Forgotten Technical Appliances

I was born during the reign of now-forgotten technical appliances, those transitional forms that didn’t survive although it seemed that their epoch would last forever. Who’d have thought something as modern and contemporary as a cassette player would so quickly and definitively end up in a museum? A camcorder, a Walkman, a floppy disk, telephone boxes, telephone answering machines … who still uses any of those things? In fact it’s easier to find someone who plays gramophone records or someone who writes letters and sends them by post, just as there are still people who go to the cinema and film libraries. But finding someone who watches videos or has a telephone answering machine, who walks around with a Walkman or files data on floppy disks, doesn’t seem possible, ever less so, even theoretically.

“It’s as though that time never existed. Everything I used to know, it’s as though it’s been recorded over. I just can’t keep up with that speeding-up, that bullshit, it makes you feel like a relic of the past even when you’re still young,” …

“When new things overtake you, you think you’re getting old, that you’ve been crushed by the army of the linked-in. But then again, they’ll dream up something new tomorrow.”

From Adios, Cowboy by Olija Savicevic