Retrofitting Obsolescence

Retrofitting Obsolescence:
Hybrid composition across time

What do we do with technology that still works but has been left behind in terms of contemporary practice? In what ways can retrofitting both overcome obsolescence and provide access to benefits that aren’t otherwise shared between obsolete and contemporary versions of technology? How does retrofitted obsolescence produce or permit hybridity?

Case study: Retrofitting manual typewriters to produce digital data

Okay, technically what I’m looking at is a manual typewriter that still functions as a manual typewriter, but has been rigged with additional hardware to track keystrokes and log them as digital data. Here’s the awesome looking USB Typewriter Conversion Kit!! The  only problem is the creator is taking a break to spend more time with family (good for him!). His finished products (typewriter plus digital conversion kit) sell for around $1.5k  and conversion kits (around $150) are not being sold. More info in a story on him is here.

But, he’s given us the kit plans via open access here! I’d just need some help deciphering...maybe my 421: Tech Comm students would be willing to help? Actually building the USB Typewriter would be fun, but for ENGL 605: Computers and Writing aka Internet as Gift Economy, I'm more interested in considering this as a case study.

As we move forward, I'm most optimistic about expanding my familiarity with the literature. This is just a fun artifact that interests me and I think provides a physical depiction of the phenomena I'm trying to understand: retrofit (as problem-solving) to bring obsolete composition tools and tactics back into relevance in ways that were never imaginable when they were created. I see this as hybrid composition across time in the sense that repurposed tools and modes find new applications in writing. But I also see hybrid composition across time as something that is possible precisely because time has elapsed and tools have become obsolete. Design of technology and composition with this in mind has new possibilites. Why compose or design for an artificial and ideal 'forever' when it's possible to design with the horizon of obsolescence in mind. Programmed obsolescence exploits this for profit; why not challenge the framework to be generative beyond mere profit margins.

Context:

This interest in retrofitting old technology and working from manual typewriter format is part of a broader trend of people who 1) find typewriters intriguing and have created modern typewriter-like keyboards for direct use with a digital device, like the Qwerky Keyboard or 2) people who like the digital detachment  (esp. From internet based distractions) as with  Astrohaus’ Freewrite.

I love manual typewriters. I write on them all the time; often I crank out my shitty first drafts on them. I own two: one of which was my Mom’s Royal Custom III in college. I’ve been writing on it since I was a kid. The other is a smaller more portable Olivetti 22 that I fell in love with in when I was in California. There are open access plans for the USB Typewriter Conversion Kit for both, but I’d want to build this project around the Olivetti. My estimates suggest I could buy the required parts for about $150.

The bigger picture

Obsolescence is a feature of technology. What is new today will be scary and resisted as futuristic, only to become a standard and integrated as commonplace tomorrow, and eventually tossed out as dated and obsolete tomorrow (or maybe next week). Retrofitting obsolescence is a re-imaging of the cycle of technology. It reorients technology as revived and reincarnated, but also reimagines time itself. Linear time takes ideas, turns them into products, sells them, and then displaces them with new products.

Obsolescence is the back-end bump that perpetually makes space for consumer markets to have new niches and demands. Retrofitting obsolescence turns this linear conception of time upon itself and asks ingenuity and the entrepreneurial spirit to take another try; to make another pass; to consider re-vision. Money and cultural capital can be made by recycling the ideas and objects that have otherwise gone by the wayside.

For compositionists, this is reinvention through revision with lots of possibility for hybrid outputs that transcend the original concept and the contemporary application, but wouldn’t be possible were it not for both of them existing together. To lean on the business buzz-word of yesterday, hybridity is synergistic! And yet this synergy is unique, because retrofitted obsolescence synergizes not just objects and ideas, but benefits from the added dimension of the passage of time. Elapsed time gives way to nostalgia, and nostalgia is the potent pairing of comfort couched in memory, springboarding invention imbued with desire.

Scope for 605: Internet as Gift Economy

For my semester project, I’d like for this project to be both complete and self-contained at the end of the term, but also open to expansion and development for future work.

Resource to share--Directory of Open Access Books has a pretty extensive catalogue of OA texts

Here are some sources I'm working with at the moment:

Digital Rubbish: A natural history of electronics, by Jennifer Gabrys, University of Michigan Press (2011)

Colletti, J. A., & Chonko, L. B. (1997). Change Management Initiatives: Moving Sales Organizations from Obsolescence to High Performance. Journal of Personal Selling & Sales Management, 17(2), 1–30. https://doi.org/10.1080/08853134.1997.10754087

Lemer Andrew C. (1996). Infrastructure Obsolescence and Design Service Life. Journal of Infrastructure Systems, 2(4), 153–161. https://doi.org/10.1061/(ASCE)1076-0342(1996)2:4(153)

Porter, J. E. (2009). Recovering Delivery for Digital Rhetoric. Computers and Composition, 26(4), 207–224. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compcom.2009.09.004