20/1/95

The Prefuture Era

Nowadays, all technology is either outdated or a step into the next generation. Nothing is comfortably contemporary.

    "You have a virus."
    "Oh God, oh God, oh God, oh no, oh hell." It was the call everybody dreads to get.
    Softly, he tried to reassure me. "It doesn't have to mean the worst, you know."
    Why me? A panic overwhelmed me. "I must have infected others. I -- I've been around."
    "Relax," he said, "it can be treated. Just don't interface with anyone before consulting your technician."
    This kind of thing never happened when I worked on a typewriter. Relationships were so simple back then.
    I had one of those cast-iron Olympias. I grew muscles on my fingertips from the strength it took to catapult each key all the way up to the page. (Children cannot possibly comprehend this. To them, dinosaurs are real, not manual typewriters.)
    The worst that could happen was a key on the way up might entangle a key on the way down. I could fix that myself, without having to spend 200 shekels for a technician.
    When it was time to upgrade, I sold the Olympia -- it was only about 10 years ago, but I got NIS 50 for it, which is about what an old computer will go for nowadays -- and bought myself a gleaming (reconditioned) electric typewriter.
    Electric!
    This was progress because it had an on-off switch.
     Now if I made a mistake I could retype the whole page in maybe a quarter of the time. I worked faster, produced more, earned more. I had vaulted into the modern age.
    But before I could use up the first ribbon, I had fallen behind again, so far behind that the next generation -- the absolute ultimate in state-of-the-art office machinery, the wizardly Selectric correctible with the golfball keys -- was already archeological.
    Then one day, one lovely cloudless spring day, birds twittering, trees budding and flowers blooming, I sat at a computer for the first time.
    And -- so help me, this is true -- when I typed to the end of the first line, I actually had to fetch someone to explain how I get the cursor to the beginning of the next line. It was a Jerusalem Post Atex; there was, I complained, no carriage return.
    I took a headlong plunge into the 21st century and bought a PC, but I had dived into the shallow end of the future: what I bought just seven years ago would today be rejected if I tried to donate it to a kindergarten.
   I've fallen so far behind, the six-year-olds are ahead of me. Which brings up a whole new quandary: sooner rather than later I'll have to get my kids on-line. Maybe I'm being a tad hysterical, but they're still using crayons while some of their colleagues in gan are already using mouse-pads. My girls are still learning the ABCs; other four-year-olds are learning QWERTY.
    But I can't get them started on my old clunker -- which has no color,  graphics or Windows -- so I'd have to upgrade my equipment, which even if I could afford to do, would entail port-networking to give them their own work-station, which brings up a whole new problem of how many keyboards, screens and mouse-pads to get. One for me, one for my wife and one for the children? Or one for each child? Would I be depriving them of basic educational tools unless each has her own?
    This is how insane it has become: my children are still sleeping in the same crib-beds they've had since they were born, yet my wife and I are debating which is the more pressing priority, computerizing the little ones or getting them new beds.
    The prevailing wisdom -- about hardware, not bedware -- is that it's obsolete as soon as you cart it out of the store. So the longer you wait the less you fall behind.
    The first Industrial Revolution was nothing like this.
    What we have come to, as the computer age completely takes over our lives, is a dangerous lack of a present tense. All technology is either outdated or a step into the next generation. Nothing is comfortably contemporary. Post-modern is by now neo-quaint; the protoplastic age has gone the way of the record album.
    We have entered the Prefuture Era.  
    Remember when compact discs first came out? They replaced the short-lived 8-track tapes as the de-rigueur technology. The 8-track was an Edsel that was supposed to make us forget cassettes, which displaced vinyl. CDs were said to be here to stay, the ultimate in compact sound-quality perfection that could not be improved.  Well, they're being improved: the compact disc is compacting to the size of a credit card. 
    If you're about to buy a camera, don't. They're soon to be old-fashioned curiosities. Digital-electronic cameras don't need film-developing and let you "edit" a photograph. They're new but not yet improved, which means that as soon as you buy one, you've fallen behind again.
    I acquired a videocamera barely three years ago, but it's already a technodinosaur, replaced by sleeker, better machines that are themselves dead as dodos because now the CD-videocamera has been invented.
    I won't even talk about the pell-mell development of the car. I've got an 11-year-old Renault that is so old even its color is extinct. I mean, it may still get me places, but it's beige, for goodness sake!
    This mad dash to get to the future ahead of its time is so perverse that science fiction has been overtaken by virtual-reality. Nothing any sci-fi writer can come up with is beyond belief anymore. We're so jaded that I suspect few people would be surprised one day to read in a newspaper (as of this writing, they still exist) that, say, the president of Panasonic has become the proud papa of the world's first baby born with digital vocal chords. (I hope I haven't given somebody an idea.)
    Things are happening so fast that the CD-videocamera, which was up-to-the-minute brand-new only three paragraphs ago, might already have been eclipsed in the time it took to write these subsequent 175 words.
    Times are a-changin' so rapidly that nostalgia has become a thing of the past. Unlike older folks, who find comfort in recalling the '60s or '50s or '30s, today's generation reminisces not by decade but by month.
    We've reached such a state of technological fundamentalism that for a new generation, life imitates computers. Take a teenager to a symphonic concert: he'll marvel that it's just as realistic as the real thing, a CD recording. (A lady once walked into the local Scrabble club for the first time. I asked her if she was an experienced player. "Oh, yes," she assured me, "though I've never played against a person before.") 

"LOGIZOMECHANICOPHOBIA" is a word I discovered recently that, once we learn how to pronounce it, will be recognized as a common psychological condition. It means "fear of computers." I think I've got it, acutely.
    I'm absolutely terrified by a new gizmo installed about five meters from my desk at the Post. We insert a photo and "edit" it, doctor the images, change eyewitness truth.
    What faith that ever existed that "the camera never lies" is now irreversibly down the toilet. Any picture you see in this newspaper today, or anywhere else at any time in the future, is suspect. The editing could be harmless -- altering the background, moving people closer together, or, as we've already done once, erasing a sweat stain from somebody's armpit -- or it can be downright dangerous, as one TV station recently proved, by displaying a "photograph" of Yitzhak Rabin and Saddam Hussein shaking hands at the Western Wall.
    One day, very soon, I'm sure, a court of law somewhere will for the first time reject a photograph as evidence, a precedent that will traumatize our faith in the credibility of proof.
    Journalism, law, history, every pillar of truth in civilization -- including even the family photo album -- will have to discredit any image created since 1994.
    This is our brave new world. Makes you feel a bit logizomechanicophobic, doesn't it?