Review: Shock of the Old (Part II)

This post constitutes part two of a review of David Edgerton's book Shock of the Old. I shall attempt to make this post stand alone by itself but read Part I if you want the review of the actual book rather than my mad musings.

In Part I, I ended by facetiously summarising my objection to the ideas in the book by saying: Yes. And?

I agree with David Edgerton's ideas. I don't see much problem with them: of course we should take a complete look at the history of technology, rather than one that--as this 2006 Guardian interview with Edgerton says--describes 1940s technology history as one of supersonic flight and atomic power.

Supersonic 1940s: The Bell X-1

When I read this interview (before having read the book) my response was dramatic. Who thinks that the 1940s was a decade of supersonic flight? Is this a popular conception that I've somehow missed out on or an absurd academic one? In the Guardian interview and in the book, Edgerton insists on using the term "we" to describe the position he is attempting to counter. "We think that..." "We believe..." Who is this we and why do they have a rather bizarre view of the 1940s? I absolute agreed, before reading the book, that the 1940s were more of a time of "tanks, aeroplanes, cars, coal and wheat and pig farming."

You could ascribe my objection to pure high and mightyness: I don't think that because I am superior and magically have more knowledge (or the right kind of knowledge) than most. 

Let me defend myself by trying to explain why I think I didn't come into this book with the expectation that technology history, either popularly or academically, never seemed to be quite as extreme as Edgerton makes out (perhaps we should allow that he may have been hyperbolising to make a point).

Finally I will actually disagree with Edgerton. Hold on to your hats, things will get crazy.

Still reading? Something of what Edgerton is worried about, this focus on the absurd magic of the cutting edge, seems to come from the futurist ideas of the 50s-70s, when people were landing on the Moon and everyone fully expected we would have at least a Moon colony and flying cars by now. The science fiction of this period--think Thunderbirds, 2001 and even Back to the Future--are I think symptoms of the possibly more sensible expectation of the everyday person. The future was going to be awesome and it was barely fifty years away, if that.

Alternate future: the Firefly crew on their crowded, jury-rigged bridge.

But I was born in the mid 1980s and my teenage TV science fiction was quite a different story. Dark Angel (2000) was set in a post-apocalyptic future populated almost exclusively by the kind of technologies Edgerton wants to draw attention to: bicycles instead of cars, jury-rigged ways of keeping up with the vanguard of technology. Firefly (2002), the beloved space western, was similar-- the heroes didn't have the cutting edge technology. Unable to access the most cutting edge technology, they too made us of elderly technology (although it looked futuristic to us). Even Stargate which gives us an alternate 'now', has humans in general scrambling to keep up with other technologies and doing many of the things Edgerton wants to highlight: borrowing, reverse-engineering, imitating, jury-rigging. The Dial Home Device for the Earth Stargate was missing and Earth scientists have managed to hack one together out of what, compared to the original technology, amounts to some bits of string and duct tape.

 A generation after Edgerton, I think, the myth of the future has changed from one of the gleaming inventiveness of humanity to one of borrowing and jury-rigging. It's changed enough for me to be genuinely surprised that anyone would look at the 1940s and think "supersonic flight" above "Spitfire" or would feel it necessary to be quite so bombastic about making this point about old technology being important as if it was completely groundbreaking. 

 That's the "Yes" of my fascetious argument. The 'And' therefore expects more from this line of argument. If we have in fact established that there is more to technology that what was invented yesterday, how can we begin to investigate this or make sense of it? This is what I would have liked to read in the book-- some clear suggestion not only that we should look at old, borrowed, regressive and maintained technology as equally important but how we should approach it. The book contains plenty of examples, but I don't think I ever got the sense that Edgerton really knows what the next step is. Perhaps he's got there now, as the book is now a good six years old!

*

And now I must disagree with Edgerton. Or rather, I must query how he appears to conceive of technology (or perhaps how he appears to conceive of how "we" conceive of technology). There is a sense that technologies invented are intended to eclipse their predecessors. For example, I see no reason why the machete as a killing tool should necessarily be outmoded by the gun, bomb, rocket or atomic warhead-- which the book appears to suggest is what is intended by the rocket's invention. If I live in London and want to get people in Paris, I don't have to be in Paris to kill them if I have a rocket. I can simply line up my rocket and fire it. It may not be the cheapest, most efficient or effective method, but it plays quite a different role.

In fact, technology rarely eclipses a previous technology complete because-- like Darwin's semi-apocryphal finches--it occupies quite a different evolutionary niche. A "better" bird doesn't necessarily entirely displace the previous bird because the ways in which it is different may outweigh the ways in which it fills the same task as the earlier bird.

In the killing technology example, the bomb will never replace the machete entirely because the bomb will always play a different role: it is more difficult to acquire, especially in quantity (even with the internet), more indiscriminate and less personal. It destroys people in quite a different way, which must have sociological and psychological implications.

1869 Ladies' Pedal Bicycle

We walk for different reasons and on different journeys than we bike, take a train, drive  or fly. While these are successive transport technologies I just don't see that anyone really dismisses biking because planes exist. This is the level on which Edgerton makes his stand: Bicycles fly in the face of the innovation myth. But do they really?

Consider the bicycle made today. Not the bicycle grandfathered--that's a different story--but the bicycle constructed today. It has a certain shape--penny farthings and choppers being unusual--an airfilled rubber tire, air brakes, a unisex (usually) diamond frame.

There has been innovation. Something has happened to the bicycle to refine it: each component has been initially invented and used and nowadays there is a general consensus on how to make an affordable general-use bicycle that is modern at least to the last 30 years. Even where poverty abounds and jury-rigging is rife, people tend to take what is best and use it. This bicycle is not old at all! The concept of 'a bicycle' may be over a hundred and fifty years old, but since then it has undergone near-continous innovation taking in advances/changes in design, materials, construction methods, methods of maintenance, social norms and changes in use-- all the things Edgerton wants to talk about.

A different kettle of fish: The modern diamond-frame bike.

For me, that is the history of technology and it is absolutely one of innovation. The main invention of technology is important but not nearly so important as the inventions that will improve it-- and they are inventions and I can't really get behind the idea that they aren't new.

I saw a thing once about a lighting technology used in some towns in the Philippines which consisted of a plastic bottle full of water wedged in a hole in the roof. You can try this at home! The water acts as a lens to 'capture' and redirect the light more effectively than a simply using a piece of plastic as a window.

Edgerton would love this as a piece of Old Technology. But is it old? It makes use of simple materials and a basic understanding of light (or even an observation of it), it's cheap and near-universally available. But it wasn't being done ten years ago and now it's being done. It's not advanced, certainly, but that's not necessarily what we're talking about.

The Shock of the Old has something to say, but it doesn't seem to have enough to say. We need to know: what is a distinct technology? When is a technology newly invented and when merely updated? If an old thing like a bicycle is made out of radically innovated parts and materials, is it still an old technology (I'm looking at you, Bugatti Veyron)? Is the Concorde a new thing entirely or just an updated plane? Shouldn't we be looking at technologies more closely (e.g. the tires of a bicycle rather than the bicycle as a whole) to make more sense out of the progress of technology? Are innovations in maintenance of old things innovations? What role does the niche of technology play in how it is eclipsed, or not? Without these questions being at least addressed-- at least asked-- the whole book boils down to the rather unshocking observation of: "not everyone uses the newest stuff".

Yes. And?