One of the baddest dragons historians of technology had to slay was “form follows function,” the best-known articulation of modern technological determinism—the claim (or tacit assumption) that technology dictates human choice, rather than the other way around. The campaign to debunk that fallacy was part of a broader appreciation of the fact that we were too enamored of our technological “progress,” that we placed too much faith in it to solve problems and increase happiness, that our expectations of it were unrealistic, and that our trust in it was too blind, making it dangerous. So, really, this goes back to the Romantics of the early nineteenth century, the beginning of the reaction against the particular ugliness of the early “industrial age”—it goes back to “The Modern Prometheus,” the subtitle of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.
In our field, a major blow against “form follows function” was struck by David Pye in 1964 with The Nature of Design. Ever since, we have striven to find and show the embeddedness of technology in culture; the very title of the journal of The Society for the History of Technology is Technology & Culture. We have sought as well to broaden the general understanding of what “technology” means, while also clarifying that historically vague concept. One way to sum that up is by stating that technology does not develop in a cultural vacuum. Technological choice is far more complex than “this works better than that.” It is more complex, even, than “this may work better than that, but that is cheaper.”
It seems to me that an accessible concept for laypeople to take hold of to think about this is “retro.” When we apply that label to something, we mean that it’s something we make and use in the present, but that harks back, in some way, to something made and used in the past. “Retro” is not exactly a fringe phenomenon; it’s enormously popular, and big business.
Sometimes, “retro” is purely visually aesthetic, or close to it; the Thunderbird reboot Ford made in the early aughts is a good example. It’s neither legal nor practical to manufacture a car faithful to the practices of the 1950s for today’s market. But the designers were able to work within the confines of regulations and engineering requirements to style the vehicle close enough to the original that the car stood out (whether the design was successful or not is a matter of taste).
A popular and common example of “retro” that goes beyond the visual aesthetic is the vinyl LP record. Despite some bogus claims to the contrary, this twentieth-century technology is no way inherently superior at sound-reproduction than its successors; in fact, it is inherently inferior, all other things being equal. However, audiophiles—and, later, a broader market—saved the vinyl LP and built a niche industry around it, for aesthetic reasons—not just visually-aesthetic, but a whole suite of aesthetics. When you spend $40,000 on a sound system based around a turntable, then yes, your system sounds better than your average person’s cheap equipment based around a digital source. The “problem” of the vinyl LP points out the weakness in value-laden terms like “superior” and “inferior.” It’s true that an uncompromised digital audio source can reproduce sound more faithfully, if the rest of the system can deliver that source fidelity. It’s true that digital sources are far more convenient to control; we can easily and instantly switch tracks, re-order them, put them on auto-repeat, etc. As a kid, I literally fantasized about some sort of infinite magic jukebox that I could just call up music from at will. That “magic jukebox” is cloud streaming. And, with lossless source files, I can play my music with no compromise in sound quality from compression.
Vinyl lovers, though, find their analog plastic discs “superior” for somewhat less concrete reasons. Those who would, without hesitation, buy a 1983 Porsche 911 over a 2023 model are not at all doing so to save money. My dear friend David owns a 1983 Porsche 911 and a 2010 Nissan 350Z. I asked him to compare them. He said the 2010 was “better in every way,” yet he still loved the 1983.
So, all around us in our normal lives, people choose “retro.” We could go on with examples. The point is, technological choice is complicated and far more interesting and instructive than “oh, this works better than that”—and aesthetics, while important, are not the whole story either. We do have to consider “but that is cheaper,” and attitudes and biases that transcend both aesthetics and economics. Sometimes, we make a choice because we are trying to predict the future, and get ahead of it. Sometimes—and this is what historians of technology love to focus on—we don’t know why we’ve made the choice that we have.
Thinking about “retro,” though, is an easy way to start thinking about technological choice more broadly. It’s a good way to start thinking about how something we tend to think of as “hard”—technology—fits securely into something we tend to think of as “soft”—culture. Once we’ve done that, we’re in good shape to start thinking about any technology we want, from birth control to battleships.
David Pye, The Nature of Design (New York: Sterling Publishing Co., 1964)—modern reprints are widely available.
Eric Schatzberg, Technology: Critical History of a Concept (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018)