Future Shock, Postmodern Nostalgia, and Uncanny Technologies

Technology and its constant modification fully transforms our everyday life every few years. Our new phones, iPods, iPads, and Kindles, not to mention social websites like Facebook, change how we relate to one another, the rhythms of our work, and our sense of play. While some technologies endure perennially—the pencil comes to mind as something relatively unchanged since the 16th century—chalkboards are fast disappearing. Manual typewriters now appear antique, but so do the earliest Macintosh computers. In her recent book Obsolete: An Encyclopedia of Once-Common Things Passing Us By, Anna Jane Grossman details an entire life-world of 20th century objects, services, and practices that have passed away. Her entries include easy-to-open packaging, girdles, cash, likable stamps, push-buttons and rolodexes—technologies that defined lives, practices, and hopes for the future.

The book is playfully illustrated, written with verve, and makes plain just how much has changed since the recent millennium. Grossman documents superseded technologies, explains how these obsolete technologies once organized social relationships, and reflects on how their passing marks profound changes in our lives. She notes, for instance, that privacy is no longer an expectation at all, but that security is. In itself, this is hardly news, but since she adduces her evidence from often unremarked changes like the demise of diving boards and deep-ends in swimming pools, her book’s peculiar perspective makes the points newly forceful.

In the introduction, Grossman recounts a series of conversations with her octogenarian neighbor, Beatrice. She writes, “I think I was a kind of enigma to Beatrice—a visitor from a world that had changed a great deal since she’d played an active part in it. The idea that I was able to work from home via computer after college was something she never could grasp. She was flummoxed by the way I carried a tiny phone, but often didn’t pick it up when it rang.” Grossman writes movingly of how she helped Beatrice cope with technological change in the ’90s, but it is not Beatrice’s 1940s world-view and expectations that most surprised her. Ironically, Grossman was helping her friend just as our networked world was taking off. It is this more recent kind of acceleration that becomes palpable. When Beatrice died just after the millennium, Grossman helped sort through her apartment.

She writes, “The objects that most interested me were actually the ones I’d bought for Beatrice in the late ’90s: The touchtone phone already looked clunky, with its thick antenna and built in cassette-tape answering machine. The address book that I’d helped her fill out, its pages now yellowing, reminded me that it had been years since I’d added a new name to my Rolodex.” She reminds us that the speed of change is unprecedented, and she finds that “it’s imbued me with a kind of odd nostalgia for right now.”

Grossman turns to futurist Alvin Toffler’s 1970 bestseller Future Shock to understand her nostalgia for the present. Toffler defines this psychic shock as “the dizzying disorientation brought on by the premature arrival of the future.” In such pronouncements, Toffler has the air of a postmodern magus like Brian Oblivion from Videodrome or an American Jean Baudrillard. Certainly Grossman’s feeling of nostalgia for the present is a form of future shock. For me, her turn to Toffler raises a different kind of nostalgia, one that Surrealists like Louis Aragon or the critic Walter Benjamin more fully understood: the nostalgia for another time’s sense of the future. So, while Grossman interviews an aged Toffler on the phone in our shared present, my own impulse is to return to Toffler’s time and to that period’s sense of the future. This cannot be accomplished effectively through his book, which is much too sane and still so relevant. His time’s sense of the future is far more effectively revealed in the eponymous 1972 film.

Future Shock the film was distributed by the text-book publisher McGraw-Hill and screened in high schools throughout the ’70s and early ’80s. Amazingly, Orson Wells stars and narrates Future Shock, himself the bemused traveler from a simpler time confronting the world most persuasively described by William Burroughs and J. G. Ballard. Frantic montages of grocery store aisles, traffic, advertising, mainframe computers, airports, suburban developments, medical labs, and robots are accompanied by dissonant Moog synthesizers and the smooth horn sections of 70s soundtracks. The film unabashedly works with a kind of lurid and exploitative alarmism, as Welles sententiously intones the end of everything: the destruction of family, religion, race, and ultimately the cyborgization and genetic engineering of everyone. Indeed, it seems rather like a film that could have been made by The Dharma Initiative from Lost, a show that itself hinges on a profound nostalgia for postmodernism.

Steampunk cell phone. Artist unknown.

Toffler’s book and most of his pronouncements seem quite reasonable, and it is no more a work of kitsch or object of nostalgia than Marshall McLuhan’s 1961 book, Understanding Media. The film, however, creates a far different feeling, in part because it is played for shock value, but more so because its images of obsolete technologies stand for the future. Montages show us walls of cathode ray televisions, microfiche readers, reels of magnetic tape and mainframes. Its visualizations of cyborgs look like the death of glitter rock. The nostalgia it produces, however, is not the longing to return to the early ’70s, but rather a feeling for the potential futures all these technologies represent. It’s a particularly a postmodern nostalgia. These possible futures are not found only in a kitschy futurist films, but are in fact deeply intertwined with all our technologies – television being a prime example.

William Gibson coined the word “cyberspace” in 1982 as he pounded out the story “Burning Chrome” on a manual typewriter. In 1984 with the publication of Neuromancer, Gibson’s hugely popular cyberpunk novel, the word entered our everyday vocabulary. At the time of its publication, Gibson’s work envisioned a future of networked connectivity and virtual spaces. Indeed, the opening lines of the novel attempt to conjure up a world completely overwritten by technologies of communication: “The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.” The metaphor is effective, haunting, and profoundly melancholy as the transcendent, limitless sky becomes a screen—the static of an empty channel flickering behind the rest of the book’s action. It suggests a world where the horizon of human interaction is a network of communication.

Gibson was not alone in turning to television static to mark a postmodern sensibility. Similar images of televisual anxiety, futures, and melancholy can be found in most postmodern art. To name just a few, Steven Spielberg and Toby Hooper’s film Poltergiest , Nicholas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth, the Ant Farm Collective’s performance and subsequent video MediaBurn, and a number of early music videos, not least the Plasmatics homage to Ant Farm, “The Damned”. Yet the image of television itself, even the in early ’80s, was not quite the future, and this became increasingly clear with the actual development and commercialization of the internet and the cell phone. Writing on the 20th anniversary of Neuromancer, Gibson returned to the famous opening lines:

“It took at least a decade for me realize that many of my readers, even in 1984, could never have experienced Neuromancer’s opening line as I’d intended them to. I’d actually composed that first image with the black-and-white video static of my childhood in mind, sodium-silvery and almost painful—a whopping anachronism … the reader never stopped to think that I might have been thinking, however unconsciously, of the texture and color of a signal-free channel on a wooden-cabinet Motorola with fabric-covered speakers.”

Gibson lovingly evokes his own past here in brilliantly concrete detail. His nostalgia is paradoxical, and its paradox is, I think, typical of our nostalgia for many recently outmoded technologies. This is quite different from the desire to return to a past time, our own youth, or indeed our fascination with more distant eras. The difference is that we do not imagine that these technologies represent a kind of golden-age. Gibson doesn’t invoke black-and-white static as a yearning to return to the late-’40s. Instead, the meaning of this static seems just as Gibson sensed it, an image of a future defined by the connective potential of networked technologies. That the image was produced by early Motorola television shows not how we long to return to a time when televisions were substantial pieces of furniture, but rather how TV technology was oriented towards the future, so much so that its static-filled screen could plausibly become the launching point of a revered cyberpunk novel.

From the Static of Technologies Past, An Image Appears

Static is not the only moment of a televisual future and a postmodern nostalgia. Early television depended on test patterns, both to help engineers and those at home properly tune and adjust their televisions, but also to avoid the static of dead channels. Though some test patterns were produced as large cards to help calibrate early television cameras, most of the broadcast images were created electronically. The most famous is the 1939 RCA Indian Head, generated by the TK-1 monoscope, a sealed vacuum-tube focused on a small metal plate with a carbon etching of the test card art.

The TK-1 broadcast image is ghostly: a glowing white background overlaid with black gridlines which are interrupted by a series of concentric circles, gradients, and scales. Center top, the profile of a Native American in an elaborate feather headdress seemingly floats above the grid, looking to the right. It is tempting to say he is looking towards the future. Many television stations used the Indian Head test card between 1947 and 1970. After the end of the broadcast day, the image of the test pattern would mark the place of the station, accompanied by an invariable 1000 hz tone. Often broadcast throughout the night, the test patterns seemed decidedly occult, charged with a kind of technological magic. This utopian magic explains why the figure of the Indian should be the emblem of an emerging modernity.

Seemingly innocuous test patterns revealed the terrifying power of television, marking its presence in our very homes — we are connected, something could appear.

As a Rousseauian fantasy, the Indian figure marks a romanticized form of existence, and early pioneers of television hoped their achievement would foster far greater connection and a better world. Yet the gaze of this Plains Indian seems almost mystic, looking to a spiritual rather than a material horizon, and so the figure becomes uncanny, disturbing. Most test patterns share something of this, and their uncanny power is, I think, much like Gibson’s image of static. The patterns marked a potential. They completed the broadcast circuit, but they utterly negated the banality of actual television programming. Instead, they simply made present the terrifying power of television, marked its presence—we are connected, something could appear. This is their utopian aspect—since they demonstrate the technological power as a pure form, the viewer of the test card confronts the sheer power of the medium without the reassuring or depressing banality of actual programming.

Not surprisingly, there are devoted collectors of television test patterns. For some collectors, the test pattern represents a straight-forward nostalgia for their own youth, as many boomers still remember the ubiquity of them broadcasting just after midnight and often running until the early hours of the morning. Some collectors make a fetish of their own cities and the changing patterns and logos over the years. However, these collectors are in the minority. In fact, most collectors of television test patterns collect every pattern they can find from around the world. They are less interested in a specific pattern than the very phenomena of test patterns. This kind of nostalgia is not that of one’s own youth, but a nostalgia for the mark of the medium’s pure form—the moment of its unrealized future.

Collecting test patterns must be thought of in a relative sense. Strictly speaking, what television audiences saw were not objects but electronically generated simulations. Most of the rack-mounted generators that produced them were discarded years ago, and as several sighing commentators have noted, presumably the tiny aluminum plates etched with carbon are still sealed inside those tubes, lost forever in slowly disintegrating scrapheaps. Some collectors, like retired television engineer Chuck Pharis, have actually salvaged and revived such generators. Pharis even found the original paintings, the master art work used to create the plates, discarded when the Harrison, New Jersey RCA tube factory was demolished in 1970.

Steampunk TV by © dj_design found on Gadget Porn.com

The utopianism of these obsolete technologies is, however, deeply connected to the uncanny. While Gibson uses static to invoke a future in Neuromancer, Hooper’s Poltergiest figures this same static as a gateway to a horrific past. Yet both uses are fundamentally the same, as the technological medium presented without content signals potential connections, promising to bind people and events to one another in ever more intimate ways. Indeed, perhaps Surrealists like David Lynch and directors of B-horror films have best understood how the promise of technology becomes uncanny.

Uncanny objects inspire a kind of unease, as Freud explains in his essay, “The Uncanny”. He points out that what we are at home with also conceals—that underneath the most banal and habitual might lie something not quite known. As he puts it, yesterday’s familiar god is tomorrow’s repressed and terrifying demon. Technologies of communication, in particular, have always been so powerful they inspire unease, so when they become obsolete it is something like Freud’s demonic powers that are suddenly revealed in them. That power could be a utopian hope that obliterates the banality of their actual content or a terrifying realization that this same connective power unleashes unconscious desires. Indeed, it is only their rote integration into our lives that tames the wonder and horror of our phones and screens. This is a great part of director David Lynch’s particular style of unease.

In films like Eraserhead, the uncanny is produced by a decaying world of steam pipes and florescent lights, but I think of Lynch as the poet of the phone. Phones, that most occult and ubiquitous of communication technologies, exist as pivot points in almost all of Lynch’s films. We should be at home with phones, but Lynch shows us their hidden face; a vast, repressed network of illicit connections, conduits of desire for conspiracy, sex, and murder. Telephony once represented absolute modernism, but the clunky, scratchy and screeching phones in Lynch’s works seem connected directly to some unbelievably powerful, demonic past—but in fact they are pale versions of the seemingly unlimited powers of our cellular lives. Particularly in Wild at Heart and Lost Highway phones appear as menacing objects, a repressed series of connections, made most evident by the resonate, piercing ring of mechanical bells tripped by pulsing electric currents.

Early in Mulholland Dr., a series of phone calls leads down from a sealed executive suite to a dimly lit apartment. In the secluded and obsessively clean room where we begin, an executive speaks into a tiny headset. His phone is a seamless piece of technology, a perfect match for the clean room, allowing this shadowy figure to project itself out through Los Angeles, uncontaminated. The camera, however, lingers on the penultimate caller’s phone, a wall mounted, yellow Western Electric rotary model, perhaps from the ’70s. The phone is attached to a dingy wall, its case stained, and a wire projects from underneath, suggesting the phone has been hacked.

This suspicion is confirmed by the caller’s use of it, dialing too few numbers and depressing the cradle twice. Clearly his movement through the network is somehow illicit. The phone is lit by a Dazor lamp with a round florescent bulb, also attached to the wall. It seems old, greasy, and out of place. It’s the sort of lamp one would more likely see attached to a drill press in a prewar factory. Framed by an aura of ghastly light, the phone is associated with production, the hidden transactions and connections powering the seemingly clean world of the executive. The yellow phone is uncanny, an ordinary object associated with our homes suddenly revealed as a frightening conduit of dangerous desires.

As Gibson himself says of the static that begins Neuromancer, the technological image is a door that swings both ways. It propels us to imagine an unrealized future, and indeed comes to stand for an open, seemingly infinite potential. Yet, those very potentials also open our unconscious, bringing us back to a past’s desire for its own future—one perhaps quite different from our oblivious embrace of contemporary banalities.