Context
The following article has been sitting as an unfinished draft since February 2024. Its fairly significant and says good things, but I have no interest in truly polishing it to accord with my current style of writing. It ends abruptly. Take it for whatever it may be worth.
Original
In a world of perpetual neomaniacal consumerism, it seems everything becomes obsolete within a few months. In 2023, Ford tells us how great their 2023 F-150 is, and in 2024 they tell us how much better the 2024 F-150 is. One year of (potential) innovation is not likely to seriously improve any particular technology; therefore, we must carefully consider what obsolescence really is and whether it really matters at all.
Obsolescence is strictly this: a thing that is no longer in common use. Ford’s Model T, in this sense, is obsolete, because it is no longer in common use. An old English word like “afeared” is also obsolete in that the word is no longer in use.
Notice the complete lack of connotation that I have provided. Strictly speaking, there is nothing wrong with an obsolete thing, it simply means that the thing is not commonly found in use.
The connotation that is often applied to obsolete things is where neomania strikes: it says, “It’s old and not in common use anymore, therefore it is bad!” Not a whit mentioned in our definition dares to call an obsolete thing bad. Just because we do not find a thing in common use does not mean it is bad or inferior. Oftentimes, the words “obsolete” and “useless” are unjustly conflated.
Consider this article on a mechanic’s shop in Poland that still uses a Commodore 64 computer for business. Sure, it is technically obsolete, but does it not get the job done? Further, it would be fair to argue that the C64 is probably a more secure business computer than most for the simple fact that it will not be connected to the internet. The C64 getting old did not suddenly make it a bad device that needed replacing. The old proverb, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!” comes to mind.
I have three vehicles and all three of them are, strictly speaking, obsolete, but they all work quite well. There are not a lot of 1973 F-100s, 2004 BMW 330is, or 2007 F650GSs on the road so these things are technically obsolete; but I see them much as I see tools: as long as they work or can be fixed when they do not work, they are still useful. Even a horse-drawn plow is not useless to the right person.
There is nothing wrong with a number of obsolete things: flip phones still work as long as they can use modern networks, older phones that cannot really are useless; pen-and-paper or typewriting text is not out-of-date just because personal computers came along; an outhouse (or outdoor privy) is not useless to someone who does not have indoor plumbing; gardening, just because large scale mechanized agriculture came along, did not suddenly become pointless. There are a number of other things which I am sure you can think of. New technologies or new ideas cannot destroy the old, though they may displace the old; regardless, it is not as if the old way of plowing a garden disappears because someone invented a gasoline tractor.
Obsolescence: The Great Gatekeeper
Now, it has been shown that absolutely speaking, nothing is obsolete in the neomaniacal connotation of that word. The only reason that the “everything old is bad” connotation exists is pure marketing and the most insidious thing about it is that it is a gatekeeping mechanism.
Consider these examples:
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“You cannot garden with a hoe! What are you? A 12th century European serf? No! You need this $40,000 John Deere tractor to get anything done!”
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“Why do you use a flip phone when you can have a smart phone? What are you? A 90-year-old man?”
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“You cannot go fishing without a big expensive bass boat! You need to spend at least $30,000 on a fancy bass boat and thousands on fishing gear before you can really fish!
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“You cannot use that old truck! It is underpowered, rusty, and gets poor MPG! Why don’t you buy this $60,000 truck with a stubby 4.5 foot bed instead that is absolutely unfixable by anyone but the dealer?”
I have done all four above without spending insane amounts of money simply by using what I already had or could get affordably.
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I have gardened with a handful of great handtools from easydigging.com including grub hoes and the awesome Meadow Creature broadfork. Frankly, I have done better with our handtools than I ever have with our New Holland tractor.
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I used a flip phone for nearly a year, an extremely durable Kyocera that could survive a nuclear blast. If it were easier to send text messages on it I would use it exclusively.
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Most of my fishing has been done on the bank of my uncle’s pond and other ponds. I spent a $50 gift certificate at a local fishing shop and got everything I needed except for some old fishing rods I already had.
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My truck is not too expensive to deal with, and it would take a lot of gasoline to add up to a $60,000 truck. Also, I can go get just about any major part from the local scrapyard for cheap.
Do not let marketing convince you that you need their special products to do anything. I am not saying that those products do not work or that they are bad, but I am saying that you do not need to spend tons of money to do most activities.
The only legitimate complaint one can level against an obsolete item is this: an obsolete item is, most likely, old, and therefore may need replacement parts and additional care that a newer product will not need. This is, however, accidentally rather than necessarily so: it is entirely conceivable that a properly maintained product that is fifty years old will not need considerable maintenance; it may even be comparable to a newer product. An obsolete product is not necessarily a project all the time.
None of this Means New = Bad
As scourer of thrift shops, road debris, and dumps, picking up the perfectly servicable pieces of consumerism left to rot by people who do not understand the value of a dollar, I still see the value in new things, but with some measured cynicism. I love the thought of buying an affordable new car that makes 250HP from just a measly four-cylinder, but I am cynical about it because basically all new cars are just boring computers tracking your every move, selling your data, absolutely unmaintainable, and quite possibly having a built in kill-switch from the factory for emergency CIA use. The two things, modern high performance and modern malicious technology do not, in an absolute sense, have to come together. The problem is that they usually do.
Consider Tesla. There is absolutely no reason Tesla could not make a basic electric car without all the silly gadgets and spyware, and sell it at a reasonable price. Imagine an electric Honda Civic or Toyota Corrolla with zero bells and whistles and you get the idea.
New computers, in terms of raw performance, are far better now than anything even five years ago, but each generation makes it harder and harder to use the machine as you wish. I still hold that secure boot and UEFI was mostly made to thwart linux usage rather than keep the computer safe.
None of these things have to be bad things, but the consumer environment we live in has made them correlate closely with the bad. On a side note, who should we blame for this poor environment: producer or consumer? Some would say one or the other, but I say both. Quite obviously the producer of junk products deserves blame because he makes them in the first place, but the consumer deserves harsh admonishment as well because he will continue to buy the junk. By doing so, he encourages the producer to continue making lower quality products until the producer finds the absolute minimum effort and quality he can produce and still be profitable.
The New Complexity
Complexity is generally a bad thing, because it makes understanding and repairing things more difficult. Simplicity in design, whenever it can be had, ought to be employed. This is why many people become enamoured with older technology (myself included), because most obsolete technology has a certain simplicity about it that most newer technology does not.
The humble carburetor, though quite a technical piece of old technology, is comparably simple and inexpensive compared to modern electronic fuel injection. No high pressure pumps, no injectors, no computer, no electricity or wiring, and overall less stuff under the hood of your car. Its most of the vehicle’s fuel system and it can fit in a small cardboard box.
(There is nothing wrong with EFI; on the contrary, it does most things better than carburetors since it can adjust the air-fuel ratio on the fly. It is one of those “just works” technologies for the most part, and is certainly preferably for a non-technical user. The carburetor will always be much simpler however even if EFI overall performs better.)
As a gut reaction, we would like to say all new things are complex and are therefore bad, but this is not truly correct. Many new things are not necessarily complex, but oftentimes they are for several reasons.
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There is a class of people who think a complicated device is better; complexity creators are glad to sell them stuff. These people expect something to be complex and are disappointed if they are not.
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Generally, if a particular technology has been around for a while, we should expect refinement rather than complexity. Again, returning to cars, why do they become increasingly complex instead of refined? Consider modern diesel emissions systems: now we need special diesel exhaust fluid (DEF), a diesel particulate filter (DPF), and most of the other emissions systems we see on gasoline vehicles. I am certainly not against reducing the poisonous emissions from diesel burning, but these systems do nothing to simplify modern diesels. Hopefully, a better way will be discovered.
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Look at popular software like Windows. I cannot think of a single piece of software that consistently gets more bloated, complicated, and overall worse with each release. Seriously, have you used Windows 11? Its the least user-friendly Windows I have ever touched. Importantly however, it does not need to be complex, but it is made purposefully complex. Compare the UI of an old version like Windows 95 or XP to 11, and you will see just how complicated it has gotten.