This understanding became unexpectedly concrete during the practical research. While working with physical computing, I found that the small electronic components I needed were increasingly difficult to source locally. At first, this was simply an inconvenience. Almost everything remained readily available online: sensors, microcontrollers, motors, documentation and tutorials could be found and ordered with relative ease. What had become harder to find was not necessarily the material itself, but the smaller local infrastructures through which material and knowledge once met.

A specialised electronics shop is not simply a place where a component can be purchased. Asking for something can become a conversation: What are you trying to make? Why this sensor? What voltage are you working with? Is there another way of doing it? Such an exchange can reveal something I did not know enough to search for beforehand.

Online, I encountered almost the opposite problem. I could find an enormous amount of information, but accessing it often required me to already know—or at least approximate—what I was looking for. The difficulty was not always finding an answer, but knowing which question to ask.

Digital convenience had made technological materials and instructions extraordinarily accessible, while some of the physical places in which materials, expertise and conversation met were becoming harder to encounter. This is not to suggest that offline knowledge is inherently better. Online tutorials were indispensable throughout the project. But I repeatedly found that the two conditions produced different forms of learning. An instruction could show me a procedure; a conversation could respond to my misunderstanding, notice something I had overlooked, or redirect the problem entirely.

An instruction can answer a question; a conversation can change the question itself.

This is not nostalgia for an analogue world. Online tutorials were indispensable to this research. I learned enormous amounts through documentation, forums, videos and other people sharing their knowledge online. But the two encounters did something different. An instruction can answer a question; a conversation can change the question itself.

I began to think about this disappearance as a kind of digital gentrification. Convenience had increased. Access appeared almost limitless. At the same time, smaller and more situated infrastructures of knowledge and exchange were becoming harder to find. Only later did I encounter Jessa Lingel’s talk on the gentrification of the internet. Lingel is concerned with transformations within digital culture rather than the disappearance of electronics shops, so her argument does not explain what I experienced. But it gave me a larger context for something I had already begun to notice through making.

She describes an internet increasingly shaped by commercialisation and consolidation, where messier and smaller forms of digital culture are pushed toward the margins in favour of cleaner, more convenient platforms. Importantly, she describes gentrification not simply as the result of individual choices, but as something produced through a “more structural set of rules.”

It made me realise that convenience does not simply increase access. Convenience can reorganise the conditions through which access happens. Suddenly the tiny component sitting in my hand seemed much larger. It was connected to the factory that produced it, the platform that sold it, the delivery network that brought it to me, the documentation that taught me how to use it, the tutorial made by someone I would never meet, the shop that was no longer there, and the knowledge I did—or did not—have when I began searching.

Technology started to look less like an object and more like an organisation of tools, materials, knowledge, rules, infrastructures and relationships. And that changed the question of where my relationship with technology begins.