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The newest technologies look most likely to vanish; the oldest may always be
with us
Jan 26th 2013 |From the print edition
THE paperless office has earned a proud place on lists of technological
promises that did not come to pass. Surely, though, the more modest goal of the
carbon-paperless office is within the reach of mankind? Carbon paper allows two
copies of a document to be made at once. Nowadays, a couple of keystrokes can
do the same thing with a lot less fuss.
Yet carbon paper persists. Forms still need to be filled out in a way that
produces copies. And there are other niches: tattooists and pigeon racers,
apparently, find it vital (see article).
This should not come as a surprise. Innovation tends to create new niches,
rather than refill those that already exist. So technologies may become
marginal, but they rarely go extinct. And today the little niches in which old
technologies take refuge are ever more viable and accessible, thanks to the
internet and the fact that production no longer needs to be so mass; making
small numbers of obscure items is growing easier.
On top of that, a widespread technostalgia seeks to preserve all the ways
people have ever done anything, simply because they are kind of neat. Steam
locomotives; trebuchets; papyrus scrolls: all boast bands of enthusiasts making
or restoring them, and sometimes making a nice profit selling the results to
kindred aficionados with money to spare.
As a result technologies from all the way back to the stone age persist and
even flourish in the modern world. According to What Technology Wants , a book
by Kevin Kelly, one of the founders of Wired magazine, America s flintknappers
produce over a million new arrow and spear heads every year. One of the things
technology wants, it seems, is to survive.
Carbon paper, to the extent that it may have a desire for self-preservation,
may also take comfort in the fact that, for all that this is a digital age,
many analogue products are hanging on, and even making comebacks. Connoisseurs,
snobs and old-skool DJs will pay top dollar for vinyl; some photographers still
treasure the information density of large-format film, or the chemical
idiosyncrasies of the Polaroid.
Oldies and goodies
Indeed, digital technologies may prove to be more ephemeral than their
predecessors. They are based on the idea that the medium on which a file s
constituent 0s and 1s are stored doesn t matter, and on Alan Turing s insight
that any computer can mimic any other, given memory enough and time. This
suggests that new digital technologies should be able to wipe out their
predecessors completely. And early digital technologies do seem to be
vanishing. The music cassette is enjoying a little hipster renaissance, its
very infidelity apparently part of its charm; but digital audio tape seems
doomed.
So revolutionary digital technologies may yet consign older ones to the
dustbin. Perhaps this will be the case with a remarkable breakthrough in
molecular technology that could, in principle, store all the data ever recorded
in a device that could fit in the back of a van (see article). In this
instance, it would not be a matter of the new extinguishing the old. Though it
may never have been used for MP3s and PDFs before, DNA (the molecule in
question) has been storing data for over three billion years. And it shows no
sign of going extinct.