Two peculiar counter-intuitive facts about the digital world this year. First, sales of computer tablets have been on the slide. Second, even less predictably, sales of ebooks – at least in the summer – were down by a quarter on two years before, while sales of print books have been rising.
I know, it’s the big trends that are important, but it is strange nonetheless that digital technology is not sweeping all before it. Real books were certainly supposed to have been consigned to the secondhand shop – Ikea was even said to have redesigned its children’s bookcase in the light of the decline in books.
The French historian Jean Gimpel predicted something along these lines just before he died in 1996. In fact he went further, hailing the glorious return of many of those technologies we regard as somehow more “real” and which were supposed to have been driven out. And he was right: trams, cycling, brick and timber-framed houses, cotton and natural fibres have all been creeping back, just as he said. To which you might add other defunct technologies that refuse to lie down and die, like vinyl records, where sales are at an 18-year high.
If you take a longer view, the phenomenon is even stranger. During the Apollo moon missions in the late 1960s, the meals the astronauts ate – beef stew in a plastic bag where you add water, high-potency breakfast pills – were popularly supposed to be the future of food. Kitchens were supposed to disappear, with meals delivered to our doors in neat vacuum packs. But they had reckoned without Nigella, and – far from disappearing – our kitchens, with their shiny pots hanging unused above the stove, are now the biggest rooms in the house.
In two cases, the old technology has almost driven out the new. And bizarrely so, given the time it takes to queue in coffee shops while the machine endlessly hisses and gargles for each customer. Instant coffee still exists, but it isn’t entirely polite. Nor is instant mashed potato. Those Smash robots, which used to fall about laughing at potato peelers, must be rusting with chagrin.
So what is going on? Well, I think two things. The first is that we cling to the real world ever more tightly as the virtual world presses its claims, a phenomenon predicted by theAmerican philosopher Robert Nozick. A growing minority of us may not shun tablets or ebooks (I write them, for goodness sake). We might even drink instant coffee sometimes. But we are determined that the unspun, unmanipulated and unmarketed shall not perish from this Earth. Even if we have to wait in line for a hissing coffee machine.
This has been dismissed as a middle-class fad, but most of us seem to be demanding more personality from politicians, more moral coherence from corporations. Authenticity is basically classless, even if it manifests itself in different ways for different people.
The other trend is more controversial. It is that, despite what we are told, technological change is actually slowing down. I’ve been travelling on Boeing 747s and driving Minis my entire life (I’m 56). And although the technology inside them is very different, just compare that with a century ago – with the extraordinary development over the same 56-year period of cars, aeroplanes, submarines, telephones and all the rest.
If I was born in 1858, would I still be struggling along in my wagon at New Year 1915? These days, we live at the same addresses as we did a century ago. Travelling in London, at least, we take the same bus routes, use the same stations.
The notion that technological change is accelerating is based on dubious factoids about the idea that mobile phone penetration into the American market was faster than it was for radio. In reality, the reverse is the case.
The future is already here, wrote William Gibson; it’s just unevenly spread. The truth is that it’s more complicated than that. The future is not what it was, and it’s often remarkably like the past.
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