Séamas O'Reilly: Why we shouldn't stop trying and failing to make weird new things

Séamas O'Reilly. Picture: Orfhlaith Whelan

My column about DVDs struck a chord with people. By that, I mean people like me; nostalgic sad-sacks desperate to keep alive the meaningless touchstones of their youths. It also prompted follow-on chatter about other failed technologies that never got their moment. I’m reluctant to react to these reactions. My readers, you included, should best be treated like the braying, mangy dogs that they are. I should also state for the record that this column is not solely dedicated to defunct media formats, but I can’t help but feel that those people saying “DVDs had their chance and blew it”, had a point.

More tantalising surely, are those things which failed to launch entirely. Take MiniDiscs, the format billed as the CD-killer on its release in the mid-nineties, and rolled out worldwide as the new, and best, way to listen to, and record music and audio. Perhaps nothing represents the baffling path of progress better than MiniDiscs, which boasted the shiny newness of CDs, and the re-writability of cassette tapes, while also being smaller and more high definition than either. They were sharp and smart and, nearly 30 years after their launch, still look more stylishly futuristic than they have any right to. What I’m getting at is this: judged entirely on technical benefits and cultural trends, we should have seen the death of CDs there and then. As it happened, MiniDiscs didn’t even outlast cassette tapes and, outside of strong sales in Japan, were all but non-existent by the early 2000s.

If the demise of DVDs represent the death of a great empire, MiniDiscs represent something sadder still; the fossilised remnants of a never reached horizon, the long-dead tomorrows promised by an ever receding yesterday. At some point we had a better path ahead but, feckless reactionaries that we are, spurned it in favour of the crap we were already used to.

The problem is, we don’t have a particularly good record of predicting the future, whether in reality or fiction. I’ve always been fascinated with retrofuturism, the old-timey visions of the future people predicted in the past. Think Star Trek’s pastel spandex and walls of blinking lights, or the Jetsons’ vistas of the atomic space age; the Raygun Gothic aesthetic of jetpacks and automated houses, gleaming cities connected with shiny walkways and flying cars. Even now, we can marvel at the World’s Fair optimism of these designs, and the bittersweet naivety of their hopes for all we could achieve.

It’s hard to look at these gilded technoscapes without feeling a pang of nostalgia for a time when the future seemed so sweet, and simple. Even more more recent milestones haven’t borne out well. This century has seen the calendar trip past the 2001 featured by Kubrick’s Space Odyssey, the 2015 imagined by Back To The Future II, and the 2019 of Blade Runner, without their visions rhyming too much with our own.

Perhaps chastened by such failures, today’s future-scapes feel altogether more pessimistic. The billionaires who actually could change the planet seem to be all out of ideas. Zuckerberg appears to be hedging his entire fortune on the premise that humanity is secretly in love with the VR technology it has loudly rejected for three decades. Musk and Bezos are so sure Earth will be an unliveable kip, they’re investing all their wealth in sending us to Mars. (By “us”, I gather they mean the planet’s 80 richest people, leaving the rest of us to die as the oceans boil, but that’s splitting hairs.)

Meanwhile, two typical flavours of the future predominate in TV and film. The first is a bland, smooth-lined landscape that’s basically “today, but a bit more”. Gone are the neon spires and accordion-armed androids, in favour of off-white simplicity and smooth, clean lines.

When a screenwriter wants to tell you their characters are from 10 or 20 years from now, they just give them a shirt that doesn’t have a collar and a slightly different phone. Clothes now seem to be the least aspirational aspect of our futurology. In the ‘50s and ‘60s, the greatest minds of science fiction imagined we’d all be wearing space helmets and bright silver jumpsuits in our own homes, we’d go to work at the nuclear plant wearing boots designed for treading Martian soil, our lapels festooned with diodes and switches and circuitry of pleasing vagueness. Searching the depths of their communal imagination, today’s prognosticators depict our grandkids wearing, basically, the current COS Winter catalogue.

And this, as I say, is the best-case scenario. For the other, and perhaps now more common, vision of the future is post-apocalyptic; a ravaged ruin of post-tech, post-disaster, post-climate-change horror, where the sea has claimed our coasts, and vegetation now fills the cracks of our crumbling metropolises. We walk in rags amidst packs of wild dogs, heat our hands over bin fires, and very occasionally an impossibly old character has to explain to his young companion what the internet was. Oh, and we’re hunted by cannibals now, presumably because developing a taste for human flesh is the natural course mankind takes, once we reject climate science, the brotherhood of nations, and — it is unspoken but wholly presumed — MiniDiscs.

I can’t help feeling that these two competing visions of the future — COS versus cannibalism — lack something of the ambition of former years. I long for more visions of the distant horizon that are as silly as the Jetsons, or as optimistic as classic period Star Trek. I guess, I’d just settle for ones were people wore shiny space clothes, and/or refrained from eating people recreationally.

Yes, we got MiniDiscs wrong, and sure, the world doesn’t want VR and probably never will. But that doesn’t mean we should stop trying, and failing to make weird new things that are probably crap but might just work. Let’s put our failures in the past, or the future will never be what it used to.