I’m writing the first draft of my latest attempt at a novel on a typewriter.
I’m not alone in adopting old tech; as a millennial I watched the popularization of vinyl records and mechanical watches. Whether for nostalgia or as statement pieces, there’s always been people interested in the obsolete.
But I’ve also noticed an increasingly pertinent reason for resurging interest in these long-departed technologies and that’s to do with the declining value proposition of their later successors relative to their immediate replacements.
Word processors supplanted typewriters by the early nineties because they let operators edit and save documents – tremendous time savers – at a price point that was finally in reach of most. There was no downside to making the switch.
That unambiguous improvement stopped being true of later writing tools like phones, tablets and laptops, which all have at their fingertips apps and websites engineered to capture attention.
Being distraction-free, which wasn’t a concern before the advent of social media in particular, is now a selling point. One that in my case eclipses being able to easily edit a document.
There’s parallels in other markets. When CDs and DVDs replaced vinyl records and cassette/VHS tapes, they offered better fidelity and didn’t degrade with use as their antecedents were well known to do. The new medium presented only upsides.
Then came streaming services to complement optical discs. Half the cost of an album a month gave you a massive library’s worth of content. The lower fidelity and lack of ownership was fine; you still had your collection. Again, only benefits.
Declining sales soon drove physical media to extinction. The streaming landscape fractured. People were now left with lower-quality products requiring increasing monthly dues to ever-more companies to access at all. The value proposition degraded.
These days my apartment is full of artefacts more associated with decades past than the 2020s; from atlases to a barograph to digital watches to manual coffee brewing equipment. They make my life better than their modern-day equivalents. I also ditched my smart speakers, smart plugs, smart watch and such.
I’m not a luddite; I do still embrace new tech but I’m much more picky about it. For example, I recently upgraded my Roomba to a newer model. Though wouldn’t you know it, shortly after that purchase it was revealed that the company might go bust threatening the function of the vacuum cleaner. Newer models require being able to connect to its corporate servers to fully operate, unlike the ten year old predecessor that I had just replaced.
Kinda makes the point, doesn’t it.