A Dystopian Prologue
I’m fascinated by apocalyptic narratives. I enjoy the boiling down of the human experience to its barest essentials. When the world around you is being torn apart, what do you care about? What do you keep and what do you discard? What do you believe?
These questions are of a more philosophical nature, and they’re not what I want to discuss here. I want to talk about post-apocalyptic technology.
In movies and books about the near future, whenever disaster strikes, the first things to go are the most advanced technologies: the Internet, phones, television, electricity. Often it’s the radio — the oldest of the modern communication technologies — that’s left as the sole means of communicating with the world. Planes and cars are replaced with horses and bicycles. I believe there’s prophetic truth to this fiction.
What the authors of dystopian narratives are trying to warn us about is our (over-)reliance on technology. Technology so sophisticated and complex we can’t possibly understand it. This complexity, in turn, makes tech fragile. You could, conceivably, make a DIY radio set at home. There’s no way you could create the Internet in your basement.
Let’s explore this fragility in more detail.
I see 2 main ways in which today’s technology is fragile:
- It is built with complex and flimsy hardware.
- It relies on today’s physical mediums and software file formats.
Poor Hardware
How old is your phone? The average is about 3 years. Some old-timers would be 4 or even 5. Many people get a new phone after only a year, because phones are fragile. They break; they scratch; they fall apart.
Our electronic devices are fragile in the most basic sense of the word. They were never built to last. Whether the obsolescence is planned is immaterial; we rely on pieces of tech that die every couple of years. Contrast this with the book, or even the scroll. Simple tech is long-lasting tech. We can still read Gutenberg’s original printed Bible from the 1450’s. Do you really think that iOS 13 will still be operational in the year 2600? How about 2030?
The breakneck speed with which we replace our devices is harmful to us and our environment. People produce 20kg of e-waste annually, after having spent hundreds of dollars on new gadgets. And here’s another cool fact: “As much as 7% of the world’s gold may currently be contained in e-waste, with 100 times more gold in a tonne of e-waste than in a tonne of gold ore.”
Sustainability and pollution issues aside, there’s an expectation now thatour equipment will break, its complexity rendering repair impossible. Buying a new piece is usually the only way. Refrigerators, sound systems, cameras and other electric house appliances used to last for decades. It’s only since the digital revolution came about that we’ve started to think of electronics as disposable.
But even when the gadgets we use don’t break, they (or their formats) still become obsolete.
Dying Forms
The issue of dying formats was made salient to me just last week. I bought a music CD that wasn’t available on Apple Music (Wynton Marsalis & Eric Clapton Play the Blues, if you’re wondering). I then realized that I had no CD or DVD players at home, and had to scramble to find one at a friend’s house. Over 15 Billion (!) CDs were sold in the U.S. alone since the 80s, and I could barely find a single device to read mine on.
The story of the CD is not unique. The graph of music sales by medium looks like an ocean, with ebbs and flows. Each format comes to dominate its predecessor, until it itself is replaced.
And it’s not just physical mediums that are in danger of being lost. Software file formats reach end-of-life, can’t be used on newer systems, or are simply being abandoned. The family pictures you keep on your hard-drive won’t be accessible to you in a few years, unless you migrate them, whether because support for the file format will drop, or because the hard-drive will fail.
Digitization was considered the savior of old media at first. Amazon rushed to scan all of their books; film photographs were converted to digital files; vinyls were re-released as CDs. What we haven’t considered is the longevity of analog tech, compared with the fragility of the digital.
The Hipster’s Guide to Surviving the Apocalypse
The “ironic” use of old tech popularized by hipsters may have been prescient. Consider the following trends:
- Vinyl sales are on the rise — you’d have to go back to 1989 to find a year with stronger LP sales.
- Paper notebooks are enjoying renewed popularity (see examples 1, 2, 3).
- Paper books are still greatly outselling eBooks (source).
What does this all mean? Some of it is nostalgia — rehashing old ideas to sell them again. Some are surely fads that will pass. But I believe that the simplicity and interoperability of these mediums are valuable attributes, not to be underestimated.
Simplicity matters. When I’m working, I always have a pen and a notebook by my side. Because when the moment comes to record a thought, I don’t want to switch tabs, be reminded of notifications, or open a new app. I grab my notebook, pick up the pen, and write my ideas down. There are no software updates, no maintenance, no learning curve. I already know everything there is to know about it (though there is much innovation in the field). This frees me to focus on the content, instead of getting bogged down in choosing the ultimate tool.
Replacing a complex app with something as simple as pen and paper is, unfortunately, not always possible (though it is more often than you might think). How should we approach choosing which tools to adopt? I’ll cover this in a future post.
This post was originally published on Medium in the Anti-Content publication.