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/