Though it is harder to find reason to crank (or dial, or strike, or pedal), nothing is stopping you from doing so. Perhaps it even makes sense to own supposedly outmoded apparatuses just because they exercise those muscles—a crankable pepper grinder, for when you can’t get your hands on a penny press. To feel your body carry out forgotten gestures anew is even more pleasurable than the gestures on their own. Rediscovering them proves that they are not bygone, but obscured by the changes that made them rare.
Bogost is nostalgic for the days of hand-cranked mechanisms — pencil sharpeners, manual car windows, and their relatives. Nothing inherently wrong with a little eccentric appreciation of life’s tiny details, of course, but just because something is evocative doesn’t make it intrinsically significant. He seems to me to be treating the objects of his attention as though they were the source of his appreciation, rather than asking what his own capacity for appreciation might discover elsewhere. By the time he’s lamenting the “sense of loss in my low-crank-lifestyle,” or finding romance in the act of rolling a car window down by hand to talk to a love interest, the words “crank-yanking” are starting to appear in my mind.
Bogost, are you yanking
My chain about society’s de-cranking?
It is the present you draw a blank for.
It is Bogost you crank for.
If he were just describing a scene of winding and unwinding himself in the telephone cord during a conversation, you might feel a little warm nostalgia about being reminded of a true-to-life detail that you knew well, once upon a time, but had forgotten. But he evidently wants you to find something profound in the physical act itself, and it just isn’t necessarily that deep. Were you so inclined, you could moon over the three little bouncing dots that show your friend is composing a text at this moment. It could be framed as a little drama: anticipation, impatience, uncertainty, perhaps even anxiety. Someone is composing a message. What are they going to say? Why have the dots disappeared? Have they changed their mind? Are they thinking? Deleting? You could invest all that with spiritual meaning, the poignant longing of wanting to know but having to wait. But that’s now, so it doesn’t have the sepia tint of times gone by. It will take a few decades before a future Bogost will be writing an article about “gestures of connection,” what we lost when the “so-and-so-is-typing” indicator went away, and future me will think, with a touch of exasperation, Why didn’t you appreciate that at the time you had it?
His recollection of winding himself in the telephone cord is charming precisely because it isolates one tiny physical detail from all the unremarkable business of an ordinary conversation. It doesn’t follow that the experience was especially charming while he was having it. He might have been bored, annoyed, preoccupied, or impatient to get off the telephone. Reflecting on this should lead you to the conclusion that “I’m probably ignoring something right now that I will only appreciate in hindsight. What is it?” But often, it seems the past receives contemplative attention; the present receives merely functional attention. That seems to me like someone sitting in a car, facing out the back window. “Ah! Look at that mountain disappearing into the distance! How poignant! How sublime! How…” And I think, “If you would just turn around, you could see all this coming, as it happens.” If you sincerely believe that the mundane experiences of your youth possessed a richness you failed to recognize, shouldn’t that discovery change the way you attend to mundane experiences now? Otherwise, you’re simply arranging to have the same revelation again twenty years hence, about a different set of vanished conveniences.
As we saw above, he suggests that readers might want to own outmoded apparatuses in order to “exercise those muscles,” to feel your body “carry out forgotten gestures anew.” There’s nostalgia, and then there’s locking yourself in a 1980s museum and refusing to come out. Seriously, if you make a personal ritual out of the mere act of dialing a rotary phone, or turning a pencil sharpener, this might suggest autism more than spiritual depths. Why are we looking for an excuse to crank our arms in a circle? Because it evokes a bygone age when there was a practical meaning to the gesture. Now, it’s just a form of Ghost Dancing, as if we’re going through the old motions and chants in hopes that the Great Spirit will roll up all the fiber-optic cables and wash all the smartphones into the sea. But even if that happened, we would just find ourselves back in the 1980s again. Where we already were once before, and just as restless and dissatisfied then.
The three bouncing dots aren’t made of brass or oak. They don’t have a satisfying mechanical resistance. Nobody’s grandmother operated them. Yet they can represent the thrilling possibility of communication from someone you love, or the suspense of a conversation whose outcome matters deeply to you. Someday they’ll be gone, too. And the poignancy will come rushing in, right on schedule. You don’t even have to wait until then. You only have to recognize that the particular conversation they’re announcing, with this particular person, on this particular day, will never happen again. Are we commemorating or cultivating the experience of being alive?