The internet
this post was submitted on 23 Oct 2024
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Aah.. Boomer bait, we get that a lot :s
Oh man...I have an entire ten page paper on the go about this topic and it just keeps growing. One day I'll publish it in a blog or something, but for now it's just me vomiting up my thoughts about mass market manufacturing and the loss of zeitgeist.
The examples that I always use are a) Camera Lenses, b) Typewriters, and c) watches.
Mechanical things age individually, developing a sort of Kami, or personality of their own. Camera lenses wear out differently, develop lens bokehs that are unique. Their apertures breath differently as they age No two old mechanical camera lenses are quite the same. Similarly to typewriters; usage creates individual characteristics, so much so that law enforcement can pinpoint a particular typewriter used in a ransom note.
It's something that we've lost in a mass produced world. And to me, that's a loss of unimaginable proportions.
Consider a pocket watch from the civil war, passed down from generation to generation because it was special both in craftsmanship and in connotation. Who the hell is passing their Apple Watch down from generation to generation? No one....because it's just plastic and metal junk in two years. Or buying a table from Ikea versus buying one made bespoke by your neighbour down the street who wood works in his garage. Which of those is worthy of being an heirloom?
If our things are in part what informs the future of our role in the zeitgeist, what do we have except for mounds of plastic scrap.
Just wanted to say thank you for writing this. Very cool take, that was so well written to get us on board for how and why "that old junk" has personality that is being lost.
Also
Damn.
Awww shucks. Thanks. I appreciate the compliment.
Damn.
Not much to say other than -- "Damn."
You're right, though.
Old camera lenses are awesome. I've got some steel and glass rokkors that are beautiful. They render in such a wonderful way too, so painterly. They have thorium in the glass! Not enough to be sketchy to use but something that obviously isn't done anymore. Bonus points that they can be fixed with a hammer.
Old camera stuff in general is subjectively cooler. The leaf shutters in my 4x5 lenses are incredible little machines. Film in general is cooler than whatever sensor the latest and greatest has. Actual bits of silver suspended in emulsion, with colour filters and dye couplers that react in development. There's a great three part video on YouTube breaking down Kodak's manufacturing process. It's mind boggling that stuff even works. Ohhhh and actually darkroom optical prints! Don't get me started there!
I'm going to develop some rolls I think. Got me in the mood.
I have a couple of 80s Rokkors that I use with a speedbooster on my lumix g9, a 50mm and a 35mm. Despite having to do some math in terms of converting things like focal length, etc... because of the adaptor, It's WELL worth it.
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The technology behind telecommunication.
Today everything happens inside your router, fast and silent. My father was a telecommunications engineer. When I was a amall boy (late 1980s) he once took me to his workplace (it was in the evening and he was supposed to troubleshoot). What today fits onto a few silicone chips inside a router took much more space back them.
I was in a room that was filled with several wardsobe-sized cabinets. Inside there were hundreds of electro-mechanical relays that were in motion, spinning and clicking, each time someone in the city dialed a number (back then rotary phones were quite common). It was quite loud. There also was a phone receptor inside one of the cabinets where one could tap into an established connection, listening into the conversation two strage people had (it was for checking if a connectiion works).
I still remeber the distinct "electrical" smell of that room (probably hazardous vapors from long forbidden cable insulation and other electrical components).
So when you dialed a number at one place with your rotary phone, you were able to move some electro-mechanical parts at another place that could be located somewhere else around the globe (hence long distance calls).
Pop up headlights! Way cooler that way. I've heard a couple reasons given for why they stopped being a thing, but one of them is that they were considered too unsafe for pedestrians-
Which is a fucking crazy though when you consider what we now blindly accept in automotive design with respect to pedestrian safety 😅
Yes. I'd rather smash my femur at a pop up headlight while lounching over the engine hood than being dragged underneath an SUV street tank and being squashed.
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I've got another one: Airplanes.
There used to be crazy designs and a lot of variation between planes. Tandem seats, swing wings, dual tailplanes, gull wings, all sorts of crazy design choices side by side. Even commercial airplanes had lots of variation. Trijets with tail stairs, engines embedded in the wing roots.
Planes now all sort of look the same. Every fifth generation fighter looks the same. Granted, this is because they're hitting physical constraints of aerodynamics and stealth, but that limits the creativity of the designers.
I suspect that some of this in the US was due to the strict liability imposed on civil aviation manufacturers in the US. It increased civil aviation safety, but demolished a lot of the civil aviation manufacturers.
In criminal and civil law, strict liability is a standard of liability under which a person is legally responsible for the consequences flowing from an activity even in the absence of fault or criminal intent on the part of the defendant.
It made manufacturers very risk-adverse, placed overwhelming weight on being a known, mature design.
GARA later rolled back some of this, but things never really returned to their original state.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Aviation_Revitalization_Act
The General Aviation Revitalization Act of 1994, also known by its initials GARA, is Public Law 103-298, an Act of Congress on Senate Bill S. 1458 (103rd Congress), amending the Federal Aviation Act of 1958.
General aviation aircraft production in the U.S. -- following its 30-year peak in the late 1970s—dropped sharply over the next few years to a fraction of its original volume—from approximately 18,000 units in 1978 to 4,000 units in 1986. to 928 units in 1994. (In a 1993 speech, Sen. John McCain said "nearly 500 last year [1992]".)
General aviation aircraft manufacturers in the 1980s and 1990s began to terminate or reduce production of their piston-powered propeller aircraft, or struggled with solvency.
At the time, industry analysts estimated that the U.S. decline in general aviation aircraft manufacturing eliminated somewhere between 28,000 and 100,000 jobs—as unit production dropped by 95% between the 1970s peak and the early 1990s—sharply different from other segments of the global aerospace industry, where U.S. market share was still strong.
Product liability costs
Those manufacturers reported rapidly rising product liability costs, driving aircraft prices beyond the market, and they said their production cuts were in response to that growing liability.
Average cost of manufacturer's liability insurance for each airplane manufactured in the U.S. had risen from approximately $50 per plane in 1962 to $100,000 per plane in 1988, according to a report cited by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, a 2,000-fold increase in 24 years.
Rising claims against the industry triggered a rapid increase in manufacturers' liability insurance premiums during the 1980s. Industry-wide, in just 7 years, the manufacturers' liability premiums increased nearly nine-fold, from approximately $24 million in 1978 to $210 million in 1985.
Insurance underwriters, worldwide, began to refuse to sell product liability insurance to U.S. general aviation manufacturers. By 1987, the three largest GA manufacturers claimed their annual costs for product liability ranged from $70,000 to $100,000 per airplane built and shipped that year.
Yeah, and since all those plane makers also do military stuff, the military planes all end up looking the same, too.
We'll never see weird designs like the Catalina or the P-38 again and I'm kinda sad about that. The weirdest things in the sky now are drones. The Bayraktar has a empanage that would make Kelly Johnson proud.
Cars used to be cool. Every car company had some kind of sporty car, a couple cheap cars, a big luxury sedan and, a while ago, a station wagon.
Now every car is an SUV or CUV. Sedans are getting phased out. Cool sports cars don't make money so they don't make them. People don't buy station wagons so they don't make them. And they're pushing big, angry trucks on everyone.
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The internet?
Web 1.0 and even before was way cooler than this corpo bullshit web we have now.
I feel like you don't actually remember what web 1.0 was like. Or even bbs's. They... kind of sucked. I mean they were great for the time, but compared to the internet of today, pathetic.
You could try Gemini or gopher web, it reminds me a lot of web 1.0, both style and community feel.
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