Complaints About New Technology Are Always the Same Complaint

I heard Louis C.K. do a routine about the death of the mom-and-pop video store — the chains moving in, the personal recommendations lost, the comfortable feeling gone.

It is a genre, and it is worth recognising as one, because the genre is more revealing than any instance of it.

Run It Backwards

Thirty or fifty years earlier, the same person would have been complaining about video stores displacing bookshops. The video store, which is now the warm and human thing being lost, was itself the cold commercial intruder that destroyed something better.

Two hundred years earlier, the complaint would have been about printed books displacing oral tradition — the loss of the storyteller, the memory arts, the shared evening. Plato makes a version of this argument about writing itself: it will destroy memory and give the appearance of wisdom without its substance.

The complaint is structurally identical each time, and it has been available continuously for as long as there have been changes to complain about.

Why This Is Damning

Someone will object: perhaps each complaint was correct in its own case. Maybe we really did lose something each time.

I do not think that survives inspection, and the reason is that the thing being mourned is always the thing that displaced the previous mourned thing. The video store cannot be both the destroyer of the bookshop and the precious human institution destroyed by the chains. Or rather, it can be — but only if the quality being attributed to it is not a property of the video store at all.

Which is the point. The quality is familiarity. The video store became the warm human thing at exactly the rate its critics grew old.

What Is Actually Happening

People like what they grew up with and dislike what replaces it. That is the whole phenomenon, and it is not shameful — it is how attachment works, and a person with no attachments would be worse off.

What is objectionable is the second step: manufacturing rationalisations for why the old thing was objectively better. Community. Craft. Human connection. Depth. These are always available, they always sound serious, and they are always applied retrospectively to whatever the speaker happens to have loved at twenty.

In retrospect it is nearly always nonsense. Not the affection, which was real, but the argument built on top of it.

The Honest Version

I am not immune to this and I do not think anyone is. The honest version is available and costs nothing:

I liked the old thing. I do not like the new thing. I am aware this is mostly about me.

That is true, it is human, and it makes no false claims about the world. What it gives up is the pretence that your nostalgia is a form of cultural criticism.

The test I would apply, to myself as much as anyone: can you state what was lost in terms that would have been recognisable to someone who did not grow up with it? If the loss can only be described using words like "warmth" and "character," you are probably describing your own childhood.