path: root/eight-track-gorilla.txt

"They have turned a thousand useless luxuries into necessities!" -- Mark Twain

I just sold an and old Oldsmobile 8 track cassette player on eBay for $86.

I pulled it 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 a 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 even the cassette tapes that replaced them were. They were something of black swan when it comes to music storage formats.

Consider that the brand new, reasonably high 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 of a fancier name-brand model most likely made by the same slave laborers 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, even houses -- I guarantee there are people out there devoting their free time and energy to fixing it.

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 by reconstructing it roughly the state it has when it began its useful life. This is what makes an ancient 8 track sell for more than a modern stereo[^1], but more to the point, it's what gives the 8 track any value at all.

I think there is something else going on as well though. I think that buying and restoring mechanical devices from earlier eras a way of traveling through time back to a past we may well have never personally known. Some of it may be nostalgia, but some of it is something else.

On one hand there is the act of reconstructing the past in the present: the thing, whatever it may be, is from the past and you are in the present. But the restoration process is also a way to taking something from the present back into the past, back in time to the way it was when it was new. It's a bit like trying to recreate a memory you never had.

I have no memory of 1969 Dodge Travcos, but in recreating one I'm connecting back to era I never got to experience. It's not nostalgia for that time, not really romanticism of it either, it's just something different, tangibly different. The time is gone, but echos of it remain in the objects that come down to us.

And I think that the world's response to the Travco, [the endless smiles and waves](/jrnl//2015/06/big-blue-bus) reflect that connection, that echo of age that gave us the Travco. That age had ideas about itself, about the objects that surrounded it, grew out of it. There is nothing like the Travco on the road now and that says as much about us now as it does about Travco's then.

The same is true of 8 tracks. Or I suspect it is anyway. Like the person who bought the 8-track, I'm part of some process of recreating a collective memory of the sort I'm not sure we have a word to describe. Nostalgia is the one that comes to mind, but to me that has a negative tinge to it.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry writes in tk, "To grasp the meaning of the world of today we use a language created to express the world of yesterday." I thought of this line -- as I often do -- when I was struggling to find a word int he last paragraph, but then it also seems true of objects. That is, you could easily change it read: to grasp the meaning of the world of today we use objects that are expressions of the world of yesterday.

Perhaps this is me getting old, but the Travco makes more sense to me than any vehicle being made now. And I don't mean the technical, the engine complexity of now versus then, though that is certainly part of it, but there are less technical things too. 

The way the engineers of the Travco looked at the world is reflected in what they built. The way the engineers who built the Honda maxivan I also currently own look at the world is reflected in their choices as well. And these are very markedly different ways of looking at the world. The engineers of the Honda assume me an idiot. It won't let me open the side doors when it's in drive. It will howl with beeping should I shift out of park while the door is still open. It doesn't tell me what the oil pressure is, but it will angrily flash an inscrutable light when it senses the oil pressure getting low. 

These are minor things that irritate me not because of their actual function but because of what they say about how the designers of the Honda think about me and the rest of the world. It doesn't stop there either. The engineers of the Honda take a dim view of professional mechanics as well. Honda's own workers are not mechanics, they're certified technicians. The world of the Honda is exclusive, stratified, and specialized. It has no place for the mechanic of old and certainly now place for you and I[^2]

I cannot make sense of a world where designers believe they are better at knowing what I am capable of than I am. 

This is true of the disposable stereo as well. It has stickers all over it and warnings on the box about voiding the warranty if you unscrew a certain screw to access the inside (as if not having a warranty were some horrible thing). All technology has moved in this direction, much of it to the point of using obscure torx screws and other deliberate attempts to stymie tinkering.

This is a world that I cannot make sense of, nor can, I suspect, the buyer of my 8 track. Why? What is so horrible that could happen if I take a think apart? That I might break it? Well then I would have broken it. And learned something.

I can make sense of the world the designers of the Travco lived in. It feels more like home to me. There are access panels everywhere. A lengthy guide tells me how to disassemble most of the core components in the vehicle. Even ones you can't reach without tearing out the walls -- the 12V electrical system are show complete with schematics. The designers of the Travco felt I might want to -- indeed they knew I would have to -- get to the engine, so the built a massive, awkward access hatch that's half as large as the seats on either side of it.

It is, like all vehicles of its era, designed to be tinkered with. Because tinkering is the thing that makes us human. Or at least that's the message I get when I sit in the Travco tinkering with things. I notice how there's not just a vent at the back of the fridge, but a panel that opens to give access to the entire 2-way fridge internals. I notice how  the tk example of access or deliberately making things either to fix.

The next line in Saint-Exupéry's book is, "The life of the past seems to us nearer our true natures, but only for the reason that it is nearer our language." Is the same true of objects? Are objects of the past nearer to us because they are closer to the time we first acquired objects? Perhaps. Perhaps modern consumer capitalist society has just created a world in which not only are most manufactured goods utter crap, but they're created by designers who prize infantilization above all else.

Call it nostalgia, call it a desire to grasp the world. The name isn't important. I don't know who bought the 8 track, but I do suspect that she's a bit like me -- she's looking for something to tinker with, something to take back in time to its original state, back in time to a world perhaps she never new, but misses none the less. We are like Saint-Exupéry writes, "emigrants who have not founded our homeland".


[^1]: In an ideal capitalist system anyway. In fact we don't live in a system like that. We live in a system where price of the new stereo is artificially low because we in the west have decided were okay with exploiting people in other parts of the world for the sole purpose of making sure we have $45 stereos.

[^2]: This is not to say you can't work on a Honda. You can and I have, but it's certainly not encouraged.