Stuff we could do without

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.