Heart and Soul and Efficiency ⇥ pxlnv.com

Last night, I watched the finale of the “Grand Tour” and, with it, the end of the on-screen constant of three British car journalists who have entertained me since I was a teenager. It was good; I am glad they wrapped in such a touching way. Also, I suddenly want to go to Zimbabwe.

I was struck by something Jeremy Clarkson said. He is a comically out-of-touch old man whose politics are often vile and whose oafish behaviour was tolerated for far too long. But, in this clip, I found a feeling we have in common:

[Imitating the sound of the engine in his Lancia:] bum, bum, bum, bum…

Love that sound. And all you lot growing up today with your electric cars, you’re never gonna hear it.

There are lots of reasons why we’re jacking this show in, but for me, one of the main ones is I’m simply not interested in electric cars. They are just white goods — they’re washing machines, they’re microwave ovens. You can’t review those. You can’t enjoy them.

I am not co-signing this hatred of electric cars, nor am I disinterested in them. I am not even signing onto Clarkson’s joy of a loud engine because I live near a road down which people drive their burble-tuned 3-series BMWs and Subarus, and it is terrible.

But I do find common ground in the need for the objects in our lives to remain characterful. We have spent an awful lot of time making things more perfect, refined, and efficient. In the process, though, I worry we are losing some of the things which make them interesting. Perhaps efficiency and refinement are an enemy of personality — the vibration of an engine is lost energy; a needle reading a vinyl record is not nearly as precise as a laser reading a compact disc.

I wrote something about this feeling last year, and I think it holds up:

[…] I, for one, do not want to live in a world dominated by appliances. I want to love the things I use, and I am sure I am not alone. Do not get me wrong: I appreciate so many of these things; they are brilliant in ways I can barely comprehend. But clever is not a substitute for soul. Too many of the products and services I use feel more advanced and less compelling than those of, say, ten or twenty years ago. We should find that quality again.

We see people turning to things like film photography to recapture some nostalgic charm, even if they are so young the nostalgia is not even their own. This is purely speculative, but perhaps the reason it speaks to us in a way modern digital photography does not is because our memories are imperfect. The world in our head is a little bit fuzzier. All things digital do not capture that imprecision quite as well.

Maybe the way we make things more likeable is to make them a little bit worse than they could be. That should not be at the expense of our environment, but not everything should feel like a functional tool, either. I do not think that means recapturing the way old technologies worked. It means doing new things with a sense of character which, sometimes, might mean sacrificing precision.