The Inconvenience Is The Point

Though it is usually inauspicious to begin by badmouthing others, in this case it is necessary to illustrate an important point. Amidst the research I conducted during my adventure in tape-deck repair, I encountered an article on the relative merits of cassettes compared to other storage mediums. The article correctly pointed out that cassettes are inferior to streaming in most respects. The fidelity is worse than that of a high-quality digital file. The tapeheads get dirty¹. The tape can jam or tangle. In terms of immediate practicality the streaming service wins every time.

The article annoyed me because despite being factually correct in most respects it betrayed a fundamental misunderstanding of the psyche of the sort of person who would ask about cassette tapes in this day and age in the first place. Cassettes may be the most inconvenient sound storage medium in common use today, but the inconvenience has become part of the point. When instant gratification is the norm, subjecting yourself to that sort of harmless busywork on purpose feels like an act of rebellion. Embracing the pain of friction becomes the choice to be an active participant in your own life. In an engineering sense friction is usually bad, but if there was no such thing we'd spend all our time sliding hopelessly around. Some people already do.

Though I learned many lessons as a result of buying that tape-deck, it did not teach me to stay away from antique contraptions. Hence after walking through the rain back into the thrift market, I found myself walking out with a Voigtlander Vito BL film camera. I knew at the time that I should inspect it carefully for mould, which I dutifully did despite not knowing what the mould looked like, but nothing else relevant. This time I was lucky, and it was in working order from the start. Even the selenium light-meter was still functional despite having been manufactured roughly 70 years ago in a country that no longer exists. For those not familiar with this vintage of camera, it is important to realise that this is a beast of a lost era. Scrolling the film to position it for the next exposure is done manually with a lever and ratchet mechanism. 'Calibrating' the light-meter to the film speed takes the form of physically rotating the label for the output, which has two scales neither of which are ISO because they didn't have ISO back then. The only way to tell if the subject is in focus is to take the photo and develop it.

If your only goal is to take a photo that accurately represents the subject in its literal presentation, a digital camera is the obvious choice. Though film is capable of disproportionately high resolution in theory, in practice digital wins every time in the ways that matter. You can check the result immediately. The high capacity of modern SD cards means that you can take as many photos as you want. The difficulties of focusing, exposure, and so forth are automated away. Whatever tricks the film photographer may employ may be replicated via photo editting software. However, none of that is relevant to the problem someone living in the modern age who picks up a film camera anyway is trying to solve. The monetary expense of the film, the sharply limited number of exposures, the lack of immediate feedback; all of this forces you to engage in the problem at hand in a different way because it's a fundamentally different problem. My first photos with the Voigtlander were wildly inferior to ones I've taken on my phone, but the end result was always maybe half the point at most. The half-decent ones felt valuable because of what it took to get to them. Though in principle my weapon of choice was simple to operate, learning its idiosyncrasies felt like an achievement.

Furthermore, while my negatives will eventually rot as all things do, they are stable in a way that files are not. The ways by which a digital file may be lost forever are innumerable. If you keep them on a local drive, that drive may be misplaced or physically destroyed; you are no better off than if you used a physical, more permanent medium. Trying to take advantage of the modern wonder of the cloud opens you up to even more vectors of attack. Subscriptions lapse; passwords are lost; and this of course assumes you never suffer to comprehend that old truism that the cloud is other people's computers, and run afoul of that somehow. Yet still more risks pile up; there are still the vagaries of software obsolescence to consider, and this is all assuming you have a permanent copy in the first place. We haven't even touched streaming or the prospect of relying on other websites, not to mention the quagmire that is international intellectual property law². A song, clip or show may be yanked from a service at any time, for any reason, depending on what way the wind is blowing and whatever mood some faceless corporate so-and-so happens to be in.

It is often said that old machines, especially cars, feel alive in a way that new ones do not. This phenomenon cannot be explained by the patina of history alone. Living things are imperfect. They have foibles. They require care and do not always do what is demanded of them. You can't appreciate what you don't notice, and the simplest way for a machine to make itself noticeable is to do something, anything, that it isn't supposed to. Life resists control. A device that does exactly what it's supposed to every time without fuss doesn't feel alive because it doesn't feel like anything. To be fair, sometimes that's what you want. When you have a job to do, you want it done as easily as possible, all else being equal. Matters of leisure and artistic creativity on the other hand are better served by a little pomp and circumstance; the lift and sweep of the tonearm, the flow of iridescent ink from the nib of a fountain pen, the click of a mechanical shutter.

At the time of publishing, on the desk in my bedroom there is an off-brand polaroid, taken by a friend and given to me, of a slice of toast that I ate on the morning of the 31st of December 2024. This photo will remain there until I physically relocate it. Though entropy will one day claim it as it claims all things, there is no reason to assume that this will happen any time soon. There is no legal means by which another may take it from me. It is unmoved by the relentless march of progress³. It may yet outlive us all⁴. Can those of you who still hew to the doctrine of digitisation supremacy say the same for your own happy memories?