A Backwards, Inside-Out, Oil + Iron Internet (1937)

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

I feel slightly queasy seeing this photograph, found in the August 1937 issue of Popular Science magazine--it seems to me to be a backwards, inside-out analog cyberpunk (without the cyber) variety of the internet, a robotic device moving people around from data bit to data bit, an oil and iron process of automatic info retrieval, moving the user to the information rather than the other way around.  The image does put me in mind of Terry Gilliam's Brazil, which renders info and other muck in a high-dystopian fashion with endless ducts and file cabinets, making things oppressively inaccessible in their accessibility.

And to some degree there's a little Spongebob similarity in there too, though without the iron nd metal part, just Mr. Squarepants and his cardboard filing cabinets for all of this thoughts and memories, serviced by smaller units of himself whop presumably have their own filing systems in their heads.  Filing cabinets, all the way down. 

There is a more-refined image of what is basically the same idea, found here in the fantastic bio-art of Fritz Kahn (1888-1968), who published his Der Mensch als Industriepalast (Man as an Industrial Palace or thereabouts) in Stuttgart in 1926.  Kahn is seen as a "modernist", which I guess is true; to me he is far more than that--he's "different".

In Charlie Chaplin's great 1937 Modern Times, there are no file cabinets and I don't think that there's any paper, just the results of vast mechanization:

And of course, Fritz Lang's Metropolis, made a little earlier, in 1927:

 And finally, an image of the semi-reverse of the gigantic filing system:  moving humans through mounds of paper not contained in file cabinets, stacked upon stacks of stacks.  Once everything is said and done, none of this info-sausage-factory seems very pretty.

 

 

Comments

[Jeff Donlan]

Something like the last picture is what I have in mind from Jose Saramago's "All the Names," in which Senhor Jose works at the "Central Registry of Births, Marriages and Deaths," a frightening labyrinth of old paper. The folly of presuming to keep accurate account of everyone surely explains why the number of people getting to heaven will be restricted to 144,000. We should attend to our happiness here and now, and regularly throw out our Sticky Notes.

[John F. Ptak]

Thanks, Jeff. AS it turns out Patti worked for a month in British Guyana 15 years ago, or so, and said that the finance department looked something like this--old records going back into the dust, all piled high on open shelves, open paper, open everything. Seems like a tragedy waiting to happen when at street level you look up to see a super tanker going by. // BTW I got me my sticky notes, just in case. They're blank, of course.