Retooling explores how the most important twentieth-century technology became the vexing riddle of the twenty-first century.
There is little doubt that the automobile defined the twentieth century, almost exactly ushering in the century with Carl Benz’s and Henry Ford’s “horseless carriage” innovations. From the first, the car’s place in society and in individual lives was also manufactured — sometimes carefully, but often haphazardly.
The car propels human beings into a future, a transforming power that solidly has rooted the car in American identity and dictated the shape of American society.
Part a personal meditation of the author and his sons as they take on a challenging “project car,” part a deeply researched examination of the expansive personal and social echoes of automobile technology, the book reveals personal entanglements the car has created in art, in media, in work, in human relationships — and how we might confront problems the car has delivered to us in the twenty-first century.
Others have described the material results of the car — its key role in suburban sprawl, its economic impact and transformation of the American marketplace and cityscape, for example. Retooling examines internal bonds of human identity and of culture with the automobile. Nostalgia, human inertia, and culture constitute the glue that make cars so sticky in America.
I am currently a regular columnist for 3 Quarks Daily, an acclaimed human-curated, eclectic, and intellectually stimulating website that has run for over twenty years. My monthly contributions make up part of the website’s daily magazine articles.
Between 2022 and 2025, I ran a newsletter on Substack called Technocomplex that explored the complex relationships of technbology and human culture and identity.
Most of the pieces that have been published by 3 Quarks Daily and in Technocomplex are available on READER (https://read.markdelong.me/). READER offers an email newsletter that is sent “about monthly.” Subscriptions are free, and subscriber emails are kept private and secure.
