Gabe Bullard is a journalist living in Basel, Switzerland. His new book Against Convenience: Embracing Friction in an Age of Endless Ease poses the question: if we have so many technologies that are supposed to make our lives easier now, why aren’t our lives easier?! As Bullard writes in his introduction, the book isn’t about him wanting life to be harder, but about how we’ve become convinced digital tech adds anything useful to our lives in the first place, and who (or what corporations) benefit from that. “Convenience is relative,” he writes, “but costs are absolute.”
As the environment is increasingly poisoned by the manufacturing of personal tech and AI infrastructure, as we grow ever-more isolated from each other, as we forget how to do things like talk to our neighbors or even read a book, Bullard wants to slow down our inevitable-feeling march into tech oblivion.
He was nice enough to talk to me about his book and about how recent backlash to tech like protests against data centers and Flock cameras is giving him hope.
[This interview has been edited and condensed].
The book is both hopeful and depressing. The first thing it made me think about was, weirdly, my first book on gentrification—walking around the neighborhood in New York that I grew up in and seeing all these closed shops, and the ones that are still open are chains. And people live in their doorman buildings and order everything with DoorDash. It’s like there’s no friction in the real world. Everything has been made seamless, and seamlessness feels kinda like deadness. Those feel like the real stakes. It’s not just “the phones.” It’s something bigger.
That was sort of the beginnings of the book for me too: it came from living and working as a reporter in Washington D.C., with the local newsroom at the public radio station. And I was talking about a big trend at the time—this was almost 10 years ago now— which was restaurants not taking reservations, and so all these big lines would form. And my friend and I were talking about how a lot of the people in the front of the line were being paid to be there—gig workers—and then people would arrive to relieve them so they could eat at the restaurant and they would arrive in a rideshare. This was at the same time that Airbnb was shifting the conversation about where people stayed when they came to D.C., and what and who businesses would be catering to.
I started thinking about how these apps and services and technologies were changing the world around us.
I’d always been interested in urbanism and city issues and design, and I felt like I was starting to see the city change around this idea of being connected to these technologies rather than interacting with their actual, physical environment.
Getting your needs met increasingly meant having a phone—whether that was to get to places around town instead of using public transit, or to use a service to rent an apartment instead of a hotel, or using a QR code to see a menu or pay. It was this big shift in what a neighborhood meant, driven by technology.
So when you walk around a city now, do you just feel kinda endlessly depressed? Like seeing everyone on their phones on the train with their headphones in; or seeing restaurants becoming ghost kitchens or whatever? How do you feel on a day-to-day basis as someone who has noticed these things and written about them?
I see less of it now because I now live in Basel, Switzerland. And there still seems to be a really big culture around people here—sitting outside, enjoying a coffee or beer or wine, that sort of thing. So I see a lot of that, but I still see a few things that I was just seeing everywhere in the US: package delivery, rentable bikes and scooters. But being back in the US is where I really see it. When I was visiting family there, it was bleak to see that for many of my friends and family, it’d be really hard to get your basic needs met without a car or a phone, or without using some e-commerce platform to order things.
It feels kind of isolating. I was really lonely walking around my hometown in Illinois. And it feels lonelier every time I go back.
It’s not surprising that it’s worse in the US, but I’m wondering what exactly accounts for the difference you see here vs. somewhere like Switzerland? Is it just that the US has, like, more unrestrained capitalism or something?
I think part of it is a business regulation thing. There’s a lot more regulation on tech in Europe. It’s not even clear that the new version of Siri will be available in Europe because of privacy concerns. There’s data protection rules around photographing or shooting video of people in public. And I could see that that will become a source of more and more friction here between these laws and emerging technologies.
I’d propose that part of it is that the US is more bought-into this notion of technological progress than other places. Even before the smartphone, this was the land of the American Dream—and part of that was the idea that technology and using it effectively, whether industrial technology or now digital technology—would help you achieve that dream.