Has Silicon Valley been building the wrong things? According to writer/designer/academic Ian Bogost, yes - but not in the way you might think. In his forthcoming book "The Small Stuff: How to Lead a More Gratifying Life," Bogost argues that our obsession with convenience has quietly dematerialized everyday life, leaving us disconnected from the sensory world. Using his popular Atlantic article on the decline of stick shift cars as a springboard, Bogost explores how everything from cars to doors to bathrooms has been stripped of its physical texture.

"Basically, it's the idea that we've become disconnected from the sensory world, and the reason that happened is what you might call convenience technologies," Bogost explained, though he was quick to note that technology isn't the sole culprit. "All sorts of factors - not just tech, and certainly not just Silicon Valley-style technology - have distanced people from the world that they inhabit, they have stripped away the texture of everyday life."

Bogost is refreshingly un-angry about all this, especially compared to other tech critics. "I just feel a little bored with the constant critique," he admitted. Instead, he's focused on finding gratification in mundane sensory experiences - the feel of a stick shift, the clunk of a manual door, the satisfying (or not) squirt of a soap dispenser. He's not calling for a Luddite revolution; he just wants us to notice what we've traded away in the name of efficiency.

Take the airport restroom. The toilet flushes for you, the sink turns on for you, the towels dispense for you - or they don't, because the sensors are having an existential crisis. "That sense of: This thing that I used to do with my physical body and my senses, now I don't do that anymore. That is so commonplace," Bogost said. "We didn't realize that we were making a tradeoff between progress and giving up that contact with the material world."

Bogost is careful not to romanticize the past. "Our lives are broadly speaking better," he acknowledged. "But there was this thing that happened that we didn't notice, in a frog boiling kind of way." He distinguishes his approach from critics like Cory Doctorow, whose term "enshittification" he finds too simplistic. "It's very satisfying to believe that there are good guys and bad guys, but I just think it happened over such a long period, so slowly, and with such overall endorsement."

As for Silicon Valley specifically, Bogost sees a culture that has forgotten the importance of embodied experience. "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." He points to an earlier era of computing - the 1970s at Xerox PARC and Apple - when human factors engineering was central. "The experience of doing something is also important, not just the outcome. We got massively focused on the outcome, and then we de-emphasize the experience of doing things."

So what's an entrepreneur to do? Bogost suggests rediscovering the balance between convenience and friction. "Who cares about the sensation of the ice in my water bottle? But over time, all that little stuff adds up. It's deeply meaningful, and when you strip it all away, you really notice what's missing."