Today in the triumphant return of buttons:

Is it just because I'm an old or does everybody kind of hate touch screens? Like, as a technology, it's the worst, right? 

Above: a gif of multiple Oscar winner Meryl Streep agreeing with me.

Wow, that's way more interesting
 than watching the road.

I ask because Volkswagen announced the triumphant return of buttons and nobs to the interiors of their electric vehicles. Up to this point they--and I think a lot of car manufacturers--had been steadily decreasing the number of physical controls in favor of a single big touchscreen located in the center of the console. It's like they just started gluing iPads to dashboards. I don't follow the auto industry, my car is just a thing I use to get places, but I think this is pretty universal now, especially with electric cars.  

Ever stuck your head into a Tesla? Maybe just to ask the driver what it feels like to drive a car from a company owned by a fascist and named after a eugenicist? I've never driven one, but it seems, you know distracting. Dangerously distracting. The screen that is, not the deplorable politics of Elon Musk and Nikola Tesla, although, yikes, right?

Although it's not like Teslas need distracted drivers to help them run over pedestrians.

Touch screens work alright on Star Trek,
but I think it may seriously take another
four-hundred years to work them out.

VW was getting complaints about how frustrating it is to use touch screens, and I 100% agree. I got a new used car over the summer and it has a small touch screen in the center. It doesn't really control any of the car's vital functions, it's mainly for linking to my phone so I can control my podcast or make calls or whatever, but it kind of sucks. Sure, it looks high tech, but it feels vague and unresponsive and I end up calling the wrong person because the contact list kept scrolling or my finger slipped, or I pressed too hard, or not hard enough. Finicky is the word, I think.

Curmudgeon is, evidently,
a valid career path.

It just seems like too unreliable a technology to trust people lives with, you know? I mean, Volkswagen's motivations here are almost certainly purely monetary. Sure, everyone hates them, but corporations don't change a thing unless they decide that not changing will cost them more (thanks Milton Friedman). Whatever the motivation, I suppose I appreciate the fact that they're walking back touch screens. It's validating in a way that appeals to the air of curmudgeonliness I've been trying to cultivate. 

Does this just come with age? This desire to bristle at the new? A perverse joy taken from watching innovations prove themselves untenable? I don't know. But what I do know is that while touch screens might feel like the future, they're also slippery, uncertain, and potentially lethal...which, I guess is also true of the future. 

Remember that time someone put Mega Man 2--a game famous for
requiring precision and accuracy--on to smart phones? You don't?
That's because it was a terrible mistake and everybody hated it.