On obsolescence
---------------
This one has been in the works for far too long...
A few months back I complained about how AM radio is essentially dead
in Finland[1]. Ooh, quick interjection (yep, distracted by the second
sentence), I recently learned about the wonderful sounding Weekend
Scandinavian Radio[2], an independent, volunteer radio station which
broadcasts on the first Saturday of each month, using homebrew
transmitters, on AM, FM and SW! I'm really looking forward to trying
to catch it in November. Right, back on topic. As I've been doing
more and more reading on various radio-related subjects, I have come
to realise that I should not have been so quick to complain and that
things could be worse. In 2017, Norway shut down all their analogue
FM stations. They are the world's first all-digital radio nation.
The very first thing I thought when I read this was "think of all the
tens (hundreds?) of thousands of perfectly functional AM/FM household
radios condemned to landfill because of this". Now, we are talking
about Scandinavia here, I'm sure in fact the Norwegians were organised
about this and had some kind of government scheme where people could
drop off their old radios free of charge to be recycled, although
"recycled" here often just means "sold to China", where the stuff is
processed in whatever way returns the most profit, rather than
whatever way minimises environmental harm. Even if this didn't
happen, the best e-waste recycling process in the world is not as good
as simply continuing to use electronics which still actually work.
Regardless of how those radios were disposed of, a huge pile of
perfectly functional devices became waste products literally overnight
because of a decision being made that a certain mature technology was
now "obsolete".
There is a parallel here, obviously, with the switch to digital
television, which is much further underway in most of the world. In
some ways, the radio situation is worse. Most televisions that were
still around at the time of the switch to digital had some way to
inject a non-broadcast signal, for a DVD player or a game console or
whatever. This means you could get a digital-to-analog conversion
box, which is cheaper than a new TV because it doesn't have the big
expensive LCD panel in it, and keep using your old television for as
long as it worked. This isn't an option for radio, because most
simple radios *don't* have a line-in option, and even if they did, the
cost difference between a new radio and a converter would be minimal,
because speakers are far cheaper than screens. So there is no
backward compatibility option, your radio is just immediately scrap.
In other ways, of course, the TV situation was probably worse, just
because TVs, especially old CRTs, were bigger and a lot harder to
responsibly dispose of.
This whole line of thought has had me thinking a lot lately about the
various consequences of the continuing march of obsolescence amongst
consumer electronics. A huge part of it, obviously, is environmental.
The advent of the DVD turned millions of VHS casettes into landfill.
I don't think I've ever even heard of a VHS recycling program. It's
simply a matter of fact that there are, today, right now as you read
this, literally millions of VHS casettes which worked perfectly well,
buried in the Earth, and they will remain there for untold years to
come. But my thoughs go beyond "just" environmentalism, it seems sad
and wasteful and wrong to me for many more reasons. Some of them,
perhaps, overly sentimental about technology, but, well, that's me.
Most technologies do not go from mainstream acceptance to total
obsolescence without a few changes inbetween. Analogue television,
displayed on CRTs, recorded on tape, was around for a good 50 years.
A lot changed in that time - not least the transition from black and
white to colour (done in a way that preserved backward compatibility
with old B&W sets!). The screens got larger, and flatter, the range
and quality of colours that could be rendered got better, the blacks
got blacker. The chemistry used to make the magnetic tapes went
through several upgrades, the tape got physically thinner so you
could record more on a single cassette. Decades of cutting edge
industrial research and millions, probably billions of dollars were
sunk into making this technology the best it could be. People
probably wrote PhD theses on research problems motivated primarily
by their applicability to this technology. And yet all of this tech
almost completely vanished in less than a decade. This feels like
such a terribly wasteful use of human ingenuity and labour. We
spend decades perfecting something and then quickly discard it
without even really enjoying the fruits of that work. For the
majority of time that analogue television was in widespread use,
people were not experiencing the best quality analgoue television
experience that humanity could figure out how to build. We spent
more time in the under-developed, less-good phase of that technology
than we did at its peak. It's not clear that we ever even reached the
peak the technology could support. None of this matters, of course,
if your goal is just to sell as much shit as possible, in a world
where people will happily throw out something old and buy something
new just for the next in a series of steadily diminising returns in
quality. But if you are even slightly romantic about technology,
about exercising the human potential for understanding and creating
to its fullest potential, doesn't this seem terribly wrong? To
spend years of gruelling effort climbing a mountain, to get perhaps
90% of the way to the top and then to jump off and begin climbing
another mountain next to it, just because it'ss 10 metres taller?
Other consequences of rapid obsolescence are social, to do with
providing easy gateways for children to learn technology, and to do
with connecting people, especially tech people, across generations.
This whole line of thought for me started when I realised that
crystal radios were now useless in many parts of the world. In part
I think this is bad simply because they were a great, simple,
affordable way for kids to have their curiousity about science and
technology ignited, and now it's gone. No Norwegian child is ever
going to cobble together a digital radio receiver out of a cardboard
toilet roll and some copper wire and have her mind blown. Worse
than that, there are young nerdy parents out there today, who built
crystal radios as a kid with the help of one of their parents, who
in turn built crystal radios as a kid with one of *their* parents,
who are unable to carry on that tradition. I don't, of course,
think that the death of crystal radio as an introduction to science
for kids is going to actually lead to a decrease in the number of
geeky kids. New and perhaps better "hooks" will replace it. But a
sense of tradition, of a shared technical culture, is IMHO a nice
thing to have. Common experiences tying people together are nice,
it's nice to have the ability to learn from your elders, or at
least to understand or related to their stories in some way because
the concepts involved are not totally alien. Many aspects of human
endeavour afford these little niceties, but I feel like they must
be rarer in many technical fields than non-technical fields simply
because technical fields are constantly throwing away almost
everything every few decades. Things which were lovingly handed
down across two or three generations end up becoming irrelevant,
incomprehensible "dinosaur traditions".
I have no over-arching idea of what is right and wrong in mind here,
and this is more of an open rumination than a call to arms. I am
painfully aware that this post laments the end of the consumer
technology of the 80s and 90s that I grew up with, and that it only
does this *because* I grew up with them and not because they are
inherently purer than anything that came after them. I realise
that somebody older than me could have made the very same arguments
earlier, and if everybody had listened then maybe there would never
have been analogue television and radio in the first place for me
to mourn the passing of. Would I be happier in that world? I'm
not sure. This theme has come up in my writing here at least once
before, the tension between arguing that technological progress has
ruined everything and the world was better off 10 or 20 years ago,
without saying anything that didn't apply just as well 50 years ago
or perhaps even 100. Is it possible to coherently be pro-technology
but also anti-technological-progress? Can I make an argument for
some kind of "Goldilocks level" of technology, that we should first
attain but then simply *maintain* without advancing past?
Perhaps the only thing I can say with any kind of confidence is
that things would be better if technology was designed, from day
one, with the understanding that it inevitably *will* be obsolete
at some time in the future, and as such should be designed to
maximise the scope for recyclability or repurposing when that day
comes. This is, of course, very rare, because it is incompatible
with miniaturisation and integration and other things which make
technology profitable. It also leads toward a culture of building
things by combining a relatively small, standard set of
general-purpose parts, which of course makes it difficult to
differentiate products from one another, which is an impediment to
marketing. But such an approach reduces the environmental impact
of unrelenting obsolesence, if not the spiritual and social impact.
[1]
gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space:70/0/~solderpunk/phlog/crystal-radio-in-2018.txt
[2]
http://swradio.net/
