Once again we’re near the end of a month with five Wednesdays, and as regular readers of this blog know well, that means that readers got to nominate and vote on the subject of the fifth Wednesday post. This time the theme that won the contest was a glance back over the landscape of rejected and abandoned technologies that still work well, and may be worth bringing back into use as the Long Descent picks up speed.
That’s a controversial topic, of course, because it flies in the face of the modern mythology of progress, the most important religious narrative of our day. I don’t use the word “religious” here as satire or exaggeration, by the way. Most people nowadays believe in progress the way that medieval peasants believed in the wonderworking relics of their local saint. It’s progress that is expected to grant us an ever-increasing cornucopia of blessings, banish all the evils from which our ancestors suffered, and eventually lift up true believers out of their earthly lives and usher us into a heaven decked out with all the features of Tomorrowland. The mere facts that these days, each new round of gimmickry that gets the prized label “progress” tends to generate more downsides than upsides, and that the shining future paradise has been getting visibly further off for decades, has barely begun to dent that touching and childlike faith.
Look away from the mirage of Progress the Great and Powerful and pay attention to the little man behind the curtain, as Dorothy did in The Wizard of Oz, and a very different spectacle meets your view. Every year various technogimmicks get proclaimed by the media as the next grand step in the march of progress. Now and again one of them is genuinely innovative; far more often they’re just excuses to charge more money to provide a good or a service that is no better, and often much worse, than the ones they replace. Even genuine innovations as often as not provide worse quality for a higher price. Calvin Trillin a while back set off nervous laughter by noting that the most frightening word in the English language is “upgrade.” We all know why.
I’m going to turn to a specific example at this point, largely because I just got up a moment ago to replace one black and gleaming disk with another on my version thereof. The electronic stereo playing vinyl records was the standard technology for recorded music at home half a century ago. Due to genuine advances in electronic technology, the art of recording and replaying musical performances reached an extraordinarily high level in the era of the stereo. I’ve found, in fact, that when I have young visitors in my apartment and put a record on, their eyes bug out at the richness and clarity of the sound from my two modest speakers—and thereby hangs a tale.
Vinyl records were replaced with compact disks (CDs) over a short period in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The new technology benefited from plenty of high-pressure marketing from big corporations, pushing it as a far better audio technology. Plenty of audiophiles noted that music on CDs sounded flat and tinny; supposed experts were trotted out by the score to insist that the audiophiles were wrong, and must be mishearing the faint hiss of the stereo as musical quality. (You still hear this fib being repeated now and then.) Despite attempts to keep vinyl going in niche markets, the marketing push behind CDs succeeded, and pundits everywhere insisted that the day of the record was over forever.
The audiophiles were right, however. What determines sound quality in a CD is its sampling rate—the number of times per second the software making the recording samples the sound and converts it into digital form. If you have a dense enough sampling rate, you really can make a CD sound very good, but that’s expensive. Record companies accordingly used sampling rates just dense enough to keep most listeners from complaining, and called it good. It was good for their profits, sure, but it made the music sound flat and tinny.
Then came MP3s, digital downloads, and streaming media. Those all have the same problems as CDs, since they all sample sound at intervals, but they have another difficulty as well: the devices used to access them, mostly phones these days, have dismal sound quality. You can improve that somewhat by getting Bluetooth speakers or what have you, but even so, phones are not optimized for reproducing music, and they do a fairly poor job of it.
The official rhetoric has it that the march of progress is unstoppable and we can’t go back to the past. People who care about music haven’t been listening. Vinyl records, consigned to the dustbin of history thirty years ago, were a $1 billion business worldwide last year and are on track to break that figure this year. The used-vinyl market is huge, and manufacturers are also getting back into the business in a big way with a mix of old classics and new releases. For that matter, the lowly cassette tape, consigned just as casually to history’s dustbin, is also in the midst of a lively revival, with plenty of small bands rediscovering the joys of small-batch tape production, and plenty of users relearning the trick of winding a cassette with a #2 pencil.
That’s not the only example of the kind. Another is the Canadian tractor company Ursa Ag, which recently set shockwaves in motion by marketing a line of tractors with no onboard computers at all. Tractors these days are fragile, overpriced monstrosities in which everything is done by computer. They break down constantly because of excessive complexity, and only authorized repair firms are allowed to fix them, at wildly inflated prices and with long delays.
Ursa Ag’s tractors are on the other end of the spectrum. They’re simple, sturdy, easy to repair, and cost a modest fraction of what the big boys are charging. Unsurprisingly, the demand is so high that they’re scrambling to expand production lines, because what they offer is what farmers actually want. It’s also the kind of tractor that was standard on North American farms in 1970 or so. Once again, somebody pushed the rewind button on progress, and the people most directly affected by it couldn’t be happier.
On the off chance that anybody from the Trump administration is reading this, may I offer a suggestion? It would be child’s play to revitalize the US auto industry, set off a huge hiring boom for factory workers, and double or triple the cheering crowds that show up the next time the Orange One holds a rally. All you have to do is get rid of the forest of regulations that keep small to midsized American companies from getting into the auto business and manufacturing the kind of cars people want to drive, which not surprisingly are the kind they drove half a century ago, unburdened with onboard computers and the rest of the garbage with which “progress” has weighed down today’s cars. Yes, I know, those regulations have all sorts of excuses justifying them—safety, environmental concerns, you name it—but the real point of every one of them is to keep auto manufacturing a closed oligopoly in which big car manufacturers can ignore what buyers want. Prune those regulations, and let the market do its magic.
For that matter, if any Ford Motor Company executives happen to read this, I have a helpful suggestion for you, too. Cooperate with the mass pruning of regulations, and then get one of your factories turning out brand new copies of the 1966 Mustang fastback. You’ve still got the plans, right? Don’t change a thing. Leave out all the “improvements,” and sell them at a price that gives you the same profit per vehicle you pocketed back in 1966. Your sales and stock value will take off—well, there’s no other way to put it: like a ‘66 Mustang when the light turns green and the driver floors it. You’re welcome, and you can thank me with a few hundred shares of stock.
These are examples of what I’ve come to think of as the first stage of retrovation. Retrovation? That’s a term I coined a decade ago, a portmanteau of “retro” and “innovation.” It’s the process of searching through the past for technologies that have been discarded by the onward march of soi-disant “progress” but are better suited to current conditions than the things that replaced them. There are a lot of those just now, and people are beginning to catch on to this at all levels of society. Need I mention the world’s intelligence services, many of which have gone back to manual typewriters and locked filing cabinets when handling their most crucial secrets, because those are so much more difficult to hack than anything that makes use of computers?
Again, though, this is just the first stage of retrovation. That’s the stage at which retrovators blow the dust off technologies that were widely used in their day, but got shoved out of use by some supposedly better product. There’s an enormous amount of first-stage retrovation still to be done, and an increasingly large number of people are working hard at it. I expect to see much more of it as we continue lurching unsteadily down the slope of resource depletion, not least because it’s the low-hanging fruit of retrovation.
It’s when we get to the second stage of retrovation that things get both more interesting and more chancy. The second stage involves searching through the past for technologies that were invented but never got a large market share, because the money and the marketing went a different way. There are plenty of those, too, but second-stage retrovation is trickier, because the pluses and minuses of widespread use of these technologies can’t be determined by a glance at what happened a few decades or centuries ago. There are still bugs to be worked out and potential applications yet to be discovered.
One good example is electroculture. Back in the late 19th century, before the chemical industry seized its current stranglehold on agricultural fertilization, scientists ran any number of double-blind controlled experiments showing that a weak direct electric current passing through moist soil makes plants thrive. There’s nothing especially mysterious in this effect—the current ionizes soil nutrients and make them more bioavailable to plant roots. Until the 1940s, electroculture was something that adventurous gardeners and small farmers experimented with, often with very respectable results. It was seen in many circles as the coming trend—as “progress,” in fact.
All that was swept away once the Second World War ended, the chemical industry had to find something new to produce to replace the vast amounts of explosives that padded the profits of chemical firms while the fighting was on. Chemical pesticides got marketed using the same high-pressure tactics that made CDs popular—backed up, of course, by government regulations that favored chemical fertilizers and pesticides over the alternatives—and today’s chemical-soaked agriculture duly followed. You have to do a lot of digging to find out that cancer rates exploded promptly thereafter, or that cancer in children was so rare before then that individual cases got written up in medical journals. Ah, progress!
Old manuals of electroculture can still be found quite easily in online archives, however, and as the petrochemicals needed to manufacture chemical fertilizers become more expensive, it may be worth trying electroculture again, at least in some applications. How well will it work? We don’t know yet. What is it best suited for? Here again, the research still has to be done. What are the long term consequences for soil health? Nobody has the least idea. Retrovators who decide to explore this have plenty of options—just now, at least, photovoltaic panels quite adequate to put that trickle of current through a garden bed are cheap and easy to come by—but detailed notes and a great many tests are needed to find out whether the result is a curiosity or a treasure.
Many of the ecological technologies invented in the 1970s also fall into the realm of second-stage retrovation. I’ve commented before that of all the remarkable innovations in the 1970s appropriate tech movement, the only ones that got picked up by the more recent corporate-funded green movement were the handful that increased individual dependence on big corporations. Most of the discoveries of that era made people more independent, and so were deep-sixed by the minions of corporate pseudoenvironmentalism. A few such technologies, such as fireless cookers and solar water heaters, have a fair track record behind them, but many other creations of the era do not. Retrovators in this field thus have plenty of work to do.
Then we get to the third stage of retrovation, and things get spooky. There are whole families of technologies that were discarded, not because they didn’t work and work well, but because the scientific theories that happen to have become fashionable insist that they can’t work. It so happens that most of the examples I know here have to do with healing, and the most widely practiced of them, back in the day, was homeopathy.
I’m going to focus here on one of the many branches of homeopathic medicine, partly because it’s the one I use and partly because it’s been sedulously ignored by the pseudoskeptics who like to assail anything that doesn’t make profits for Big Pharma. This is biochemic medicine, and its medicines are called cell salts or tissue salts. There are 12 inorganic minerals found in macroscopic quantities in the human body. Take one of them and put it through a specific process of dilution and succussion (rapid shaking) until the resulting medicine has one part per million of the original mineral. You have to do the succussion, by the way, or you don’t get the effect.
And the effect? If you gulp down a significant dose of sodium phosphate dissolved in water, let’s say, it will produce nausea and certain other symptoms. If you feel nausea or one of those other symptoms for some other reason, and you take the diluted, succussed sodium phosphate (Nat. phos. 6x, in homeopathic jargon), it will relieve the nausea. That doesn’t seem to be caused by any physical or chemical process…and this is where things get spooky.
If you read old homeopathic textbooks, you’ll find an explanation that makes perfect sense, so long as you don’t mind flinging down and trampling on the core prejudices of modern thought. According to these sources, there is something—call it Factor X—that is present in sodium phosphate, but can be communicated to other substances by succussion. The body is sensitive to Factor X. When the body senses a lot of Factor X, it braces itself for the arrival of a strong dose of sodium phosphate—but when the sodium phosphate doesn’t arrive, the body’s homeostatic reaction swings it in the other direction, away from (for example) the nausea sodium phosphate would cause. It’s a neat sort of judo move that seems to resolve many health conditions. The problem, of course, is that Factor X doesn’t seem to be a material substance.
Nothing, but nothing, gets the defenders of modern scientific orthodoxy into a towering fury faster than suggesting that something that isn’t material can have material effects. It doesn’t matter that cosmologists have had to admit that around 85% of the mass in the universe isn’t matter as we know it—the phrase “dark matter” is a polite way of saying “it’s there but we have no clue what it is.” It doesn’t matter that nearly every human society in all of history but ours treats the life force, the most likely candidate for Factor X, as an ordinary part of everyday life, and most of them use it on a daily basis for healing among other purposes. It doesn’t matter, either, that there are reams of double-blinded, controlled studies showing that homeopathy does what it claims to do. (Here’s a 231-page bibliography of such studies to get you started.) The invincible ignorance and rigid prejudices central to contemporary scientific thought lead a great many authority figures to reject the whole subject out of hand, typically with an entertaining display of purple-faced, saliva-spraying rage.
The fact that every dollar spent on inexpensive homeopathic medicines deprives pharmaceutical firms of the chance to demand hundreds or thousands of dollars for their overpriced, problem-ridden products doubtless has a lot to do with this. The same thing is true, of course, of most other forms of alternative healing, which are generally much cheaper and have many fewer and less damaging side effects than the quack nostrums being pushed these days by Big Pharma and its enablers in government and the medical industry. Still, the prejudices themselves have power, and that power has to be taken into account as we proceed.
I could go on, but it’s probably best to stop here and glance back over the landscape we’ve traversed. There are literally thousands of technologies, abandoned, forgotten, and accursed, spread across the three stages of retrovation. That’s why I chose to highlight just a few examples in each stage in this post. Anything more comprehensive would require a book—and curiously enough, that’s a book I’m thinking about writing.
Think of it as the Technonomicon, a tome of forbidden technologies dating from eldritch aeons before the dominance of our current heavily marketed suite of energy-gobbling gimmicks and time-wasting trash. I imagine each of the technologies being given a page or two, with a basic description and some references for the curious. The one limitation in the way of this project is that I don’t have the technical expertise to assess more than a modest number of the many available options. What I do have is the best as well as the weirdest commentariat on the internet, packed with people nearly as odd as I am (which of course is saying something) who have studied the most astonishing range of strange subjects and forgotten skills.
Therefore, dear readers, I’m laying down a challenge. Help me with this. I need good solid reading material on abandoned technologies—references to books, whenever possible, with author, title, and publication data. I also need your own experiences with this or that abandoned, forgotten, or accursed technology. Let me know what worked for you and how other people can learn more about it. Little things are as important as big ones, and it doesn’t matter when they dropped out of use, if they ever did find a market.
If this takes off, I’ll put up regular posts on my Dreamwidth journal to provide a venue for continuing discussion. This might just become the Whole Earth Catalog of the Long Descent. Shall we give it a try?
(8/5 edit: This project is now formally under way. I’ve posted something on my Dreamwidth journal here, giving details for how interested readers can help it along.)