Ian Bogost on stick shifts, e-bikes, and what our transit says about who we are.

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Our writer Ian Bogost wrote two articles last month that both left me wondering: What do our modes of transportation say about who we are? I chatted with Ian about the end of the stick shift, the wobbly rise of the e-bike, and why how we get around sparks such strong feelings about our identities.

But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.

Isabel Fattal: You write in your article that you’ve driven stick shifts for the past 20 years. Why do you love them so much?

Ian Bogost: The inspiration for the piece was the end of stick-shift manufacturing because of electrification. It made me sad on a visceral level, and I started to think, Why? If there’s a loss, what is the loss?

I looked at a bunch of conversations on the internet and elsewhere, where people have this sense about why they drive their stick shift. They go through phases of justification for it. First they try to talk about its practical benefits, all of which don’t really apply today. Then you get left with this word: control. “I feel like I have greater control.” I feel like for me, and for a lot of stick-shift drivers, it’s a sense of being connected to a complex human-made machine that you feel in conversation with, rather than subject to its demands that you have to accept. That feeling is really rare now when it comes to interacting with devices of almost any kind.

A lot of people have real qualms about the relationship we have with cars in America—it’s about masculinity, the taming of distance and expanse. But we don’t need those things to take the driver’s seat, as it were, all the time. I got so many emails; people sent me mail. I think a lot of readers had this same feeling, and they wanted a way not to think of the feeling as only being about the questionable or bad things about automobiles.

Isabel: Right, missing your stick shift is not just some sign that you’re—

Ian: A gearhead. And the reactions were not gendered in that way at all. But I had been worried about it. Oh my gosh, I’m going to do a piece on this, really? So it was gratifying to see that sentiment resonate.

Isabel: You note that when the stick shift dies, we’ll lose “the comfort of knowing that there is one essential, everyday device still out there that you can actually feel operating.” Do you think it’s possible that any technology of the future will give us back that feeling?

Ian: I’m really worried about this. I did a piece a number of years ago called “Why Nothing Works Anymore.” I wrote about the automated faucets in public restrooms—where you’re putting your hand out, like, Can I get the water to turn on? There was a story I told in that piece about going to a restaurant that had a throwback aesthetic, and in the restroom there was one of those towel dispensers where you just turn the crank, and the towel comes out.

Isabel: I sigh with relief when I see those, honestly.

Ian: Right. You feel that. They’re less and less common. The direction we seem to be going with everything is that there’s more and more layers of remove from its operation. One of the reasons I wanted to do the stick-shift piece was that this felt like the end of something. And I don’t know if we will get it back, unless we design for it anew.

Isabel: You were much less enthusiastic about the topic of your next article, e-bikes. Can you explain why they’re “a monster made from bicycles and motorbikes,” in your words?

Ian: I got this e-bike a while back, and it just felt off to me. I was really excited about all the things that make people want to ride an e-bike—commuting without my car, getting outside. But it wasn’t ticking any of the boxes quite right for me. The piece was about why it felt to me that the e-bike was in this strange no-man’s-land between bicycles and motorbikes.

Isabel: Why do you think e-bikes haven’t managed to become cool?

Ian: I got a lot of flak for this from the bike folks, and some of it’s in the eye of the beholder. But if you look at the way that both bikes and e-bikes are marketed as “cool,” they often do so by looking more like motorcycles. Everybody knows that motorcycles are cool. They have a tradition. I think the reason people like Vespa motor scooters is that they have a cultural tradition; you can imagine getting on one and cruising around Rome or something. If you’re a bike person, then bikes are already cool to you. But we need something outside the coastal cities that are enclaves of urban-cycling advocacy.

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Inspired by the concept of the “spirit animal,” I asked Ian what his spirit mode of transportation would be. It’s not a stick shift—it’s a sailboat. “I used to race boats in college, and it felt like the purest synthesis of nonmotorization and direct control I’ve ever encountered while moving myself through the world,” he said. (As for me: Does walking count?)