Transparent technology.

I have been thinking a lot about tools, mechanics and machinery lately (and I probably still am when you are reading this). Maybe you have too? All my life, and probably yours, we have developed technology to make our lives easier. Humanity has probably done that for all of its existence. But as we have moved into an increasingly digital domain, the cost has become less obvious. We are now in a state, where an overwhelming amount of our lives are contained to, if not confined in, the digital space. The latest branch on the big tree of tech is AI.

Motorcycles

Lately, I have found myself searching the web for simple explanations of how a car works. I know that cars are not motorcycles, but I digress. I know how to drive a car, but I must admit my grasp on the inner workings of a car is very limited. Oil good, fuel good, snakes bad. Even after looking at some videos, seeing some exploded views, and reading a little, I am still not really getting it. Simply the amount of parts makes it hard to grasp what is crucial, and what is not. On top of that, it is all enclosed inside a metal body.

Select all the squares containing a motorcycle, Mobile, 2024

Introducing motorcycles, a car with fewer wheels, less enclosure and a 28 times higher fatality risk ¹. I am thinking about those older bikes, from before 1980, where workings of the bike were exposed and the way it functioned was simply… simpler. I would call those bikes a more transparent technology than today’s bikes or Electric vehicles. Back then, no company could control the updates on the bike you purchased. It was sold and used as is. See below for an extremely basic explanation of how bikes work.

Today however, with the increased focus on global warming and the invention of bigger and better batteries, both electronics and digital systems have found their way into bikes and engines. Looking at the Harley Davidson 2025 Street Bob² it has an analog speedometer, but the rest of the gauges are left to an LCD-screen. “4-inch (102 mm) analog speedometer with digital gear, odometer, fuel level, ride modes, heated gear, traction control, ABS, TPMS, cruise control, clock, trip, range and tachometer indication”². This is interesting, as the bob or ‘bobber’ model has a heritage behind it. Back in the day, a ‘bobber’ was a reissued army bike with everything unnecessary chopped off. It could be seen as the parallel to ‘hot rods’ ^{3 4} if you are familiar with those.

I will have a hard time claiming that the digital features aren’t nice or aren’t as precise as an analog counterpart. But it does come at a cost.

Loss of Transparency

Introducing electronic circuits and digital displays in products comes at a cost. First of all, It is yet another thing that can break. A bottle opener has only a few breakpoints and they are hard to reach. However a bottle opener with a LCD-screen has a whole lot more. The same goes for motorcycles, or any other thing for that matter. More functionalities means more things that can break. The main problems with electronics can probably be addressed, but I’m not sure they always are. This is my personal list of problems or challenges we face with electronics as regular consumers, without an engineering degree:

• Fragile. Most electronics are quite fragile, due to the materials and sizes of components. This makes them a definite breakpoint in any consumer product. Often mitigated by enclosing them in a sort of protective case.
• Small. We are really good at making small efficient components. But that also makes it all the more harder to repair, and things are often replaced rather than repaired.
• Complicated. Many things on a bike are complicated to repair, but with electronics, you need all the foundational knowledge to understand how to repair something. If I had to weld something, I am guessing that I can study welding, and ‘simply’ do it.
• Finicky. Ever played ‘Operation’? One small move and you kill the patient. The same goes for electronics in consumer products.
• Encased. As I mentioned electronics are often encased. This makes it even harder to diagnose an issue and repair it.

^{This pulled-out-of-the-ass list is probably not accurate, nor complete. Let me know in the non-existent comments what you think is missing.}

I think all of the factors above contribute to the loss of transparency. Meaning that it is harder to fix, if your product stops working. Riding a bike specced-out with the newest digital breakthroughs, self-driving, self-balancing, latte-art-making, etc. is like riding a big mysterious box that you really hope does not break, as you have no chance of repairing it. While some of the features, like batteries and LEDs are (maybe?) much better for the environment, having to replace parts instead of repairing is terrible for the environment. Though the act of replacing is great for fueling the engine that runs our capitalist utopia so thank god for that.

Back to the old bikes. They are of course not magical, and can break as well. They can even break in ways that are impossible to repair. They were much simpler though, with less parts that could break. Additionally, the reissued army bikes, were not exactly made with light-weight components⁴, making them even more durable and likely more repairable.

Recontextualizing loss of transparency

The loss of transparency is clearly visible (ha) in many other contexts. You have probably noticed ‘new’ products that is just an old product with an LCD screen and some claim that it uses ‘AI’. Some of these improvements are amazing and really do advance us. An example could be using machine learning for early detection of cancer. Other improvements are little more than a waste of resources, improving on something that was pretty good already.

Many contexts have been touched by the different waves of technology. You can’t have a pizzaria without a website, a boarding pass without a QR code or a friendship without social media. Over the past few years many public services has been moved into apps. The technologies have not seeped into our world, our world has been submerged in a digital ocean. Though the pervasiveness of digital technologies and electronics can seem like the enemy, I think even the digital domain has been affected by the push for ‘making our lives easier’. I’ll explore the digital context below.

The digital context

We have not always had digital systems, but it too has been affected by various new technologies. Most recent is probably Large Language Models (LLMs). Suddenly LLMs is being put into every thinkable context. You mail, your operating system and in the videos you see online. LLMs have started to take over critical roles, such as handling critical and sensitive data. And just like with electronics on a bike, it can be hard to debug what is going wrong. But when it works it is pretty nice. _{There are of course huge environmental costs, infrastructure costs, relying-on-computers-to-express-ourselves costs, sneaking-in-political-biases-costs and so on. Maybe a future blog post?}.

At some point a long time ago, people wanted to make money - whaaaaat???. They already had an operating system for computers, MS-DOS. But it was fairly technical, being only text-based. If they could make it more user friendly by adding graphics, perhaps it could become successful. We are still on that timeline today. Many of the applications we use are graphical and not text based. Can you imagine using photoshop with just text? Neither can I.

The point is that the graphics are indeed nice, and make many amazing things possible, they also add a layer of things that can go wrong, or even be misrepresentative of what is actually happening on your computer. With a git-client, you might not know for sure what happens when you press fetch. But with the command-line version, only what you type will happen. Then you have the control.

While the case I’ve made against graphics may have some truth to it. That applies to everything on the computer. The whole computer, the operating system and the applications are all reliant on vast amounts of code and infrastructure, both on the computer and externally. Graphics is just one extra layer of things. LLMs is another layer. Your wifi-card a third layer and so on.

The more technological advances we make and add onto our many layers of reliance, the less transparent our digital existence becomes. I have only highlighted a few technologies that have changed our digital life but there are many more. Defining a thing you can do to experience the ‘old-way-of-life’ like buying and driving an old motorcycle, but for the digital context, asks a question about what the ‘core’ of digital really is? My best guesses are:

1. Installing some version of Linux.
2. Taking your terminal for a spin. Maybe using Vim, or Vi, for editing some files.
3. Using FFMPEG to clip together a movie of you vacation?
4. Programming something in C?

Habits and consumption

I’ve already written a bit about this in the post Metal objects that facilitate our rituals forever. But I’ll add to it here. I think that I am not completely alone in focusing more and more on durability and expected lifespan when buying things. I like sturdy things that are repairable.

Over the years we’ve bought many pieces of old furniture and restored and repaired it. Economically it has not been worth it, but on so many other levels it has. I also tend to buy second hand tools, even really old ones. Especially corded power tools can live surprisingly long. I have two old Makita sanders bo4561 that still do their job very well. In the digital domain, I tend to dive into the technical stuff, rather than relying on GUIs. A good, but basic, example could be git for version control when programming. Or overall programming to get what you want.

Over the years, I have been picking up a few screen-less hobbies, such as whittling, knitting, playing guitar, board games, cocktails and cooking. One of the things I find particularly magnetizing about these hobbies is that there are no middle layers between me and the outcome. No software updates for the knitting needles, no new AI workflows for the guitar and no printer issues when cooking dinner. I think that many people (in my little bubble) are drawn to some of these hobbies to both get a break from screens, but also to regain some control over the outcomes. Direct control, where no middle-ware, middle-men or middle-processes are influencing the outcome or one’s ability to control the outcome. So what I am saying is, welcome back to, and long live, handicrafts and craftsmanship.

So how do motorcycles work?

To those, who have stuck around -or scrolled down- long enough to find this section; here is my terrible explanation / overview of how a motorcycle works. A motorcycle has many parts that all do their own respective job. For the purpose of this post, I’ve chosen to focus on only a few of those core parts. I can only recommend the video 7 Minute Motorcycle Teardown – Mechanic Crash Course⁵ it is a really nice walkthrough of the components, and further provide a good visual of them. Good job following along in this list without any visual aid.

• Gas tank contains the gas. And delivers it into the Carburetor(s).
• Carburetor’s job is to mix the gas with air. It uses a nozzle to create a mist. This is done because air + fuel allows us to get energy from the fuel⁶. The throttle on the bike controls the amount of air, which results in bigger energy release⁵.
• The pistons sit on the engine and suck in the mix of fuel and air as they move down. When the pistons move up, they compress the mixture and the spark plug ignites the mixture, causing the piston to move down again, thus repeating the cycle⁷. That is basically the combustion. This up and down movement is translated into cyclic movement on the crankshaft.
• The exhaust gets rid of bad gasses. Sometimes with less noise⁵.
• The crankshaft simply transfers the energy from the engine to the transmission.
• The transmission is just a bunch of gears submerged in hot oil. The gears are what you control, when… shifting gears. This results in either more power or faster wheel speed.
• The drive- chain, shaft or belt connects the output of the transmission to the wheel.⁸
• The Wheel pushes the asphalt away under the bike.

Honorary mentions: brakes brake, clutch disconnects engine from transmission, kickstarter starts the engine.

This concludes my ted talk. Hope you learned something. I sure did. Until next time.

Homework

Here are some books tangential to the topics in this article. Some I would like to read, or have already read. Maybe you want to enjoy them with me?

• The Revenge of Analog: Real Things and Why They Matter. Seems like an interesting read some time.
• Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert M. Pirsig