Shaking My Fist at Clouds
Everything Old Will Be New Again
My wife and I went antiquing this past weekend. Or did we go thrifting? If anything we did both, because we definitely hit a Goodwill store while we were out, but that aside it’s a difficult distinction to make sometimes. I mean we went to a place that definitely calls itself an antique store, but I managed to buy the immortal soul of a woman who lived more than 100 years ago for only a dollar. How’s that for thrifty?
Meet Martha. I know, that’s not a very creative name to attach to some random woman in an oldy-timey photo, but it was actually written on the back of the card-stock frame. Her soul was probably sucked into this tintype photograph more than a century ago, but it’s frustratingly hard to pin down exactly when.
This image of Martha was just one of many old photos in a bin in a Newark, Delaware antiques store, with another bin-full on the shelf below it. Each and every one available for one dollar, and many of them were tintypes. Images that might be more than a century-and-a-half old, of people whose entire existing legacies might amount to nothing more than a forgotten photograph in an antiques store.
Or…maybe not.
Maybe Martha has an enviable legacy. Maybe, after divorcing her abusive husband Henry, Martha started preparing and selling preserved fruits out of her home. Maybe her product gradually became so immensely popular up and down the eastern seaboard that it built her little cottage industry into an formidable business empire. Maybe her grandchildren are, as we speak, angling themselves to try and bite off a disproportionate chunk of the Martha’s Preserves fortune when her grandson, Ezra Augustus Meek, finally kicks the bucket. Maybe Ezra is, as we speak, laughing spitefully in his bed, because despite 102 hard years he has every intention of out-living every single one of his ungrateful children. And anyone who knows him believes he’ll do it, too. Powered by pure spite and bourbon, that old Ezra.
Probably not though, right? I mean I love me some fruit preserves and I’ve certainly never heard of hers. No, I think Martha probably fell into the same hole of relative obscurity we’re all going to end up in. Relative, because nobody can live a life on Earth without being remembered by someone. I guess the argument can even be made that, even though I can know nothing about her but a face and a name, I’m never going to forget Martha H. Meek.
And…ugh…yeah, okay, Batman vs. Superman is also part of the reason.
But reminding me of my own pointless mortality isn’t the only way poor Martha Meek has fueled my thoughts. Looking at this old photo, I can imagine a connection to this long-dead person that no digital photography could ever hope to match, and it has everything to do with the medium.
Because of the nature of this type of photography, I know that this metal plate in my hand occupied the same space as the person in the image. And that photons (particles of light), either from the sun or from a controlled explosion of magnesium powder prepared by the photographer, literally bounced off Martha and struck the emulsion layer on this very plate, directly and irreversibly changing it in a way that I can immediately recognize and appreciate as the image of a fellow human being more than a century later.
Even the modern film photography I grew up with can’t replicate that, with the notable exception of the Polaroid. Images in a common film camera are captured directly onto film, which is then processed into negatives. But a separate process is required to transfer that image onto photo paper. And then there’s digital photography, which puts so many obfuscating layers of translation and interpretation between the subject and the final product that it’s more comparable to describing (in superhuman detail) what something looks like to an artist over the phone, and then having them draw it for you (with superhuman skill).
Film photography is now the domain of hobbyists and hipsters. TV, radio, and telephony have all gone digital, and I have concerns. But I don’t feel like I know enough about…anything…to convey them well. I just know that it wasn’t all that long ago when we were listening to radio signals that could be picked up by machines so simple that a child’s orthodontic gear could occasionally (accidentally) fill the role. Occasionally TV signals would come through the radio, and cordless phone signals would come through the TV, and the cordless phone might pick up someone ordering their McDonald’s at the drive-thru a block away. It was messy, but extremely robust. Communication equipment could be intricate and complicated in application, but it still worked on principles that could be explained to almost anyone.
Take, for instance, a telephone call… circa 1975. You speak at a microphone, and your voice vibrates a diaphragm…makes it shake back and forth super fast. The diaphragm also wiggles a special kind of tiny crystal that makes electricity when you wiggle it. Your voice wiggles the air, which wiggles the diaphragm, which wiggles a crystal, which wiggles the voltage up and down, and that voltage travels along some metal wires out of your house and all the way to the other phone.
Miles and miles of wire. Miles of unbroken conduction. Sure, that metal is going to pass through all sorts of other equipment, boxes stuck in the ground and mounted on poles, through telephone company buildings, but all that equipment is just there to make sure that there’s an unbroken path all the way from your lips to their ears until you hang up. On the other end of the call, that same wiggling voltage wiggles another crystal, connected to another diaphragm, which wiggles the air next to your mom’s ear and she hears you complaining about… whatever. It really is the same principle as two soup cans connected by string.
I am not a luddite. I use and enjoy digital technology almost every waking moment of every day. And of course the problem with being anti-technology is… where do you draw the line? The printing press? Written language? Smoke signals? Cave paintings? It’s all technology. Radio is more complicated than telephony, television is more complicated than radio, but each of these analog technologies was still built upon what came before it.
Digital, however, just completely flipped the table. Speakers and microphones may still work on the same principles they always did, but everything that happens in between your microphone and your mom’s speaker is, for the vast majority of people, indistinguishable from magic. Your voice is turned into electrical pulses, which are sent into a box of utter chaos, translated into increasingly opaque nonsense, and then sent to another box of chaos that turns it back into sound. Can’t argue with the results though. Not gonna be able to count Chris Hemsworth’s individual chin hairs without digital ultra-high-def. So… what’s my point?
I guess I’d just feel a little more secure knowing that, in the not-all-that-vague chance our cruel and petty gods decide to toss a solar storm or a nuclear explosion at us for giggles, it won’t necessarily be the end of modern human civilization as we know it. A tin-cans-and-string network would survive. A crystals-wiggling-voltages-along-metal-wires network could probably be rebuilt in days. But 5G? 2G? Hell, even if our actual smartphones, laptops, and flat screens weren’t internally destroyed by some natural or man-made electromagnetic clusterfuck, the networks that serve them would never be rebuilt. Not in any form that’s recognizable anyway, and not for years.
So why have we let even our “old-fashioned” voice landlines be turned over to digital networks? Even if that kitschy old Bell telephone you inherited is plugged into a regular wall jack and not into the back of an Xfinity box, your calls are only carried by wiggling voltages along metal maybe as far as the end of the block before it’s converted to digital and being squirted around between microprocessors as binary data packets. I think. I’m… not actually qualified to make any of these claims.
You should probably call your mom. That’s my point. Call your mom.
