The Virtues of the Good Old Landline Phone

The old landline phone was simple, durable, reliable. Buy one, just about any one, install it, and you might find yourself still able to use it perfectly well decades later, without having to do anything but keep paying your phone bill. You could even use one when the electricity was out--something people learned to appreciate in disaster prone-areas (which just about every area seems to be these days). These are considerable virtues from the standpoint of the sane non-idiot--and when personal computers exploded in the 1990s, seeing how little of these virtues those devices displayed, they may have hoped that computers would become more like phones this way. Instead computers remained just as problematic as before, and indeed got worse in various ways--in significant part because the ballyhooed "entrepreneurs" of Silicon Valley realized that making them into Orwell's telescreens would be a profitable proposition, and the government they pretend to despise even as it invented and subsidized everything that made them rich (as they take all the credit to the thunderous applause of their claqueurs in the media and the rest of the commentariat) of course had no problem with their using them this way (wink, wink). In the process, rather than making computers more like phones they turned phones into computers, with all their enduring and even worsening defects actually magnified (at least the user of a wired PC--never mind a landline phone user--doesn't have to worry about battery charge and signal strength and the security of their "Wi-fi," or fumble with tiny and hyper-delicate SIM cards and touchscreens with all their annoyances and maintenance demands), all as, even twenty years after the unveiling of the smart phone, a mobile phone still can't give you the reliability and quality of an old-fashioned landline call, not that people will be able to make the comparison for much longer. Telecom companies which love taking your money but hate paying for infrastructure and everything else relevant to service are working hard to make the landline a thing of the past, not by making it superfluous but by making it legally possible for them to simply not offer the facility.

I, for one, appreciate the technological progress of the last two decades. I feel no nostalgia whatsoever for dial-up Internet, preferring gigabit broadband and all that it enables--like streaming video. I certainly think being able to query a chatbot with a complex question far superior to typing strings of unconnected keywords into a search engine. And I certainly think it a good thing on the whole that portable communications devices exist. But it is dishonest or stupid to pretend that every change has been for the good, that the bad was all the necessary "price of progress," and that the changes were all a matter of "consumer choice." Here as everywhere else the consumer is not king. Business offers the consumer what it wants to offer them, take it, or take it, all as "simple," "durable, "reliable," "long-lasting," "low-maintenance," "straightforward," "cheap" and "user-friendly" are not only not at the top of their lists, but things the Waste Makers fight against with every fiber of their being as a mortal enemy to their divine right to take the consumer for as much as possible as they give them as little as possible in return, all as they smarmily tell them "You've never had it so good."