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"They have turned a thousand useless luxuries into necessities!" -- Mark Twain
Right now there's a bidding war on ebay for an old Oldsmobile 8 track I pulled out of the bus. It's a stock item for a cutlass supreme from the late 1960s through early 1970s. I have no idea how it came to be in 1969 Dodge Travco. What I do have an idea about is why I just sold it, as-is, could-be-working, could not be working, for $86.
Seriously, I sold an antiquated music player that takes a format no one has manufactured in over four decades for $86.
In purely practical terms the current value of the 8 track is bewildering. Eight track cassettes are unwieldy, easily damaged, didn't sound very good even when they were brand new and were never produced in the quantities that vinyl or the cassette tapes that replaced them. There were something of black swan when it comes to music storage formats.
Consider that the brand new, reasonably hight end car stereo that will replace that eight track costs a mere $45 on Amazon. It will play every digital music format you've ever heard of and dozens more you haven't. It's a knock off a fancier name-brand model most likely made by the same workers in the same factory. Capitalism.
It's also a complete piece of crap, made of cheap plastic and designed to be chucked in a rubbish bin the minute it starts to malfunction. In fact the advent of the car stereo wiring "harness", which eliminates any need to understand soldering and reduces the installation process to clicking little plastic pieces into place, was designed to facilitated just this kind disposability. Consumer capitalism.
The 8-track player on the other hand is a purely mechanical device. Whoever installs it will be soldering it in (or perhaps just twisting and taping some wires, but either way there will most definitely not be any snapping of plastic. It can, if it does turn out to not be working, be repaired by just about anyone with the patience to sit down, take it apart and figure out how it works.
What's more, there is a kind of satisfaction in taking something apart, wrapping your head around how it works and then putting it back together better than it was before. No matter what the things is -- clocks, wood burning stoves, vehicles, radios, tk tk -- I garentee there are people out there devoting their free time and energy to fixing these things.
Sure, at this point you might have to fabricate some parts if they turn out the be broken, but with 3D printers that's well within the realm of possibility. Forget even 3D printers, even if you have to turn to a good old fashioned metal lathe or something, well, they're still around.
Anyone with the free time and patience to study it can fix a mechanical device.
At perhaps the simplest level the act of remembering is the act of reconstructing the past in the present.
Repairing things from the past is an act of memory, but it's an act of memory outside of oneself.
The person with the 8-track is recreating a collective memory of the sort I'm not sure we have a word to describe.We can describe it economically -- it looks strange to us, even me who has the thing, but it's there, this is a thing of value to some, for whatever inarticulable reason.
That sounds dismissive, but it's not meant to be. I don't know precisely how to articulate it, and in the case of the 8 track I don't really understand it --
-- but I understand what it's like. I have no memory of 1969 Dodge Travcos[^3], but in recreating one I'm doing something more than just making a home for my family.
Digital devices actively discourage this with threats of voiding your warranty, or, in the case of Apple and other, making it deliberately difficult to disassemble thanks to bizarre screws and fasteners that require expensive, specialized tools.
Pre-digital things tend to be the opposite, often encouraging you to descstruct them by providing detaild schematic (early Apple computers did this as well).
This means that the value over time of digital devices is necessarily always falling unless you maintain your device in near mint condition. Mechanical devices on the other hand are purely market driven -- if something proved over time to be a reliable, useful device there's probably a market out there for it. Even if it's an antiquated 8-track player.
I suspect, with the so-called Internet of Things coming, that mechanical devices are going to see a serious up tick in interest. When it's possible to hack your refrigerator and use the password gleaned from that to compromise your email account and access your entire life, you might want to re-think some things.
I'm still unclear on why a refrigerator needs to be connected to a network. Actually I'm still unclear on why a refrigerator needs to be the horribly inefficient energy and money wasting design that it currently has when much smarter designs have been available for ages.
I've been thinking about this every since I pulled the 8-track out of the bus and looked it up on Ebay[^1]. It's something I ask myself every time I contemplate an item for the bus -- will I be able to fix this in five years? Actually the first question is do I really need this? But assuming it passes that test, the next major criteria is how hard will it be to fix it myself.
Sometimes I decide that even though the answer is no that's okay (as in the case of my replacement stereo) because there really isn't an alternative.
[^1]: My first thought was to just toss it, but then I thought, well, I should at least check and see if there's anyone buying and selling these things.
[^2]: There's always the alternative of doing without.
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