Ghosts in the machine?
why I'm terrified of obsolete tech
A few years ago, I found a very old mobile phone in a junk shop in Hong Kong. And, of course, by “very old” I mean “from the 80s”. The sliding scale of agedness is a funny thing. A house, a vase, or even a person from the 80s could all be considered relatively new. But, for a piece of technology from an industry built on planned obsolescence, the 80s might as well be the dawn of time.
The phone, a black Motorola, was a brutalist relic the length (including the aerial) of a small baguette. I picked it up, discovering it was even heavier than it looked. The buttons were deeply rooted and stiff. The whole thing gave me a sinking feeling in my stomach, or what my mum used to call “the willies”. I bought it anyway, as a present for my dad who - far from sharing my fear of obsolete tech – loves this sort of thing. The phone now stands on a shelf in his house. Every time I see it, I imagine my terror and repulsion if the thing – horror of horrors – started ringing.
I’ve Googled the hell out of my aversion to old technology, and can’t find a name for the phobia, a psychological explanation for it, or even a single other sufferer. Maybe this is because it’s so difficult to put the feeling I get from a prototypical mobile phone, or a blocky 70s computer, into words. There’s something about knowing that – in a time where what we still refer to as “phones” can be used carry out every function from playing TV shows to recording high quality video – these obsolete specimens are still able to carry out their puny little functions, as if time never moved on. This makes them – to me at least – ghostly. An old, black-screened computer, still running lines of pixelated green text, while civilisation crumbles under the weight of the internet, and deranged billionaires send cars into space.
Jacques Derrida probably would have diagnosed me with existential dread induced by what he called “hauntology”. Derrida described hauntology as the “nostalgia for lost futures”. Essentially, we’re haunted by our past (I mean… no shit, Derrida). What once was considered futuristic (a good example of this is the beepy, slightly distorted tones of early electronic music) is now an eerie anachronism. And all of this boils down to me being profoundly creeped out by the Space Jam website, which is famously unchanged since 1996.
Maybe a more relatable example of what – as an obsolete tech fearer – I find unsettling is this, the first ever recording of a human voice. In 1860 – a year before the US Civil War and over thirty years before the invention of the toaster – French inventor Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville recorded someone singing the nursery rhyme Au Clair De La Lune. The granular, barely-recognisable-as-human voice was captured in time, on his phonautograph – the earliest known sound recording device. When you listen to this, you’re hearing the voice (such as it is) of someone who lived to see the abolition of slavery. Someone both anonymous and so long dead that the spectral trace of their voice may be only thing left of them.
For anyone into the paranormal, or at least anyone who’s ever watched Most Haunted, the voice may sound like an EVP, or electronic voice phenomenon. These are supposed spirit voices caught via electronic recordings. The idea is you leave a recorder running in, say, Hampton Court Palace, and pick up the scratchy and otherworldly sound of Anne Boleyn asking Henry VIII if stuffed swan is OK for dinner. If you think about it though, all voice recordings – supernatural or otherwise – are either of the dead or those who will die at some point.
And maybe that old mobile phone seems like another medium for the voices of the dead. When I was a kid, I remember a friend of mine seeing a 1950s radio owned by my dad, and saying, “Wow, that must play really old fashioned music.” I explained to her that – no – it actually played whatever was on right now. Which somehow seemed even stranger to my friend than the idea of a time capsule radio, trapped in the year it was manufactured, forever blaring out crackly Buddy Holly tunes. And that’s the thing, it kind of is stranger. That old-timey radio simply can and will play WAP by Cardi B, feat. Megan Thee Stallion, and that – to me – seems messed up.
I imagine the voice on the end of the phone to be grainy and distant.
“Hello? Hello?” it says, before the speaker hangs up and dissolves into nothingness.
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