Living The Future Shock

Techno-Junk 

I have a lot of techno-junk. A lot of times, it starts out being the cool thing, but as I keep using it, it just ends up being kipple. I've been using my second 160GB iPod Classic for like 6years. Now I have the choice of moving to an iPod Touch with 128GB or shelling out big and using my phone as the music player. Given that I simply have the iPod Classic as my car audio thing, it's not likely I'm going to shell out for the biggest-capacity iPhone 6S as a music player. I'm going to move to another dedicated audio player and be done with it.

The iPhone has made the point and shoot camera redundant. I have an old Canon G9. In the olden days of 2009, it was a pretty cool compact camera. Of course the camera on the iPhone ate its job, so now it sits on the shelf un-used, and worse still it's far too obsolete in spec to be waved around in public lest people think I am a retro-fetishist. Which goes to show tech isn't worth spending money on until it becomes necessary to have that tech. I've given the Go-Pro cameras a wide berth as a result. They look like a lot of fun if you like strapping the camera on to moving things, but it's hard to argue a need for one on a day to day basis. It's usually easier just to grab the iPhone and shoot video.

Still, I have weird techno-junk which are noise-making devices of various types. These don't go obsolete; they merely extend the sonic palette for recordings so they don't tend to be as bad an investment as a camera. As good as iRig is on the iPhone, it is simply no match for the Catalinbread WIIO pedal for its ability to make my guitar sound like Pete Townshend's tone on 'Live at Leeds'. It never really goes old as a piece of technology; although the desire to want to sound like Pete Townshend on 'Live at Leeds' sort of dates a lot faster than any bit of techno-junk.

It's not all bad news. I have an app on the iPad that can fire samples of an old Mellotron with great accuracy. I have a whole array of synths on the iPad, I could do anything from Kraftwerk style blips to fairly modern trance music sweeps. The option anxiety that arises from my iPad alone is substantial, so it is doing a great job as this sort of noise-making machine. And of course one day it will become this obsolete little tablet that I can't wave around public, but while it can make all these noises, it's going to remain one of my important noise-source units.

The speed at which things become obsolete has me in a bit of a headspin when I survey the things that are going out of date in my lifetime. The LP record lasted about 35years; CD Players lasted about 25; The Walkman went 15years somewhere in there, 20 if you count the portable CD iteration; the iPod era went for about 10years. I feel immense pressure to move on to streamed music but it just runs hard against my instincts. Film cameras of still and moving variety went for decades before digital knocked them off, but the reign of the stand alone domestic digital camera lasted all of 12 years by the time the camera in the phone ate up most of that market. Somewhere in there there was the U-matic video tape which seemed to be around since the 60s for about 25years, and VHS tape which lasted as a popular format for about 20years. DVDs as a media format really only lasted 12 years before HD video and Blu Ray supplanted it; and Blu Ray has really only gone 5 years as a mass consumer format before Netflix and streaming services have killed that market.

You can chalk all of that up to Future Shock. Computers too are accelerating in a disconcerting way. I went 5years with with the G5 PowerMac, 4years with the Tower Mac, and now 2 years with the Mac Mini, and I'm already thinking maybe I should be upgrading the computer soon if I want to be able to edit 4K Video.

As you can see, not only are the product cycles getting shorter, the actual lifespan of any given tech is getting so short. My first iPhone was the 3GS because I was a late adopter. I went three and a half years until it was so obsolete I couldn't show people I was still using it; so that put me onto the iPhone 5S which I've had for 22months - and well, it too is feeling slow, old and obsolete next to the iPhone 6S. I couldn't have imagined that, back 22months ago when I got my 5S. I fear for the lifespan of iPhones and smartphones as a technology, in general. With the pace things are going, there might not be much left in the future of smart phones. I might buy an iPhone 6S the day it goes on sale, but it is in danger of becoming super obsolete, well within the lifespan of its 24month contract.

That's all on the one hand. Contrasting against all that is my pair of Optonica Speakers from the 70s which still sound great. They sound full, broad, punchy and rich. The Arcam Amp powering it is from the mid-2000s, while the CD player is a 5 plate Sony from the late 1990s and it still works great. I have guitars and basses that date to the 1960s and 1970s that work perfectly well, pedals that date to  the early 1980s that still work perfectly well, a 1985 Roland synth that still works fine, and other bits and pieces from somewhere in the last half century that still do what they're designed to do. Somewhere in storage is a top of the range VHS player, and a turntable. All of this stuff still works.

And so gradually you end up being a weird mosaic of tech ownership. I feel like I live in the Bradbury building of 'Blade Runner' ("Good evening JF!") of my own devising and I didn't necessarily plan things that way. I am, to confess, a little more than simply shocked about all this. I never imagined what it would feel like to end up so layered up with the experience of technology. It's even true of this very blog too. When I start blogging over a decade ago, I was the only person in my circle doing it and everybody else was incredulous or disinterested. Now that decade has passed, blogging went from being a fad to a phenomenon to then being reduced to microblogging, and now this kind of blogging -writing out full sentences with the pretence of ecriture - has become somewhat quaint in its archaic-ness.

I write all of this down because I think there is great scepticism about the rate at which things change. The delusion we've been given in our childhoods was that it would be gradual, and mostly linear. The lived experiences inform us that it is rapid and ever accelerating. People think Ray Kurzweil's description of an ever-accelerating technological progress as being fanciful, but I have to tell you the subjective experience of this notion is far more true than the persistent critique that somehow technological development is going to plateau and level off. I won't vouch for the technological Singularity, but I will say that the future change is going to speed up even more.