflects that restlessness with diagnosis-only books: the first half names and describes dematerialisation, the second half looks for antidotes.
The Silicon Valley Diagnosis, and What Comes Next
Bogost traces the turning point to roughly the early 2000s, when computation’s takeover of culture accelerated and the earlier concern with ‘human factors’, with how the body interacts with a machine, quietly dropped off the agenda. Xerox PARC and early Apple, he argues, understood that ‘my body has to fit in the chair or has to go through the doorway.’ That sensibility lasted into the 1990s. Then outcomes started to matter far more than experience, and the two drifted apart.
His prescription is not a return to the past. ‘We’re not going back. You live in the present, into the future, and we don’t live in the past.’ Nostalgia can be orienting, he concedes, but ‘it’s indulgent to think that you can live in the past.’ He’s equally sceptical of ‘reintroducing friction’ as a solution: the goal isn’t to make things hard, it’s to restore the sensation of doing them.
He’s also deliberately modest about the scale of the fix. ‘I think 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. Ordinary people don’t need to wait for that.’
What he wants instead is for readers to notice what’s already around them: the sensation of ice in a water bottle, the heft of a telephone handset, the sound quality on a Zoom call that a compressed phone line never managed. Small stuff, yes. But as the book argues, add it all up and you have something that feels very much like being alive. The question for the tech industry, post-publication, is whether that argument lands in any product roadroom, or just sells well on the self-help shelf.
