Originally published 19 October 1992
In 1842, a German immigrant to America named J. A. Etzler published a book called The Paradise within the Reach of all Men, without Labor, by Powers of Nature and Machinery.
Etzler gave voice to America’s unbridled enthusiasm for technology. “Fellow Men!” he wrote, “I promise to show the means of creating a paradise within ten years, where everything desirable for human life may be had by every man in superabundance, without labor, and without pay.” He proceeded to describe a gadget-filled world remarkably similar to the present.
Henry David Thoreau reviewed Etzler’s book in the United States Magazine and Democratic Review. He wondered if Etzler had left something out of account — namely, soul or spirit.
With our usual ambivalence towards technology, we have raised Thoreau to our pantheon of heroes and consigned Etzler to oblivion. But it is Etzler we follow. It is Etzler’s paradise we long to enter, with gadgets in superabundance, without labor, without cost.
To honor (or at least remember) the forgotten prophet of our techno-paradise, I hereby establish the J. A. Etzler Awards for Technological Innovations We Could Do Without. The winners receive a bronze statuette of Etzler’s paradisiacal man, supine on a couch, remote control in hand.
The winners:
- Chirping auto alarms and beeping digital watches. No longer do we listen with Thoreau to the chirp of returning robins and the peep of spring peepers. Instead, we have parking lots full of chirping cars, in full voice year round, and watches that beep, peep, cheep, and tweet, apparently at random, but usually in the middle of a church service, concert, or lecture.
- Cardboard magazine inserts. It took some terribly clever machine designer to figure out a way to bind these into magazines, thereby making it impossible to read a magazine using less than three hands. A particularly galling offender: That watchdog of consumer convenience, Consumer Reports.
- Lift-and-sniff magazine perfume samples. Cardboard inserts are annoying; perfume samples can be downright embarrassing. Thumb through a copy of Vogue or GQ at the newsstand and come away smelling like a vamp or dandy. Even the staid old New Yorker has recently acquired a chichi scent. What’s next? Lift-and-sniff ads for hairsprays, deodorants, and bathroom cleansers.
- Computer-generated telemarketing and telephone answering machines. Either one of these inventions would be enough to chill Thoreau’s soul. Not even Etzler imagined how much time we would spend listening to machines or talking to them. However, we can take a perverse satisfaction from knowing than many computer-generated calls are answered by answering machines.
- Touch-tone telephone switchboards. If you think this is the most annoying technological innovation of our time, push 1 now. If you would like to protest to the touch-tone switchboard of your choice, push 2 now. If you have ever felt like ripping the telephone out of the wall while waiting to complete a call, push 3 now. If you…
- Call waiting. The telephone company has a lot to answer for.
- Styrofoam “popcorn” packing material. Opening a package filled with this stuff is like popping the lid on Pandora’s box. The “popcorn” leaps from the package, scatters across the floor like roaches caught in the light, clings like leeches. The machines that make this stuff should forthwith be converted to the production of cheese-flavored snacks.
- Post-its. Someone at 3M invented a glue that didn’t stick, and turned it into a multi-million dollar industry. I find myself going through a pack of these things every week and loathing myself for it. When our civilization is exhumed by archeologists many centuries hence, they will find it encrusted with countless layers of little yellow squares. Particularly offensive are the ones that say “For Your Files,” which means “For Your Wastebasket, Not Mine.”
- SaladShooters. I’m not exactly sure what a SaladShooter is, nor have I ever seen one or met anyone who owns one, but they are advertised so frequently on primetime television I’m sure someone must be buying them. As I write, in homes all across America, people are saying, “Sweetie, how about shooting up some dinner.” I checked Etzler on this one: No, he did not include SaladShooters in his compendium of “everything desirable for human life,” but surely this was a failure of imagination on his part.
It was the Harvard historian Perry Miller who first suggested that Etzler, not Thoreau, should be America’s patron saint. Americans of the nineteenth century were “grasping for the technological future, panting for it, crying for it,” said Miller. Now the technological future is here, clothed in Post-its, speaking with a digital voice, beeping, chirping, reeking of unwanted scents, spitting chopped carrots.
Welcome to paradise.