The Brick is a gray square you attach to your phone that disables most of its functions. Fast Company reports people are paying $59 for it, enthusiastically, because they want friction back. On the same day, Zoox cleared federal approval to launch its paid robotaxi service in a vehicle with no steering wheel, no pedals, no interface for the human to fight the machine. Both products are responses to the same anxiety, but they pull in opposite directions: one restores the human's ability to resist; the other removes the human's ability to intervene entirely.
The Steering Wheel as Metaphor
Zoox's wheelless taxi is the logical endpoint of the UX frictionlessness project that has dominated consumer technology for two decades. Remove the control surface, the argument goes, and you remove the failure mode. But removing the steering wheel also removes agency. The Brick buyers are doing the inverse: they are buying back the failure mode on purpose, because failure modes are what make experience feel real. Eugene Whang, industrial designer and former Jony Ive collaborator, made the argument in a Culture Slop conversation that designed experiences require resistance to be meaningful. A party with no bad moments is not a party. A phone that never distracts you is not a phone. It is a tool, which is a different thing.
What Automation Costs in the Register of Attention
The academic frame for this is attention economics, but the cultural frame is more interesting. The Atlantic's piece on the rise of animal narrators in fiction makes an adjacent point: writers are increasingly using non-human perspective not to escape humanity but to reencounter it from outside. The Brick and the wheelless taxi are both defamiliarization devices. One forces you to encounter your own addiction to the interface. The other removes the interface so completely that the encounter is foreclosed. The question both are asking: what kind of attention do you actually want to pay?