A Tome of Forbidden Technologies

Once again we’re near the end of a month with five Wednesdays, and as regular readers of this blog know well, that means that readers got to nominate and vote on the subject of the fifth Wednesday post. This time the theme that won the contest was a glance back over the landscape of rejected and abandoned technologies that still work well, and may be worth bringing back into use as the Long Descent picks up speed. It’s not going to happen, no matter how hard we try the Tinkerbell trick and just believe. Deal. That’s a controversial topic, of course, because it flies in the face of the modern mythology of progress, the most important religious narrative of our day. I don’t use the word “religious” here as satire or exaggeration, by the way. Most people nowadays believe in progress the way that medieval peasants believed in the wonderworking relics of their local saint. It’s progress that is expected to grant us an ever-increasing cornucopia of blessings, banish all the evils from which our ancestors suffered, and eventually lift up true believers out of their earthly lives and usher us into a heaven decked out with all the features of Tomorrowland. The mere facts that these days, each new round of gimmickry that gets the prized label “progress” tends to generate more downsides than upsides, and that the shining future paradise has been getting visibly further off for decades, has barely begun to dent that touching and childlike faith. Look away from the mirage of Progress the Great and Powerful and pay attention to the little man behind the curtain, as Dorothy did in The Wizard of Oz, and a very different spectacle meets your view. Every year various technogimmicks get proclaimed by the media as the next grand step in the march of progress. Now and again one of them is genuinely innovative; far more often they’re just excuses to charge more money to provide a good or a service that is no better, and often much worse, than the ones they replace. Even genuine innovations as often as not provide worse quality for a higher price. Calvin Trillin a while back set off nervous laughter by noting that the most frightening word in the English language is “upgrade.” We all know why. I’m going to turn to a specific example at this point, largely because I just got up a moment ago to replace one black and gleaming disk with another on my version thereof. The electronic stereo playing vinyl records was the standard technology for recorded music at home half a century ago. Due to genuine advances in electronic technology, the art of recording and replaying musical performances reached an extraordinarily high level in the era of the stereo. I’ve found, in fact, that when I have young visitors in my apartment and put a record on, their eyes bug out at the richness and clarity of the sound from my two modest speakers—and thereby hangs a tale. If you’ve never heard music on one of these you have no idea what you’re missing. Vinyl records were replaced with compact disks (CDs) over a short period in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The new technology benefited from plenty of high-pressure marketing from big corporations, pushing it as a far better audio technology. Plenty of audiophiles noted that music on CDs sounded flat and tinny; supposed experts were trotted out by the score to insist that the audiophiles were wrong, and must be mishearing the faint hiss of the stereo as musical quality. (You still hear this fib being repeated now and then.) Despite attempts to keep vinyl going in niche markets, the marketing push behind CDs succeeded, and pundits everywhere insisted that the day of the record was over forever. The audiophiles were right, however. What determines sound quality in a CD is its sampling rate—the number of times per second the software making the recording samples the sound and converts it into digital form. If you have a dense enough sampling rate, you really can make a CD sound very good, but that’s expensive. Record companies accordingly used sampling rates just dense enough to keep most listeners from complaining, and called it good. It was good for their profits, sure, but it made the music sound flat and tinny. Then came MP3s, digital downloads, and streaming media. Those all have the same problems as CDs, since they all sample sound at intervals, but they have another difficulty as well: the devices used to access them, mostly phones these days, have dismal sound quality. You can improve that somewhat by getting Bluetooth speakers or what have you, but even so, phones are not optimized for reproducing music, and they do a fairly poor job of it. The official rhetoric has it that the march of progress is unstoppable and we can’t go back to the past. People who care about music haven’t been listening. Vinyl records, consigned to the dustbin of history thirty years ago, were a $1 billion business worldwide last year and are on track to break that figure this year. The used-vinyl market is huge, and manufacturers are also getting back into the business in a big way with a mix of old classics and new releases. For that matter, the lowly cassette tape, consigned just as casually to history’s dustbin, is also in the midst of a lively revival, with plenty of small bands rediscovering the joys of small-batch tape production, and plenty of users relearning the trick of winding a cassette with a #2 pencil. That’s not the only example of the kind. Another is the Canadian tractor company Ursa Ag, which recently set shockwaves in motion by marketing a line of tractors with no onboard computers at all. Tractors these days are fragile, overpriced monstrosities in which everything is done by computer. They break down constantly because of excessive complexity, and only authorized repair firms are allowed to fix them, at wildly inflated prices and with long delays. The basic Ursa Ag tractor — just what the farmer ordered. Ursa Ag’s tractors are on the other end of the spectrum. They’re simple, sturdy, easy to repair, and cost a modest fraction of what the big boys are charging. Unsurprisingly, the demand is so high that they’re scrambling to expand production lines, because what they offer is what farmers actually want. It’s also the kind of tractor that was standard on North American farms in 1970 or so. Once again, somebody pushed the rewind button on progress, and the people most directly affected by it couldn’t be happier. On the off chance that anybody from the Trump administration is reading this, may I offer a suggestion? It would be child’s play to revitalize the US auto industry, set off a huge hiring boom for factory workers, and double or triple the cheering crowds that show up the next time the Orange One holds a rally. All you have to do is get rid of the forest of regulations that keep small to midsized American companies from getting into the auto business and manufacturing the kind of cars people want to drive, which not surprisingly are the kind they drove half a century ago, unburdened with onboard computers and the rest of the garbage with which “progress” has weighed down today’s cars. Yes, I know, those regulations have all sorts of excuses justifying them—safety, environmental concerns, you name it—but the real point of every one of them is to keep auto manufacturing a closed oligopoly in which big car manufacturers can ignore what buyers want. Prune those regulations, and let the market do its magic. For that matter, if any Ford Motor Company executives happen to read this, I have a helpful suggestion for you, too. Cooperate with the mass pruning of regulations, and then get one of your factories turning out brand new copies of the 1966 Mustang fastback. You’ve still got the plans, right? Don’t change a thing. Leave out all the “improvements,” and sell them at a price that gives you the same profit per vehicle you pocketed back in 1966. Your sales and stock value will take off—well, there’s no other way to put it: like a ‘66 Mustang when the light turns green and the driver floors it. You’re welcome, and you can thank me with a few hundred shares of stock. These are examples of what I’ve come to think of as the first stage of retrovation. Retrovation? That’s a term I coined a decade ago, a portmanteau of “retro” and “innovation.” It’s the process of searching through the past for technologies that have been discarded by the onward march of soi-disant “progress” but are better suited to current conditions than the things that replaced them. There are a lot of those just now, and people are beginning to catch on to this at all levels of society. Need I mention the world’s intelligence services, many of which have gone back to manual typewriters and locked filing cabinets when handling their most crucial secrets, because those are so much more difficult to hack than anything that makes use of computers? Again, though, this is just the first stage of retrovation. That’s the stage at which retrovators blow the dust off technologies that were widely used in their day, but got shoved out of use by some supposedly better product. There’s an enormous amount of first-stage retrovation still to be done, and an increasingly large number of people are working hard at it. I expect to see much more of it as we continue lurching unsteadily down the slope of resource depletion, not least because it’s the low-hanging fruit of retrovation.