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Television as Tubepunk Technology
Sometimes — not very often, but nevertheless sometimes — it is given us to see the future. Now, by this I do not mean that we are rarely and briefly granted special mental powers that allow us to remotely view the future, but only that sometimes there appears in history glimpses of the future in the form of things ahead of their time.
When I was a child and I heard the phrases, “ahead of its time” or “ahead of his time,” I can still remember how it bothered me. As I grew up and become more explicitly philosophical, I sought to justify my visceral reaction, and in some of my early writings I attempted to argue that history would make no progress at all if not for individuals and innovations who are said to be ahead of their time.
While I can still see the reasonableness of this argument, and I could give it a better formulation today if I spent any amount of time on it, I can now see my way clear to give a pretty straight-forward definition of what it is for an individual or an innovation to be ahead of its time, and it is this: an individual or innovation that is ahead of its time is revolutionary in a Kuhnian sense.
Now I am of the opinion that, even without revolutionary developments, history would continue to exhibit change, and some of this change (but not all) would be sufficiently cumulative to be called progress. In other words, “normal science” could pretty much go on forever without being rudely interrupted by revolutionary developments, and this would be sufficient to give us some kind of historical change.
It would be an interesting intellectual exercise in counter-factual history to try to determine how much contemporary scientific knowledge (and its associated technology) we could possess today, even if by much slower means, by way of gradual transitions from one epistemic paradigm to another. Any such construction would intrinsically speculative, but I think that a rational case can be made for an alternative human history as close to gradualism as our natural history has in fact been.
That being said, cumulative change resulting in progress occurs much more rapidly when there is a Kuhnian revolution, and a paradigm shift causes a social shift from one body of knowledge (and its associated technology) to another body of knowledge (and its associated technology).
Television technology is, I think, one of the those rare glimpses of the future. Today we are surrounded by screens on all sides. Our cell phones have little screens, there are screens in the dashboards of our cars, there are screens at the checkout stand on the credit card machines, there are screens at the bank teller window (or, if you prefer, you can use the screen at the automatic teller), and of course there are screens throughout our homes (some of them quite large), competing for our attention by the display of some information or entertainment.
Almost none of these screens in use today are cathode ray tubes (CRT), which furnished the screens for all televisions until plasma and LED screens were introduced. CRTs take a lot of power and don’t give a very sharp image, but for many decades this was the only screen technology available, so that’s what we used.
Television presented us with an early vision of this world of information displaying screens at every turn. Even today the innards of an early television are dauntingly complex, and most people could not master the technology without many years of training. Televisions, at least inwardly, possess precisely that aesthetic of technological complexity that has been lost with the miniaturized and streamlined electronic devices that we use today.
A few months back I thought I would introduce the term “tubepunk” as being analogous to “steampunk,” but with vacuum tube technology instead of steam engine technology. I discovered that I had been anticipated and the term was already in use. I wrote about this in Tubepunk, Unexploited Technologies, Retro Technology of the Future, and — indirectly — in Counter-Factual Weapons Systems.
The Urban Dictionary defines steampunk as follows:
Steampunk is a subgenre of speculative fiction, usually set in an anachronistic Victorian or quasi-Victorian alternate history setting. It could be described by the slogan “What the past would look like if the future had happened sooner.” It includes fiction with science fiction, fantasy or horror themes.
From this we can derive a definition of tubepunk:
Tubepunk is a subgenre of speculative fiction, usually set in an anachronistic early twentieth century alternate history setting. It could be described by the slogan, “What the past would like like if contemporary electronic devices (or their functional equivalents) were constructed with vacuum tube technology.”
In fact, the Urban Dictionary definition already anticipates tubepunk, which it calls “Industrial/Modern Steampunk.” I have also recently come across the term “retrotronics,” which pretty much means the same thing as I intended with tubepunk.
Television was, in a sense, ahead of its time; it is tubepunk technology made concrete and embedded and embodied in history.
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