The Sturdiness of Things

“Stuff that works. . .stuff that’s real, stuff you feel, the kind of stuff you reach for when you fall.” -Guy Clark

In a recent issue of Driver’s Club,  Jay Leno poses an interesting question: “If you were able to somehow time-travel a hundred years into the future and you needed to drive someplace, and all you could find was a 1907 White steam car and a Tesla, which would you choose?” For Leno, the answer is easy. “I would take the White.” He goes on to talk about how modern cars, while offering a high level of comfort and ease, are somehow a different thing entirely from these old mechanical wonders. When something breaks on an old car, you can often determine what it is just by looking at or listening to it. Belts snap, diaphragms tear, hoses leak. Modern cars to the contrary have miles of wiring and sealed boxes that all look the same but may be completely broken. “Mechanical things break,” bemoans Leno, “but electrical things degrade. . .A relay may look brand new on the outside while on the inside, it’s dead.” In addition, cars like Tesla come with features that you don’t even know exist until you’ve owned the car for some time because there is no manual to tell you these things. Even if there was, with over the air software updates, the location of controls (all located on the giant touchscreen) change constantly. There is no stability of things in the digital realm. “I’ll be sitting there trying to figure out how to turn on the heater,” says Leno, “and the person on the phone will tell me, ‘Just say, “Turn on heater.”’ But I want to know where the button is! I know where it used to be. Well, it moved with the last software update, it’s over there now.”

Far from being a problem found just in the auto industry, we see a move away from physical and real things and to the digital realm in almost every area of our lives. Countless appliances and gadgets that used to be controlled with buttons and switches have given way to touchscreens or voice prompts. This is true not only in our homes and cars but in most of our workplaces. Orders are punched into an iPad instead of written down on paper. Machines are calibrated with keystrokes instead of dials and knobs. The handling of things has given way to the swipe. The physical has been smoothed over to make way for the digital.

Philosopher and social theorist Byung-Chul Han has argued as much in his book Non-things:

We are today experiencing the transition from the age of things to the age of non-things. Information, rather than things, determines the lifeworld. We no longer dwell on the earth and under the sky but on Google Earth and in the Cloud. The world is becoming increasingly intangible, cloud-like and ghostly. There are no tangible and arrestable things.

There seems to be a far greater danger in this transition than mere frustration at not being able to find certain menu items after a software update. The greater danger is that the shift from the physical to the digital realm destabilizes our lives and weakens us.

Digital Destabilization

Physical objects provide a continuity to our lives that is hard to overstate. Things carry with them a history and story; they hold memory. They often reveal marks of wear and use over time. In a world that is constantly changing, real things are sturdy.

This invoice holder sits at the desk of our local tire guy’s shop. He is 65 years old and it is older than him. It shows the marks of wear over decades of use.

As a car guy, I am constantly browsing Craigslist or various other classifieds for new (old) cars and projects. A few years ago, I found an old square body Chevy pickup that I wanted to have a look at about an hour north of Pittsburgh. I drove up and met this middle-aged man who ended up being a local pastor. In talking with him, he revealed that snatching up old cars and trucks and getting them running again was a hobby and side gig for him. “My dad was a truck driver,” he explained to me, “and we were always wrenching on his truck or some old project car. He passed away five years ago now but when I’m out there in the garage, fiddling with some barn find and using all his old tools, it’s as if he is he there with me.” These tools held a memory and story and were points of resonance for this man—even a connection to his father who had died.

I can relate to this sentiment. As a third-generation diesel mechanic having grown up in a blue-collar family, I have tools that I still occasionally use which have been passed down from both my grandfather and great-grandfather. Their initials are etched into the handles. There is something sturdy and faithful about such objects that seem to extend a certain stability into my life. They reach into the past and connect me with a bygone era and to ancestors I barely had the chance of knowing. While our latest scan tool needs updating or our diagnostic laptop fails to connect to a truck, these tools are testaments to the durability of real things and put me into conversation across time with those who have gone before me. Chances are, these tools will exist long after me too.

My great-grandfather’s initials LD can be seen on several tools. He worked for CPC International, a corn products company as a millwright for 42 years. My grandfather’s initials BD can be seen as well, conveniently the same as mine.

This is not a characterization of the world we live in today, however. You would be hard pressed to find a programmer who stays up late at night finishing a project on his grandfather’s laptop. No one is using their grandmother’s smartphone. Today, as the physical has paved way for the digital, we no longer have things of durability and sturdiness and thus, we live in a state of constant vertigo.

One of the markers of real things is the tendency to hold memory. Far from existing in an eternal present, real things show signs of wear and use. If you’ve ever toured an old cathedral or museum, you’ve undoubtedly climbed staircases in which the stain on railings has been worn down by the constant grip of hands or felt the divot in the middle of the steps from generations of use. I have examples of tools that my grandfather (who was himself a diesel mechanic) used and some he fabricated for a specific job like removing an air compressor on a Cummins engine which could require a wrench with a specific arch. These tools hold and display memories of use and ingenuity. They seem to embody the virtues of the man who used them.

In contrast, modern non-things do not have the markings of story or memory—they merely transmit information which is constantly updating and changing. Many modern smartphones have a screen which refreshes 120 times every second. There is no lingering. In the digital realm, lingering is a liability. The faster an old image can be cleared away for the new, the better. There is no continuity of time but rather a series of point-like presences. Novelty and newness are the virtues of this realm. This ghostly fleetingness destabilizes life. “Digitalization de-reifies and disembodies the world,” writes Han. “It also abolishes memory. Instead of memory, we have vast quantities of data.”

Along with memory, an additional mark of real things is that they offer some resistance to us. They are a true Other. As Han states, “The word ‘object’ is derived from the Latin verb obicere, which means ‘set against’, ‘throw against’ or ‘oppose’. The negativity of resistance is inherent in it. An object is something that turns against me, that opposes and resists me.” But this characteristic is absent from the digital realm of non-things. The virtue of resistance has succumbed to the smooth. We swipe away things we don’t like instead of having to reckon with them. If you’ve ever had to navigate a room in your house in complete darkness, however, it is only the things that offer resistance which give you some indication as to where you are. You run your palm down the wall to find a light switch or reach out for the chair you know is off to your right, hoping to grip it with your hand before discovering it with your toe. It is in the arrestable things, things that offer some resistance, that you can place yourself. As Han states, “Where nothing is arrestable, all stability is lost.”

Disney’s WALL-E, 2008

In a world of non-things that offer no resistance, what do we become? Pixar’s movie WALL-E seems to lend a prescient image of what human beings turn into when the world becomes smooth and frictionless. Set almost 800 years into the future, humanity has been forced to leave Earth which has become inhabitable and instead find refuge in a giant space station called Axiom. Here, people are carried to-and-fro in giant hover chairs constantly looking at projected screens and slurping down big-gulps called ‘lunch in a cup’. They have become fat, almost shapeless blobs who never talk to one another directly and only produce the small movements of keystrokes. They never walk. They never do much of anything. They are merely carried around and kept in a dopamine rich, infantile state. All their technology has not increased their intelligence or capacities and in fact, seems to have eliminated any trace of agency at all. They are less than human. Lacking any true resistance of an Other, they can no longer reckon with the world at all, only digital representations of it. They cannot push back against anything, they can only consume.

Resistance, while considered anathema in the world of non-things, is vital for our own development. When we act out in a world of things, we are met with resistance that works backwards and shapes us as well. To overcome this resistance, we develop calluses and specific muscles in response to some required motion or usage of a tool. In this way, sturdy things produce in us the virtue of sturdiness. There have been sayings that have existed for centuries that reveal this truth. “The boats were made of wood, the men made of iron.” Or, “The men in the Forest Service were as tough as their axe handles.” If this principle is true, one wonders what could be said about us. What qualities of our current tools are we reflecting? “Men as liquid as their LCD screens.”

The sturdiness of things gives our lives a continuity and shape across time. They stabilize us in the midst of the tumultuous waves of life and they produce in us a sturdiness of being. Perhaps in the process of losing all physical buttons, all controls and all the resistance of real things, what we are really losing is ourselves.

Oregon loggers pose on a massive tree stump in the early 1900s. (Courtesy Oregon Historical Society)