Will progress kill Tinkering?
Image by Ryan McGuire from Pixabay
A couple of days ago, I finally received a package I had been expecting for about two months. It contains some spare parts to restore and repair a 20-year-old GPU. An ancient piece of E-waste. Why on earth would anyone want to spend their precious time on a project like that? I talked to my wife about it this morning and her instant reply was “Nostalgia”. She is partly correct, but I think there is another driving factor.
A couple of days ago, I read an article in Unherd about the end of BBC´s Top Gear. The topic was that the primary audience of the show – myself included – were Tinkerers and Petrolheads. And with modern (EV) cars, that’s just something that sadly is a thing of the past. The decline of Petrolheads with regards to EV´s need no further introduction. But can’t you tinker with an EV? No, not really. It is more of a computer on four wheels than a machine. You can’t tune it by fitting a larger carb or an open exhaust pipe. I guess you can upload some new firmware and “overclock” it, but seriously, it is not the same thing.
All vehicles are going this route. Less and less serviceable stuff and DIY. You just drive it and had it over to a workshop every now and then. And there is no rational reason to disagree with this. Of course, this is the most efficient and productive way to use a car. But I would argue that there is no soul left, none. The car has finally become a subscription service.
Another important point in the Unherd article, is money. Cars and especially EV’s have become prohibitively expensive. I find it hard to imagine anyone buying an old beat-up Tesla and restoring it in the same way I can imagine a barn find being brought back to life. It could be done, of course, but would anyone care to do i? If you think about it, you might see a similar pattern in other domains as well. Computers is heading down the same path. As an enthusiast, I love to design and build them myself. It is so rewarding, educating and fun to figure out how to put together a bunch of PCBs that you order individually, instead of grabbing a ready-made box from HP or Dell. But this era is ending too. In one way, it has already ended. Prices have literally exploded, and they are not coming down. To build a high-end gaming PC today will set you back more than a used car. This has probably killed the interest for the next generation of builders/enthusiasts, and when the potential market shrinks, so will the supply. And manufacturers are moving to chiplet based designs, where the GPU, CPU and everything goes into one chip. This is from a functional view obviously much more effective. But it also kills the upgrade potential and if anything breaks, you just switch the whole chip instead of discrete components. A great solution if you only care about performance, but it sound very boring. Exactly the same problem as with EV’s if you ask me…
So, was my wife correct in her nostalgia conclusion? Partly. I think the main reason I attempt to repair this old high-end GPU with a custom cooler is a burning desire to make things work. That’s what tinkering is all about. It is not about creating top notch performance. It is about extracting the full potential from something. And for me, it is like therapy. The Unherd article resonated very strongly with me. I could recognize myself in so many ways as a tinkerer. So, what are we tinkerers supposed to do when there is less and less DIY and more and more optimization? The craving for tinkering will always be there. A mate of mine (also a tinkerer) read the article and came up with an interesting idea: Is it possible that tinkering has moved to the digital domain?
It sounds reasonable, but I can’t really relate to it. But maybe I am simply a dinosaur.