The Glory of Small Things: Ian Bogost on How To Be Enchanted by Diet Coke Cans & Plane Tickets

**Andrew Keen** (0:00)
Hello, my name is Andrew Keen. Welcome to Keen On America, the daily interview show about the United States.
Hello, everyone. It's always nice having old friends back on the show. Ian Bogost is a very well-known Atlantic columnist, professor, author. He was back on the show in June of 2020, six years, more than six years ago, talking about how the tech industry might be able to change for the better. Back then, he had a new book out called Play Anything, The Pleasure of Limits, The Use of Boredom and The Secret of Games. He has a new book out right now. It's called The Small Stuff, How to Lead a More Gratifying Life. Maybe in contrast to the tech industry changing for the better, this is a book about how we can all change for the better. Ian is joining us from his home office in St. Louis, Missouri.
He's moved over this last six years. Last time he was on the show, he was in Atlanta. Ian, congratulations on the new book. It's getting a huge amount of visibility everywhere I go. I bump into The Small Stuff, New Yorker, Guardian. That's great.

**Ian Bogost** (1:37)
I'm glad to hear that.

**Andrew Keen** (1:37)
Of course. Would it be fair to say that this is a book not about improving the tech industry, changing it for the better, but changing ourselves for the better?

**Ian Bogost** (1:51)
Yeah, that's right. I've been covering the tech industry for a really long time and I've been a part of the technology industry since early in my career. I realized over the last 10 years or so that maybe we were a little too obsessed with how technology and the tech industry was making our lives worse or better. I became much more interested in, I guess, the bigger picture of everything that we encounter as human beings that live in physical bodies.
So yeah, it's about technology. The book discusses technology and admits to some of the benefits and also some of the downsides of smartphone life and AI and all that. But it's really about our lives as human beings in the world.

**Andrew Keen** (2:40)
The H-word, humans, you write about reclaiming the, and I'm quoting you here, the sensory enchantment of everyday life. Is there a religious quality to this book? Enchantment is, of course, a word that was traditionally associated with religion. Max Weber, the great German turn of the century, turn of the 20th century sociologist wrote about the defining quality of modernity being disenchantment.
Is enchantment a religious idea for you?

**Ian Bogost** (3:16)
I think it's a spiritual idea for sure. And I think that, you know, living in the secular age that we do, we have all been seeking some kind of replacement for religion. It could be religion itself or it could be a proxy for it. You know, some would say that technology itself became religious or its own kind of religion.
I think that people are looking for meaning, and I think enchantment is one path to meaning. It is a spiritual idea and a, I don't know, I mean, maybe for me, a sort of, for those who know my work, maybe a surprisingly optimistic and even spiritual book. The difference here for me is that that everyday life business, that the place where I locate the kind of meaning I'm interested in here anyway, is through the ordinary experiences that we have every single day, every single moment even, rather than in those big stuff moments that only happen once in a while. And I do think it's a spiritual book though.

**Andrew Keen** (4:24)
In other words, you use, and this was associated with the piece you wrote for The Atlantic around the book, is the wonder of everyday life.
To some people that might, Ian, sound rather contradictory because everyday life sounds lacking in wonder. We get up, we have our breakfast, we go on the internet, we have our lunch, we watch a bit of TV and we go to bed. And of course, we do our work as well. What does the word wonder mean?

**Ian Bogost** (4:54)
I think wonder is an investment in interest and curiosity. It's an openness to the idea that meaning and power and some kind of form of liveliness, of vividness can come from almost anywhere.
And I think what turned me, I've been working on this idea of wonder for some time. I wrote a kind of straight up philosophy book in the early 2010s. And that was one of the first places I explored the idea of wonder. It was a book called Alien Phenomenology, which is, as I said, a kind of straight up philosophy book.