Do you remember your pre-internet brain?

To contemporary eyes, life in the last days of analog might seem like a huge hassle, full of obstacles and uncertainty. But that friction was the source of a great deal of freedom.

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SHORTLY AFTER CHRISTMAS I came across this Axios report about how “pre-internet” life had become a subject of “intense curiosity to the growing cohort of people who never experienced it.” When I read it I was struck by two thoughts. The first and most immediate was, cripes I’m old. The second, though, was more jarring: What was the pre-internet world like? Like Douglas Coupland, I don’t really remember. 

I mean, I should remember. I was there for it, an adult for much of it, and I obviously have memories of the period from the late seventies to the mid-nineties. But what I have trouble remembering is how we did a lot of things, in particular, how anything was planned, coordinated, and executed. I took vacations and went places with my family, and met up with friends and went to parties and went on dates and generally lived a reasonably full life. But I don’t really recall exactly how we made it all happen, and how my brain navigated it all.  

I’ve heard people say things like, “well before phones we just made plans, and kept them.” And that’s true to a certain extent (though I’ve never been great making plans, or keeping them). And I guess there was also a lot of default coordination that was done through social Schelling points that we would default to in the absence of any communication to the contrary: meet at the park after school; Saturday night we’ll be at Scott’s dad’s house; go to the usual pub after class. But there would also have been plenty of missed connections, failed opportunities, and wasted time. One of my biggest memories of weekends in high school, for example, was how much time we spent just wandering around looking for other kids to see what was going on. More often than not, we would find small packs of other kids, doing the exact same thing. (Then you’d end up standing in a snowbank drinking a half-frozen can of Labatt Blue from a six-pack someone’s older brother had bought – but that’s another story). 

We are so used to being purely digital that we’ve lost track of what it means, metaphysically. But simply (if perhaps simplistically) it’s the idea that the message is conceptually distinct from the medium. Any  digital message can be instantiated in any number of diverse media, from digital tape to CDs to copper wire or fibre optic cable to Wifi. As long as the binary pattern of information, the zeroes and ones, the ons and offs, is retained and transmitted faithfully, the medium doesn’t really matter. Digital information is logically independent of matter. Communication is now fully independent of place, and by extension, of time.

What does it mean to live in an analog culture? It is to live in a world where the medium and the message are one and the same: Ink on paper, grooves on vinyl, pulses over copper wire, electromagnetic waves in the air. And so despite the clear revolutionary character of the telegraph, the radio, and the television, right up until the late 1970s humanity remained thoroughly embedded in analog culture. We were tethered to stuff, and therefore largely tethered to time and place, with our politics and economics, our entertainments and our private lives, all equally bound by the limitations in the transmission of information that had not substantially changed since the invention of the telegraph in the 1830s. 

If you search “pre-internet life” you’ll get a raft of listicles and YouTube videos and think pieces, along with plenty of pictures and memes of kids playing hopscotch and families playing board games and other scenes. Typically missing from this idyll are images of kids starting slackjawed at a television, but there is a great memestream with the caption “not a cellphone in sight, just people living in the moment” accompanying old paintings of civil war battles or crowds gathered at a medieval beheading. But nostalgia and anti-nostalgia aside, and regardless of the various solutions we hit on for resolving the endless coordination problems we faced in the pre-internet world, it was just harder to do stuff — there was more lining up, more waiting, more wandering around, more general uncertainty about life. 

You can see how this played out, practically, by just watching almost any movie or television drama from the era. It’s amazing how much plot movement is generated by the basic inability of the main characters to get in touch with one another.  There is a sneaky* example of this in the first season of Halt and Catch Fire, a television show that ran from 2014 to 2017 and which tried to do for the computer revolution of the early 1980s what Mad Men did for the advertising revolution of the ‘50s. 

The focus in that season is on a fictional company, Cardiff Electric, a Dallas-based mainframe software company that is trying to compete with IBM in the personal computer market. Joe MacMillan is the project leader, along with a computer engineer named Gordon Clark and a computer science student named Cameron, who has been hired to do the coding for the operating system. Their ambition is to disrupt the nascent personal computer business by making a machine that is twice as powerful as an IBM PC, costs half as much, and is also light enough to be carried around like a briefcase. 

The keystone episode is the sixth of the season, in which spillover bad weather from a hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico finds our heroes isolated by the elements. Cameron is stranded at work having drinks with the head of the company, while Joe is spending an uncomfortable night at Gordon’s house. Having been invited over for dinner, he spends the night drinking wine with Gordon’s wife and playing with his kids while waiting for Gordon to come home. But no one knows where Gordon is. He’s out driving in the storm, criss-crossing the town trying to track down a Cabbage Patch doll that his daughter has asked for and which Gordon has told his wife he’s already bought. 

The whole plot only makes sense in the age of analog. To imagine how the episode would play out today, instead of everyone sitting around wondering and waiting for Gordon to come home, the question of where he is would be answered with a simple cell phone call or text message. But more importantly, his frantic hunt across the city for an elusive toy would be pointless: forgetful Gordon could have simply ordered one delivered overnight from Amazon or he could have found one locally on Facebook Marketplace. The logic of the episode relies on people not having access to the most basic forms of mobile communications that we take for granted today.

(*What is sneaky about this episode is that the reason Joe has gone to Gordon’s house in the first place is that he wants to convince Gordon to take his side against Cameron, who is convinced, wrongly Joe thinks, that the future of personal computers is networked communication. The writers knew what they were doing.)

This is also why the default for so much contemporary fiction is apocalyptic, falling back on the easy plot device of the failure of civilization, which usually just means smartphones don’t work. It is much easier to do tension and drama when every major dilemma can’t be resolved with a quick text or Google search. The 2020 end-of-the-world thriller Leave The World Behind is almost a parody of the genre, and from its cast (Ethan Hawke and Julia Roberts) to its major plot points (e.g. desperate middle-aged professional male can’t find his way around a small town without his Waze-enabled iPhone), the film is cask-strength Gen X fan service. 

All of this makes pre-internet life seem like a big hassle, and in many ways it was.  But there was a flip side, which is that the constraints of the analog world helped foster a great deal of creativity, and opened up the space for a specific kind of freedom. This seems counterintuitive, because we have completely internalized the conceit that technology and liberty are soulmates. But there’s an old distinction in philosophy between freedom from and freedom to, and what technology has given us in the latter (the instant capacity to do all sorts of things we couldn’t have imagined a few decades ago) it has taken away in the former: we have lost the freedom from distraction, from constant surveillance and monitoring, but more generally, from the social and personal expectations generated by the promise of constant and instant networked communication.

I sometimes wonder when was the last time I went a day without using a phone, sending a text or email, or checking the internet, in an unconscious way — not counting forced isolations like canoe trips or rides on Via Rail. When was the last day I spent with my pre-internet brain? I really have no idea. It wasn’t before 1999 for sure, but it was certainly no later than the day I got my first smartphone, in the fall of 2007. In there somewhere, I lost touch with the analog world, forever.

I can sort of conjure up my pre-internet brain, when I try to throw my mind back to what it was really like before I had even heard of the internet, let alone had an email account or a cell phone. When I recall, for example, wandering the streets of Ottawa with friends on any given weekend evening in the late 1980s, wondering where our other friends were, trying to find the scene, any scene, what comes to mind is that there was a great deal of friction involved in the basic folkways of daily life.

But it is increasingly clear though, is that friction wasn’t a hassle, not by any stretch. It was freedom. 

This is part three of a series devoted to exploring what I call “The Long Eighties”. This is the extended decade between 1979 to 1993, which, as I read it, marked the last days of analog culture and our full transition to a fully digital society. You can read the first two posts here and here. I think we’ll take a break from this theme for a couple dispatches, but will come back to it very soon. As always, thanks for reading and please, if you like this, I’d appreciate you sharing it with anyone who might it enjoyable as well. — ap