The Weekly Screed (#846)

Ou sont les gadgets d’antan?
by David Benjamin

MADISON, Wis. — We came to know him as Franky the Hawk but he was actually a peregrine falcon. He used to visit our bird feeder in California, looking for breakfast.

He always got served.

Whenever Franky flew in, I halted my labors to watch life and death unfold in our driveway. As hawkshadow passed over the feeder, all the sparrows, finches and towhees bickering there would cheezit into a big bush beside the drive, whose branches were too dense for Franky to penetrate.

A patient raptor, Franky would light on the fence above his avian buffet and wait. He knew that, in a minute or so, an impetuous sparrow or foolhardy finch would make a dash for freedom. When that happened, whoa!

I never really saw Franky nail Tweety. There would be a darting flutter from the heart of the bush, at which Franky became a blur flashing toward the fated fugitive. Falcon and quarry would struggle fleetingly, not for a full second, on the driveway. The mad chirping in the bush, suddenly, went silent. On the ground, perhaps a spot of blood or a lost feather. Then, whoosh. Gone.

Since I was a kid, I’ve been awed by my encounters with falcons, snakes, sphinx moths, trees in bloom, frogs in heat, great blue herons in the mist and loons crooning eerily across the lake at dawn. Surprises like this — a  black racer that exploded beneath my Keds and streamed in sinuous zigzag through a sea of bluestem, timothy and Indiangrass, while I chased hopelessly — have fired my curiosity and inspired my imagination. Under my breath, I say stuff  like “Oh my God,” or “Holy shit,” or simply, “Wow.”

This week I found myself remembering Franky the Hawk — and the liquefaction of his strike — while attending, as I do annually, the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, the greatest gadgetfest on earth. I inched amongst the throngs, who jostle wide-eyed along endless aisles of temporary carpet, their sanity assaulted by a tin-roof roar of Orwellian synthemuzak and the relentless Roy G. Biv strobing of a hundred thousand epileptic diodes. Amidst it all, I overheard them — as they caressed the screens, leered transfixed at ultra-HD 3-D demos and timidly fondled a thousand dazzling prototypes: “Oh my God!” “Holy shit, Bob!” “Wow!”

And of course, “Cooooooool!”

I wonder, am I jaded — to never be as thrilled with a Bluetooth-activated, deep-learning equipped, robotic orgasmatron as I am with the thought of a hundred-mile coral reef formed inch-by-inch over millenia by polyps no larger than a pinhead? Or am I a Luddite so hidebound that I cannot appreciate even the most ingenious of technological innovations?

I hope perhaps neither. After all, I’ve been writing dutifully — with some measure of competence — about gadgets for (oh my God) more than thirty years. I even ghostwrote a book about inventions. I found many of those breakthroughs (Arthur Jones’ Nautilus machine, Yuma Shiraishi’s VHS video format, Godfrey Hounsfield’s discoveries in computerized tomography) downright gripping. Even cool. Inventions make great stories.

And there are gadgets I love. My first sight of a Linotype machine almost got a “wow!” out of me. It’s a towering Rube Goldberg maze of levers, pivots, nuts, bolts, wheels, chutes and rods that somehow turns the manual tapping of a qwertyuiop keyboard into a flow of molten lead that trickles into narrow steel molds which — once it’s cooled — becomes row upon row of “hot type,” a wonderful term that evokes the frenzy of legwork, cajoling and reporting, editing and argument that turns into news. Smearing ink on those perishable strips of hot type demands a companion technology that changed the arc of civilization the day Johannes Gutenberg thought it up.

Trouble is, the mechanical miracle of the Linotype had already faded before I first beheld it 40 years ago. Now, you need a museum to see one, and there is likely not a living typist who knows how to squeeze from it even a single quick brown fox. As for Gutenberg, one of the coldblooded neo-shibboleths of the 21st century goes, “Print is dead.”

Therein, however, lies one of my misgivings about high technology. It doesn’t stick around long enough to love. Most gadgets, from storage media (remember cassettes?) to operating systems (o Unix, o mores!), are not merely supplanted sequentially by newer versions. They’re erased from the very history of technology by creators whose voracious revenue stream demands an endless cycle of mandatory “upgrades.”

“Consumers” are consumed by gadgets that do stuff we don’t particularly want gadgets — or anyone — to do. Until today, billions of people have lived and died on Earth without once being informed, constantly and involuntarily, of their heart rate. I met a nice Frenchman at CES who was promoting an interactive, wireless, ergonomic “smart” wine storage system. Who asked for that? Who ever said we need a rack that talks back?

Among the signal successes of techno-progress are the myriad gadgets that do things worse than they were done before, and don’t last as long. For example, your classic black Western Electric bakelite telephone wired into the grid still works better, comes through more clearly, covers more territory (all of it, actually) and tolerates more abuse than any smartphone will hope to do for the next 50 years. Remember the scene in The Day After Tomorrow when the only phone that worked in all of Manhattan was a landline pay phone on the mezzanine level of the New York Public Library?

Consider, for another example, a pre-ECU Ford F-150 pickup truck.

This Ford — let’s say the ’75 model — starts up when you want it to, turns off when you kill the engine and goes where you steer. It’s easy to fix with a standard toolbox and you don’t have to know a lot about either auto mechanics or computer diagnostics to fix it. At worst, all you need to know is a guy, in greasy coveralls, named Jeff or Kenny. A ’75 F-150 will never, ever, be obsolete. Chances are, you’ll die before it does.

The same won’t apply to the 2020 F-150, which Ford is billing as a “computer on wheels.” It’ll offer lots more functions, many of which the truck will take over from you (whether you want it to or not).  “Under the hood,” there’s already more stuff to go haywire than either you, Jeff or poor dumb Kenny is gonna know how to fix. A new “suite” of integrated ECs will make this once-humble truck so digitally sophisticated that it will be serially obsolete on a more or less annual schedule — unless, of course, you believe the Elon Musk fairy tale of free, “seamless” over-the-air software upgrades  beamed directly from a cosmologic cloud into the brains of your Ford.

Used to be, you got a Ford pickup and you could drive that heap ’til the floor rusted out from under you, or it got totaled by a drunk yuppie in a Land Rover. The new models won’t last that long — which is the point. Because tech gurus like Musk and Huang need constant technological churn to keep the revenue flowing and their mystique alive, we’ll never again see a gadget as faithful and sturdy as a ’75 F-150.

Speaking of lifespans, I looked it up. Peregrines live about 13 years, or about twice as long as your typical Mac. But there are are quahogs older than the United States. And up on the timberline, the bristlecones have been subtly photosynthesizing sunlight — without even an a occasional tune-up by Jeff or Kenny — since 3,000 years before the Immaculate Conception.

Maybe it’s just me, but that — I think — is, like, Oh my God.