Old-Fangled Gadgets

"Old-Fangled Gadgets" is an article that was published in a supplement to the November 30, 1998 edition of Forbes magazine called Forbes ASAP, subtitled The Big Issue III: Fifty-Seven Minds on Time. In addition to Vonnegut, it features articles by William F. Buckley, Arthur C. Clarke, and Stephen Jay Gould, among others.

Summary

Encyclopaedia Britannica, 15th Edition

It is often asked what new technology is doing to "us", as if we were not separate individuals with our own ways of celebrating, ignoring, or fending it off. Vonnegut's own favorite technology is the Encyclopaedia Britannica, whose weight feels good in his hands and forces him to stand and walk to retrieve one, which makes him move like a human. He also likes putting letters into mailboxes. An even older technology, firearms, can change the course of history in an instant depending on who's shot.

At this moment, the technology that most interests him are what Vonnegut calls "social transplants" like television, which can replace real friends and relatives. This technology is at least 2400 years old, dating to the first dramas in ancient Greek amphitheaters where it was learned by accident that audiences will accept the performers as real people. A similar accidental discovery was made during World War II, when airmen who had bits of plastic blown into their eyeballs led to the knowledge that eye lenses could be replaced with new plastic ones. The war also produced synthetic heroes, actors who had never been to war, like a famous one with an airport named after him in California.

Jean-Paul Sartre once said "hell is other people", but now with new, successful social transplants, it may be more accurate to say "hell is other real people". While theaters were temporary events, music recordings, radio, and then television brought synthetic friends and relatives directly into the home, even when surrounded by real people. The newest form is personal computers, which can minimize human contact even more effectively. It gives the user the feeling of being active, productive, and intelligent, instead of merely sitting on a couch. Information now travels faster than ever, to the point that Americans can know about the president's extramarital sex life "before he'd zipped his trousers up again!" During the Carter administration, Vonnegut once asked James Flexner, a biographer of George Washington, how the first president would have responded to the Iran hostage crisis. Flexner replied he wouldn't even have heard about it yet.