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Found myself watching episodes of the 20-year-old television series, The Secret Lives of Machines, in which Tim Hunkin introduces the first seasons’ finale on Television with:

Of all the machines in the home, the Television is probably the most mysterious. […] And all that’s inside these machines is a mass of equally mysterious bits an pieces, none of which appears to do anything at all.

No moving parts, nothing which affords us any understanding of how they work just by taking a peak inside. But once the program does get around to demystifying the inner workings of CRT televisions, juxtaposed against today’s display technologies, we’re reminded just how mechanical they really are: heaters warm-up, guns fire, electrons fly, magnets deflect, meshes intercept and lines scan. In all, there seems to be quite a bit of “motion” taking place inside these machines. And in fact, as Hunkin also reminds us, the very first television system invented by John Logie Baird was in the most literal sense a mechanical device.

And in the same way one would when faced with the revolving discs of Baird’s early sets, a child with his or her head pressed to the face of a CRT television likely makes some sort of primitive conclusion as to what’s happening on the other side of the glass to generate the red, green and blue dots that constitute the moving image. However, the same child facing a modern HD television isn’t presented with a question of mechanical understanding, but instead one of interface literacy. There are effectively no moving parts or visible seams to draw conclusions from, only ports and buttons through which to funnel and interact with information. Today, “How does it work?” is frequently synonymous with “How do I use it?” Frame of mind shifts from “What other signals can I feed into the TV?” to “What else can I attach this TV to?”, or more generally “What new contexts can I place this TV in?”

So what changes as increasing complexity and decreasing scale precludes us from understanding technologies as machines and forces us to accept them as mysterious black boxes? We can see some impact this loss of mechanical literacy has on our relationship with technology when we consider how repair culture is becoming less and less distinguishable from hacker culture. As technology becomes more complex we seem to be pushed into a mode of thinking that externalizes a device’s function/purpose and exposes it to new opportunities for integration, augmentation and subversion. To enable this, it looks like we’re giving up the knowledge needed to repair a breakdown in exchange for hardware APIs to decrease a device’s rate of obsolescence. Which seems to be the right choice since, these days, obsolescence looks to be contributing more to the disposal of electronics than failures or malfunctions.