My Toaster Doesn't Need Bluetooth

On craftsmanship and the human experience

There is something sublime about low tech items. An analog camera, a magnetic compass, a record player, a number 2 pencil, a swiss army knife, a skateboard. A pair of original Doc Martens leather boots that have lasted 20 years. Cast iron pans. Wind-up watches with a translucent back to view the mechanism. There is such joy and personality in an understandable mechanism with no frills or unnecessary digitization. The priceless hum of an engine powered by pistons and not optimized by computer code and the availability of knobs, levers, and dials with needles that mystically change position — beautiful. Authentic.

Tactile controls and feedback are invaluable because they hand over something real to the user, who is a king. But grasping for a fundamental simplicity and analog nature of things is more than just an activity for a genre of consumers or tinkerers. There is something instinctual about admiring a machine making use of — and thriving in — the same 3D space we live in.

There is a line where items not only get augmented by the computer chip, digital, internet-connected space, but where they become subservient to that world. Holding the physical world hostage, they kneel before software and are regulated by its vicissitudes — which include characteristics and principles which are in stark contrast to those employed when designing solely for the real physical world. The necessity to be useful in a non-digital world fades, and the once-accepted standards of quality and repairability die — alongside the entire idea of long-term ownership and earned trust in the producer themself.

A shot from my Minolta XD-5, a film camera I recently purchased cheap on eBay.

The allure of “low tech”, of “real” ownership, modularity, fix-ability and the like, may stem as a response to the Orwellian moves of auto manufacturers, tech subscription models, or similar. King or not, nobody wants a tech behemoth to play gatekeeper. Will I really be locked out of my own car due to a glitch at a server 2,000 miles away? A car is a machine, not an IoT gadget… right? People want quality and functionality that works in-situ, by in-situ mechanisms. It doesn’t really have to be perfectly efficient, beautiful, lightweight, or shiny, even less so if its functionality is going to be disabled sans a monthly payment.

The transient nature of computer programs, of upgrades, versioning, subscription gatekeeping, and the “new” as forced upon us by planned obsolescence and anti-fixability, only open doors (potentially thousands of miles away) for more issues to spring out of the added complexity – including even more added gates and paywalls. All of this drives the very real human desire to simply do away with the use of computers to solve the issue at hand entirely.

Desire to not have life be augmented by a thousand unnecessary apps and ever-changing UI touch screens is the raw desire to be human. To be powerful in reality and have control over your devices. To forge personality outside the digital world, to be present in the real 3D moment – not the 2D moment as shown on an LCD. I can’t just grab a touchscreen with my own two hands and begin to modify it physically to change the functionality, make it mine, own it, direct it in the way I want to. I don’t live inside the code. So much is losing physical quality and simultaneously becoming impossible to fix and own — ownership as in, assert direct power over. The king is no longer the user, it is the software itself that demands obedience.

I’m left helpless when I most want to change something if it’s controlled by a silicon wafer thinner than my fingernail. The diminishing sense of empowerment that owning something once held is a tragedy.

My human self operates in a different scale of world than my smartphone’s internals operate in. A phone with a sliding keyboard was enticing not solely because of the tactile feedback – but because the phone required me to manipulate it in the same 3D space that I lived in as the operator. The keys pressed down; things physically slid, clicked and moved. The circuit board – a digital middleman passing signals around the device – was nowhere near as all-encompassing and software-ridden as the middleman is now. The slider mechanism became smoother over time as it wore down, but I didn’t notice it much since it became a part of me too — I internalized the palette of feedback that I received by physically operating it. And I mastered it.

There is a threshold of complexity that digitization of devices can help us with. This threshold eventually bumps up against the human threshold of annoyance in dealing with UIs and computer chips flooding everything around us for no good reason and demanding our energy to deal with. The vitality and character of a device itself is diffused now by over-complicated and invisible systems. The adjustments themselves are restricted in the sense that the knowledge required to make a change, or even unlock the ability to make a change, are those of an obsessive hacker, not a wrench-holding monkey operating in the 3D space.

Why is everything so overbaked now and constantly broken? Why are we pretending that AGILE methodology applies well to everything? It’s like our hammer is computer chips, and everything looks like a nail. Our one trick is to add more complexity into simple devices and pretend like it’s an accomplishment to add it to the IoT or that we’ve moved the electric toaster closer to perfection by adding bluetooth and AI for something that’s barely even articulated by the manufacturers themselves. Meanwhile, these same things are forged with ever-cheaper, thinner, and poorer quality materials, begging to be disposed of and courting wastefulness.

To me, it seems obvious that quality physical design should assume operation and fixability in the 3D space without a digital device. The demise of the human element of quality physical craftsmanship is the demise of the appreciation for the beauty of human life and capability. Our desire to live and breathe and be still, content, personable, powerful as humans with our minds and hands to maintain the things we buy, to take a picture without it being auto-edited, to flip a switch directly connected to our seat heaters with no hidden tricks, to unscrew a refrigerator’s back panel and replace a component. Over-application of software ropes us into a messy black-box world of complex computer code that is unnecessary to perform the function we want. Modern product design ultimately infantilizes the user by smuggling with it the idea that they couldn’t successfully operate the device — let alone fix it — without this complexity to augment every step. The user’s helplessness is assumed, and that’s obnoxious to an extent where it’s almost, dare I say, offensive?

The software to operate simple devices with knobs and buttons was always stored in our heads, if not quickly learn-able, yet we seem to fight against ourselves by making simple devices more complex with little added benefit. Why does a toaster have any delicate microelectronics in it at all? Just give me a timer and a heat setting, what more is really here to do? When that chip fails, will the device stop working entirely? At a certain point of technology, adding more becomes absurd.

Appreciation for simple, durable, time-tested design is being replaced by obsessive tedium and software-system deification, but more importantly, the empowerment of the human to operate and fix their device or machine is lost, which undermines the collective esteem of consumers themselves.

To master any art, you must go through the beginner phase where you start a project not knowing the steps forward. You may have to do many more steps than a pro, since you may mess up, or need to cover something up, or simply undo, erase, or do things slower. So your finished project doesn’t strike as masterful to a trained eye — traces remain of finessing the details while things are coming together, instead of knowing how to do them from the get-go, and setting up the canvas beforehand to accommodate the features appropriately.

This exists in crafts across the board: know the impacts of the actions you take at the current stage of your process to succeed at making your life easy for future steps. The outcome will reflect your skill level in the holistic task and not judgment of one step or another. The mature artist touches the canvas the absolute minimum amount of times to make their product. The amateur struggles in self-doubt to not continue carving their spoon to get it just a little more round, and accidentally carves a hole in the wood — ruining it.

Authentic craftsmanship displays an important element of maturity: knowing when to stop. Stop chiseling, stop sanding, stop pretending to improve a perfectly functional design. An overdone result reveals an unconfident, amateur artist.

So much of technology is overbaked with features, overdone with UI spam, overengineered with computer chips, devoid of its soul and personality and instead full of complexity, sensitivity, liability, and tedium. Modern items lack the zest of the unfrilled mechanism in all its glory, its incontestable royalty in a sea of cheap mimics. To the engineers: stop touching it! Or hand me something built from a time when engineers knew when they were done, and weren’t expecting to conjure up a “new version” for the next business quarter — or week.

Sell me something that respects my desire to control my environment, not usurp my energy into a digital one. Mastering reality is the most fundamental human desire of all.

Cheers,

Daniel

P.S. no, bluetooth toasters aren’t actually trending (yet), thankfully.