Some time ago I warned that we were witnessing an interesting technological regression. First of all, the disturbing influence of television had been put in check thanks to the remote control, enabling viewers to channel-hop and thus ushering in a phase of creative freedom. Final liberation from television came with the video recorder, which was a step toward cinematography. The remote control could also be used to mute the sound, so returning to the delights of the silent movie. In the meantime, the Internet, an eminently literate form of communication, had disposed of the dreaded Culture of the Image. At this point pictures, too, could be eliminated, inventing a sort of box that just emitted sounds and required no remote control. I thought I was joking at the time in imagining the rediscovery of radio, but I was prophesying—evidently through some supernatural inspiration—the advent of the iPod.
We reached the final stage when, after broadcasts on the airwaves, the new era of cable television arrived with pay-TV, passing from wireless telegraphy to cable telegraphy, a phase completed by the Internet, thus superseding Guglielmo Marconi and going back to Antonio Meucci and Alexander Graham Bell.
I expounded this theory about the march backward in my book Turning Back the Clock, where I applied these principles to political life—and, what’s more, I recently noted that we are returning to the nights of 1944, with military patrols in the streets and teachers and children in school uniform.
Then something else happened. Computers become obsolete in three years. Anyone who has had to buy a new one recently will have found that computers now have Windows Vista already installed. Now, you only have to read the various Internet blogs about what users think of Vista (I won’t go any further for fear of ending up in court), and hear the views of your friends who have fallen into that trap, to come to the perhaps mistaken, but absolutely firm, conclusion not to buy a computer with Vista installed. And yet, if you want an up-to-date computer of reasonable dimensions you have to put up with Vista. Or make do with a clone as large as a trailer truck, put together by an eager seller who will still install Windows XP and earlier versions. Your desk will then look like an Olivetti laboratory with the 1959 Elea computer.
I think the computer manufacturers are realizing that sales are falling significantly as customers decide not to buy a new computer so as to avoid Vista. So what then? To find out, go to the Internet and look for “Vista downgrading” or something similar. There you will learn that if you’ve bought a new computer with Vista, spending whatever it cost, then by paying yet more, and going through a complex procedure that I gave up trying to follow, you could go back to using Windows XP or earlier versions.
Computer users know what upgrading is. So downgrading is taking your highly advanced computer back to the happy condition of the older system—for a price. Before the Internet had invented this magnificent neologism, a normal dictionary defined the word “downgrade” as a noun meaning a downward gradient or descending slope, or a downward course or tendency in morals, religion, etc., while as a verb it means to reduce to a lower grade, rank, or level of importance. We are therefore being offered the opportunity, with much effort and for a certain amount of money, to lower the grade, rank, or level of importance of something for which we have already paid a certain sum. This would be unbelievable if it weren’t for the fact that it’s true: hundreds of poor computer buffs are working away madly online and paying whatever it costs to downgrade their software. Are we ever going to reach the stage when, for a reasonable sum, we can exchange our computer for an exercise book with an inkwell, pen, and Perry & Co. nib?
But the whole thing is not so paradoxical. Some technological advances cannot be bettered. A mechanical spoon cannot be invented: what was invented two thousand years ago is still fine as it is. The Concorde has been abandoned even though it flew between Paris and New York in three hours. I’m not so sure it was the right thing to do, but progress can also mean moving back a few steps, such as reverting to wind power instead of using oil, and so forth. Be prepared for the future! Full speed backward!
2008