My visit to the Computer History Museum was great, and you didn’t need to know your bits from your bytes to appreciate it. There was so much uber-cool retro gear from the 60s and 70s: stylishly designed knobs, sliders, lights sat alongside buttons galore. These were design classics as well as being cutting edge technology.
Design classics from the past
I don’t think I am just donning my rose-tinted specs here. A lot of the kit from the 80s and beyond was brown or beige, and boring (to look at, at least). Perhaps there is a creative arc that sees innovation combine with a first blush of aesthetic elegance before degrading into dull (but improved) functional utility? I’m thinking of steam trains to diesel, original minis to mini metros, LPs to CDs.
Maybe the early part of the creative lifecycle is, almost by definition, hands-on, focussed on detail, experimental, idealistic. All these things lend themselves to human scale, care and thoughtfulness which then translates into good design, whereas perhaps later iterations sacrifice personal connection for mass-production and return-on-investment.
What was particularly striking was how the museum situated the computer revolution within and alongside the innovations that went before it and made it possible. Log tables, slide rules, weaving machines, telegraph cables, morse code and many others provided foundational elements: it felt as though IT was pretty much bound to happen given the myriad antecedents: an almost Darwinian process of incremental small changes leading to the sudden speciation of the microchip.
Perhaps new technology is just another invention that provides us with some utility. The printing press, the telescope, the television all created seismic and well-documented cultural shifts of their own.
This may be true, but things seem qualitatively different this time. IT is now both larger and smaller than human scale, and as such no longer seems to fit. It is like putting on a suit that is too large, or being all thumbs when trying to thread a needle. On the one hand we really don’t know if there is a nanobot in that vaccine or some spyware on our phone. And on the other hand, we cannot parse petabytes of data as machines now can. This creates an anxiety of powerlessness and a state of mistrust.
And most technology is passive, obedient, static. When you park your car, put down your book or finish your newspaper you expect to find them all just as you left them. Put down your smartphone and you have no such guarantee. This creates an anxiety of disconnectedness and a state of addiction.
As I left the museum I passed a noticeboard where visitors were invited to provide feedback. “Literally everything I do uses a computer” wrote one, “I’m glad I was born in this era.”
