#102: You Can't Go Home Again
Over the course of the last twenty years, as cell phones and then smartphones saturated the market, it was common to have some friends who held out and refused to get one for years after everyone else had. At some point, probably in the late ‘00s, it became pretty much impossible for anyone not to have some kind of mobile phone—being unable to communicate on the go imposed an increasingly large burden on one’s peers that eventually meant the holdouts effectively disappeared when it came to making plans. The infrastructure of social interaction had reoriented itself around mobile communication so completely that it was quickly impossible to remember how things had worked before, and the few who attempted to stay behind were similarly ineffable. As with other kinds of rapid modernization, this process erased areas of analog social life so thoroughly that virtually no evidence of what it was like remained, at least in one’s ordinary environment. William Gibson said that the future is already here, just not evenly distributed, but eventually that changes and the future melts into a present so familiar it becomes invisible.
A recurring straw man argument about digital technology has been that it isolates and atomizes us by undermining more traditional social arrangements. If you’re reading this, you likely hold the more nuanced view that this technology merely exchanges certain kinds of sociality with others, and that the internet is the opposite of an isolating force for most people, even if human interaction in meatspace is still a fundamental human need. But what is true about the new social infrastructure that replaced the old is that the new infrastructure is literal infrastructure—electronic devices and fiberoptic cables and data centers and the energy that keeps it all flowing—and now our ability to communicate with even our physical neighbors depends more on that system than on any localized community we can access easily without software's assistance. That generally doesn’t matter, because the technology almost always works, but when your phone dies while you’re out of the house, you realize how little is left of what preceded the digital revolution. When the power goes out, in many cases, you really are isolated (finally).
One side effect of software eating the world is that many formerly low-energy activities now require a constant supply of fuel to keep happening. Reyner Banham, describing the various technologies that facilitated the settling of the American wilderness, observed that American-made Jeeps became less versatile and rugged as the infrastructure for driving got better and they no longer had to traverse rough terrain. He also noticed that Coca-Cola vending machines were popping up in remote western towns, and wrote that these machines “imported into their surroundings a standard of technical performance that the existing culture of those surroundings could no more support unaided than could the Arkansas territory when it was first purchased." Today, we could say the same about many of the physical environments where we spend our time—most of our buildings, streets, and cities were built long before our iPhones were and are correspondingly “dumb,” optimized for forms of analog collectivity that only still exist symbolically, if they still exist at all. The devices themselves, by contrast, bypass all of that and connect to a global stack for which cities are just clusters of end users and sources of data. If a few of us sit in a room together, we can all turn our phones off and talk, the same way people have for millennia, but to organize anything more complex, now, we need infrastructure.
Reads:
Everything is Private Equity Now. PE as the inevitable product of today’s economy and the increasingly desperate hunt for financial returns.
Kate Wagner lamenting the ongoing disappearance of the old web. “Non-virality and false obsolescence, when combined with link rot—the natural atrophy of links across time—have led to the quiet erasure of entire swaths of the internet.”
A map visualization of Los Angeles County’s 250,000 swimming pools, which as you might imagine is also a map of socioeconomic status.