Pistons and Pixels – Introduction

I am a car guy, and I am a watch guy, and these are the sole reasons for the secondary
blog on my website. I don’t think of myself as a “collector” in either regard, but that
doesn’t mean I don’t have several or that I would get or shed one too many.

There is, however, a secondary aspect informing my interest in this, and it is about
knowledge, philosophy, history, engineering, and culture. Both watches and cars are
imbued with all of these as well, and provide easy and accessible ways to explore topics
that might otherwise be too abstract (and also uninteresting.)

I might be called a historian of technology, although I would say with a bit less punchy
force that I am a scholar, a learner. Using the word “historian” comes packed with a
heaping mound of frequently unclaimed baggage, and while I use it, I try to use it most
advisedly. (I’m also not afraid to leave the odd hanging adverb there…truly.) Likewise,
while I might try theories on for size, I’m not much of a theorist or a futurist.
Nonetheless, it is sometimes tempting to call out a trend that one thinks one beheld; I’m
not above that either.

Sure, one might ask – we get the pistons part, and we grok some type of affiliation
between cars and watches, though the lines circling those sets have overlap, they’re not
congruent. What about pixels, other than that I wanted to use a cute occasionally-used
phrase by the automotive journalist cognoscenti. Well – maybe there’s some of that
because, like most alliteration, it tends to stick in the mind. In reality, however, the
ongoing march of the pixel dominating our lives is unmistakable and, true to the
assertion I made above about providing platforms and springboards for interesting
topics, this is definitely one of them.

The so-called “Quartz Crisis” is something that still resonates within the watch industry.
We’ll be exploring this in more detail soon enough, but suffice to say that durable, long-
lasting, battery-powered, waterproof digital watches that cost a fraction of that of any
automatic (eg., “self-winding”) flooded the market and scared the hell out of a lot of
legacy watch producers.

And yet, automatic watches have survived.

So today, we can see certain parallels in the automotive world. Is the advent of the EV
analogous to that of the debut of the Casio calculator watch (of which I was a proud
owner when in 5 th grade or thereabouts)? There have been hybrid attempts in the watch
world to share the quartz accuracy with the quality of an automatic, with mixed
successes. Even Rolex dipped its bangled toe in the waters of quartz, inadvertently
(perhaps?) creating a clt-classic watch.

Cars, however, have been incorporating and stacking tech for decades. From the
advent of the first microprocessor-based electronic control unit as an outgrowth of the
solenoid switch, cars have been incorporating elements of computational power and
information technology. In recent years, auto manufacturers have been leaning into the
“screens in cars” phenomenon to the point where, at least in some cases, it verges on
sci-fi satire. And in even more dystopian cruises, General Motors made tons of money
by selling motorist data stored on its car-based systems to insurance companies and
data brokers. It carried this on for years, and only recently did a regulatory enforcement
action curtail this practice. Other lawsuits are still pending, and it’s unlikely that GM is
the only company to engage in it.

They are, however, the only company that marketed its motorist “safety system”
(OnStar) as a selling point and then used it to not only extract more money from the
motorist in terms of subscription model, but also turned around and used its thousands
of sensors in each car to collect data on that motorist and then package and sell it to a
third party.

All of this is to say that cars are much more than transportation, and perhaps much
more than a statement of personal style. To some extent (and factoring in a very large
part of my own), they represent that individual agency of being able to go somewhere,
to transport, to transform. It’s not all good, to be sure, and plenty of issues come up
with it.

Watches and cars both form and accompany us in major chapters in our life. They are
tools, to be sure, but they’re also uniquely human in what they do. This blog is going to
be an exploration of that culture and technology, and we are going to revel in it.