Eccentric Flower:200912/Obsolete

Mel and Karen have both commented on this New York article about "things which have become obsolete in the aughts."* Actually you'd do better to go read one of their items first, because what I call the source "article" is actually a useless slideshow which would have been better as a written article - a list, perhaps with some smartass copy.

Notice that "obsolete" and "extinct" aren't the same things. Some of these obsolete things are on the verge of becoming extinct, some aren't, and some New York just plain gets wrong.

In addition, they completely default on the extremely important secondary classifications, such as "is becoming extinct and deserves to be," "is becoming extinct and doesn't deserve to be," "is in a decline now but may well come back," and so forth.

Fortunately, I am here to help, and also to provide you with your RDA of dry bitterness (keeps you regular, you know).

1. Answering machines. I find it interesting, this propagation of the idea that land lines are old-fashioned and only creaky people have one. I sometimes wonder how much of that is deliberately spread by cell phone companies. I recognize the physical number of land lines is declining, but there are perfectly sane and non-Luddite reasons not to abandon them. One day, I think, we will discover the long-term consequences of constant bombardment by cell phone transmissions, and land lines will make a resurgence, and people will joyously re-learn what it was like to actually be able to understand what the person on the other end of the connection was saying.

That having been said, it's not really germane to the concept of the answering machine, because the answering machine never really went away, it just became voice mail. It's possible the standalone answering machine is in a decline along with land lines, but there will always be people who prefer not to trust their messages to the telephone company's servers, just as there will always be people who are not copacetic with cellular service for one of a variety of reasons.

2. Lickable stamps. "Collectors still demand lickables; everyone else sends self-adhesives." Yup. Godspeed and good riddance. When even the postal service concedes it is an evolutionary improvement, the writing is on the wall.

3. Foldable road maps. By which they actually mean paper road maps, the implication being that all the cool kids have those little devices with the tiny unreadable screens that won't stay mounted on your dash properly and holler incorrect directions at you and run out of power and crash occasionally and have bad information and are annoying and can't be used in the dead of wilderness five miles away from your car with a flashlight. Unfortunately they're probably right, paper maps probably are on the way out, but I'm not sure we will be making a good trade. Of course, I say that as a cartography freak. You can't have fun poring over a Garmin for hours.

Me, I carry a local street guide and a national road atlas in my car. I have to pull over to read them if I get lost, but frankly, you weren't doing your driving any favors trying to read your TomTom while your car was in motion either.

4. Cathode-ray tube TVs. Old school CRTs are heavy, bulky, do not scale into large sizes well, are dangerous if opened, dangerous if broken, have a waste disposal problem, and in general are inferior to LCD screens and other flat(tish) technology in all respects except the most important: Better picture. So you'd think I'd bemoan this as a bad trade, or at least a trade we shouldn't rush. But the fact is, I have a space in my living room that I could use a hell of a lot more efficiently if it had a flatscreen display in it; and I reclaimed a similar space in my office and my work environment years ago. And the picture on non-CRT technologies gets better every year as they get cheaper. This is an extinction whose time has come.

5. Incandescent light bulbs. This has been a source of some personal angst for me in the past couple of years, and as a result I have been following the matter closely. I was seriously considering stockpiling bulbs - say, enough to last me a decade or so - because of this. Because I cannot abide fluorescent bulbs for anything other than spot desk lighting. They make rooms look blue and dead; they hum; they give me eyestrain; and they're not as bright as incandescents at anything even near the same range of power consumption. People who talk about the energy efficiency of a fluorescent bulb have never tried putting in a fluorescent that's supposed to be the equivalent to a 75-watt incandescent and watching how much dimmer the room instantly gets.

The matter is given additional anger by the fact that this is the most useless, trivial, blame-the-wrong-people energy saving measure ever devised. It's punishing consumers in their living conditions because the government doesn't have the spine to punish the people who are really doing the massive amounts of ecological damage. If you want to punish consumers somewhere that would matter, mess with their automobiles, not their light bulbs. Better yet, go after heavy industry or the truckers first. And have we discussed the fact that fluorescents have a genuine toxic waste issue? (There's mercury in them thangs, yunno. The EPA has even issued alarm signals about this.)

And yet, I'm not stockpiling incandescents. Because my reading has convinced me that by 2012, the rules of the game will have changed. All the major light bulb players are working on 1) more efficient, 2012-compliant incandescents 2) better color-balanced and safer fluorescents 3) alternate technologies altogether, such as cooler-running and more efficient halogens. Go dig around the web for a while and you'll see. So I'm pretty sure this won't be as apocalyptic as it looks.

6. Paid pornography. Oh boy, New York, you really didn't do your homework, did you? Tsk. You should hire a writer who knows something about the porn market. The copy, such as it is, notes "Five of the 100 top U.S. websites are "tube sites," a.k.a. free-porn portals."

The fact of the matter is, the free-content trend is reversing everywhere as people start to realize they need to make money, but its fastest retrograde motion is in pornography. If a free-porn site isn't a teaser gateway to paid porn, then chances are it is mostly composed of content that's been reposted illegally. The porn industry is even more paranoid than most web content providers, because if they can get a user to pay for it once, that's about the best they can hope for. (And then they hope the user won't just RapidShare the whole thing and pass it around for free.) I judge the state of the web porn industry by how much teaser content a particular site is willing to give away. A few years ago, most sites would have multi-page "tours" which offered thirty-some images all told. Sites would often give away full sets for free to get you to see others. These days you get a page with six images before being sent straight to the pay curtain - if you're lucky.

Sure, there's the amateur stuff, but that revolution is mostly dead, and the amateurs who survived its thrashing-out aren't really amateurs anymore, and they have gone pay like everyone else. And it's not so easy to just find a spot to post your home video. You'll get it up on YouTube - for about ten minutes. Sites that do similar things to YouTube but have no such reservations about content are extremely unsavory, and even your grandmother knows now that going to such places without really good electronic condoms is risky behavior.**

P.S. Playboy is not pornography. But you could have written about the impending extinction of Playboy and it would have been a more interesting item.

7. Smoking in bars. Yes. Smoking outside bars is still around, of course. Smoking in general is on a long slow decline in the rich world. It is not in decline in the poor world. None of this is exactly fascinating new information.

8. Fax machine. Can't possibly become extinct fast enough for me. The lingering survival of the fax machine bewilders me. Some of the devices mentioned here are not as much the sign of a dinosaur as New York wants you to think, but the fax machine is. If you have to deal with an American business which requests that you fax them something, you should reconsider whether you want to deal with that American business, because this will only be the beginning of your troubles with them.

9. Hydrox cookies. It is indeed true that this is the decade where the Hydrox cookie finally died. In an unrelated story, there are people who actually care. (I cared a little bit once, when the cookies were actually different, but by 1997 when I did a comparative tasting, they weren't. See also the 2007 addenda to that article for the fate of Hydrox.)

10. Cassette tapes. I would be interested to know if the sales figures for cassettes refer to commercial, pre-recorded music releases, or to sales of blank tapes, or both. I think cassettes continue to have a life as a mix tool, but not much of one; these days, on most home computers, it's actually easier to make a mix CD than a mix cassette. However, I think a cassette player is a more robust piece of hardware than a CD player (he says drily, having discovered the average lifespan of a cheap CD/DVD player's motor is about a year and a half). It's more shockproof, dirtproof, and weatherproof. I could still see justifiable reasons for using a cassette for mixes/home recordings. I could not see any reason whatsoever to buy commercial music in cassette format.

However, the whole thing is moot because frankly, all dedicated physical storage media for music are on a course to obsolescence. Flash memory is plummeting so fast down the cost/disposability line that soon, if you want to make a mix CD for your friends, you'll just go buy ten little datakeys and copy the files, rather than buying ten blank CDs and going through the still-moderately-slow-and-accident-prone process of writing them.

11. The French franc. Adieu. But why not single out any of the other currencies eliminated in the Euro zone? As I recall, they had pretty nifty looking money in the Netherlands as well. Where are the tears for Austria, Belgium, Cyprus, Finland, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Malta, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Spain?

The euro is a fabulous idea. That and the Schengen area were the two best things to happen to Europe in a very long time, but the latter is mostly of concern to internals; as tourists, though, the euro makes our lives better as well. And if that means we lose some of the distinctive character of local currencies, well, you can always go admire British coins.

12. Floppy disc. Yes, well, is this really a noteworthy obsolescence? Was this trip really necessary? The Hydrox item was more interesting.

13. Phone book. Now this is an interesting one. I would have expected the phone book to become more obsolete than it is. But it hasn't, and calling it so might be wishful thinking. I think the issue with the phone book is threefold: 1) Local information. 2) Ease of interface 3) Powerless access. The fact of the matter is, you can use the phone book even when you're not at the computer, when your computer's not on, and you don't have to think about how to use it or wait for the search engine to find something. And it's a known thing. I wouldn't know where to go on the web to find accurate phone listings for my locality, and frankly, I wouldn't bother looking there first. Until all that changes, I think the phone book is going to stick around.

14. Polaroid photo. New York admits this is "not dead yet!" ... so the item really shouldn't have made the list at all, then, right, New York?

However - Polaroid photos are effectively dead, optimistic copy notwithstanding. But only because film is dead. The instant-feedback, garage-band characteristics that made Polaroids so popular and useful have been replicated by digital cameras. The only next step needed is to make the viewscreen on a digital camera bigger so people can actually look at the photos in a meaningful way before they ever leave the camera. Film is expensive and uses scarce resources. The pro and semi-pro photographers I know have all either gone digital or are contemplating how they can do it. Polaroid may make film again, but it will be for a hard core of devotees only; Polaroid is officially a curiosity at this point. What will open people's eyes is when Kodak becomes a curiosity too. That will happen next decade.

15. Bank deposit slip. That implies one uses a slip on the rare occasions one makes a physical check deposit in the first place. If I'm depositing checks and the ATM already has a record of the transaction, and the checks are endorsed, why would the bank need a separate slip to confirm information they could already get from the checks and the transaction record? I haven't used deposit slips in ages, and not one bank has ever given me trouble because of it.

It would have been a far more interesting item to discuss the impending extinction of the bank teller. We have just about entered an era where the privilege of talking to a human in a bank will become a "gold card" service, available as an additional option for high-rollers and the finicky for an additional yearly fee. I wouldn't be at all surprised to hear that some banks are doing this already.

16. Subway token. Of course they use the picture of the Y-cutout NYC token, the only subway token that could ever be said to have had an interesting design, and thus the only one which was ever mourned. Consider that along with the many, many compensatory efficiencies of card systems as you make your mental profit/loss calculations in this matter.

17. The Rolodex. I modestly propose that the Rolodex was obsolete well before the Naughts.

* I prefer to call this decade the Naughts, especially since it hasn't been a very good decade. Those who had a better decade than others can call it the Naughties, at their discretion.

** I look at a lot of porn sites. I also have an extremely well-tended piece of antivirus software, anti-spyware software, anti-rootkit software, and a firewall set on "kill." I have not caught anything nasty from a disreputable web site in quite a while - but something has to be terminated with prejudice every time I go out surfing, without fail. Every single time.