Everything works fine until it doesn’t
One of the ironies of the age is that anyone of ‘a certain age’ (like me) can be found harping on about how things were in their youth – and how baffling or stupefying the modern world increasingly tends to be – and yet half the time we’re also part of it.
On the Rust there’s always been a healthy degree of anarchy in our editorial line. At the point when I first joined the band of contributors the theme ‘We’re commenting upon the world as it is in the 21st Century whilst simultaneously documenting the vagaries of growing old as we come across them …’ seemed to hold a certain sway amongst the powers-that-be, but over time that gradually morphed into a somewhat vaguer ‘Oh, any old how will do – just write about anything that takes your fancy’ and for the most part that’s the mine in which I’ve been digging ever since.
The other day there was some media story about modern technology doing the rounds – nothing unusual about that – but it was illustrated by some 1980s politician or statesman talking on (or maybe just posing with, pretending) what must, at the time, have been a cutting-edge symbol of the wonders of the modern world – viz. a mobile phone.
A mobile phone about the size and weight of a breeze block.
The sort of thing that in the good old days always used to be carried around in a red box by a senior official, accompanied by four secret service heavies, behind the President of the United States in case he either wanted to ring USSR President Khruschev about the Cuban Missile Crisis, or press the nuclear button, or perhaps both.
[Satire warning – this doesn’t seem to happen in 2017, but let’s hope that this is because somewhere in US constitutional law and/or convention it has been decreed that if your President is deemed ‘unsafe’ you don’t let him loose with the wherewithal to initiate the end of the world].
But back to my point.
When I saw said image, I couldn’t help a smile forming upon my lips. In today’s modern age, when even someone as technologically illiterate as me – who owns a year-old smartphone no doubt capable of doing all a modern example of said item can do, but who has ‘switched off’ ever single app, facility and capability he has been able to identify within its workings for fear of incurring unending costs without knowing it, and who de facto who uses it solely to make telephone calls and send texts – can shake his head at this absurdly unwieldly proof of how primitive phone technology was just thirty years ago.
How did our scientists – still less we ordinarily mortals – ever kid ourselves that a 1980s mobile phone was the ‘current’, still less ‘future’, way the modern world was going?
Because at the time, of course, that’s what it was. To be walking down the street, either with a breeze-block shape bulging in your inside jacket pocket, or indeed holding one to your ear was (at the time, if memory serves) just about the coolest thing on the planet.
I can remember walking around all day at my place of work wearing a kind of holster contraption over my left shoulder in which – rather in the manner in which Clint Eastwood playing an ex-CIA man in the movie In The Line Of Fire (1993) housed his government-issue handgun – I kept my original Nokia phone with a little aerial sticking out the top of it.
The wider answer, of course, is that – without first going via such clunky, breeze-block sized, mobile phone technology, the modern day successors of those scientists then working in the field would never have got to where they are now, today, in 2017.
This is consistent with a thought that (a little unfairly perhaps) came to me during a recent visit – after about a thirty year gap – to the Science Museum in London.
On display were wondrous examples of James Watt steam etc. engines from the 18th Century [billed in the accompanying blurb as entitling him to the accolade of being the ‘Founding Father of the First Industrial Revolution’].
All very impressive.
But then I got to thinking “Well, hang on – if Watt … or indeed The Master himself, Leonardo da Vinci … had been such great scientific minds, why didn’t they come up with concepts such as the telephone, the internet, space rockets and perhaps Amazon drones delivering online-ordered goods to our doorsteps one day at the same time?”
Yes, okay … okay. I get it. The answer is that they were ‘of their time’. Plus human beings get used to what they get used to. Not too far from now today’s ‘cutting edge’ will be tomorrow’s given. Today’s crazy fashions and fads will soon be as quaint and ‘in the past’ to today’s human beings under the age of forty as 1970s flared trousers, 1960s mini skirts and (whenever they were) de Loran motor cars now seem to me. And I was there at the time.
The reason I came to these things as my subject for the day is that – about 90 minutes ago – the bloody internet where I’m currently staying ‘went down’ and, despite all efforts, there has been literally nothing I have been able to do that will prompt it to come back.
So far.
It’s funny how irritated I became about this state of affairs this morning.
Twenty years ago (if I remember correctly) one had to ‘dial up’ the internet and wait about a minute for the dialling tone to go through a tired sequence of several long notes before anything happened.
And, if and when anything did happen, one felt singularly blessed. Rather like in the good old days, when in some far off land on the outer edge of civilisation, one came across a semi-connection to Blighty in the form of a crackly version of the BBC World Service on one’s portable radio and felt deeply relieved and glad of it.
