The lost Ferrari

This image of a buried Ferrari Dino 246 GTS being excavated in 1978 turned up in my inbox this morning. The Ferrari had been stolen four years previously, and it’s presumed that the thieves ended up burying it. It was discovered by a group of kids digging in their front yard in Los Angeles.

There are a couple of things I find really striking about this photograph. The first is that it was taken four decades ago, yet the Ferrari still looks like a futuristic car. And it serves as a stark reminder of how much things changed up until about 1980, and how almost nothing seems to have changed out there in the world since the beginning of the 1990s. Indeed the design of pretty much all the things in our environment: homes, offices, bars, cars, clothing, advertisements, haircuts, domestic appliances, pedestrian crossings... feels like it got frozen in time. And that’s the second thing that I find extraordinary about this image—that it is almost as if an archeologist has uncovered it a thousand years in the future. Only they didn’t. What still looks like the future was dug up 40 years ago in the past.

My Dad’s life spanned the beginning of powered flight to the space age. When he was born in 1912, there were aeroplanes, but they were made out of string and brown paper. When he died in 1988, people were going into space in something straight out of Kubrick’s 2001. And the first part of my life was similar; there was relentless progress. Indeed, if I watch old movies, I can pretty much guess the year up to about 1992. Prior to that so much changed, even in twelve months, that every single little prop acts as a clue to when the film was made. But after 1992 it’s almost impossible. That was the year everything got frozen. Except for one thing: digital technology. Because as soon as I see a mobile phone (or a laptop or a computer), I know immediately.

1992 was the year everything disappeared down the screen, and the physical world got put on hold.

I’m not making some kind of Luddite rant here. I was a digital early-adopter. In 1992 I had Tim Berners-Lee’s ‘World Wide Web’ running on my NeXT computer. “Let me show you something!” I’d say to people. “Isn’t it great!” “But what is it?” they’d reply. In those days most of them didn’t even know what email was.

But I am making an observation, and perhaps a lament. After a quarter of a century my enthusiasm for digital technology has long since evaporated. And the world is catching up with me. Nobody says: “Hey, I just discovered an amazing website!”—I haven’t heard that almost since the millennium. “Have you seen this incredible app?” It’s not 2010 any more. And, frankly, I couldn’t give a damn anyway. Pixels on screen are so like... whatever.

In 2018 the big news is that digital technology is dystopia. It’s messed up our kids’ brains—stopped them sleeping, turned them into addicts, and exposed them to bullying, grooming and radicalisation. It’s also allowed all kinds of nefarious forces to destabilise our democracy, with disastrous consequences in the USA and Britain. It’s ripped through sectors, from private hire to professional services, destroying livelihoods and replacing them with ‘gigs’ (and ironically its devastating impact on residential lettings is now making it impossible for bright young people to come to work in Silicon Valley). It doesn’t pay its taxes. Its supply chain... well, you don’t want to know. And it hoards lots of personal information about all of us that none of us remember consenting to.

Tech’s ‘insanely great’ (or perhaps just insane) new thing is Tulipmania with a valueless pseudo-currency invented for drug dealers, weapons smugglers and paedophiles.

Worse still, after two decades of reskilling ourselves—and preparing our children—to be ‘knowledge workers’, Tech has abolished knowledge work. “That’s all going to be done by AI now!” Fuck. Mark Carney, the Governor of the Bank of England no less, reckons that in the UK 15m middle-class, white collar (knowledge worker) jobs will be replaced by robots over the coming years. That’s half of the British workforce. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. What were Silicon Valley thinking of?

But it’s not a conspiracy. It’s just that nobody thought about any of this. All they thought about were their quarterly returns and keeping their shareholders happy. And that wasn’t good enough. Business doesn’t have a right to plunge whole societies into the shit, just to maintain return on investment. But it’s not as if business is some kind of alien thing—it’s people we sat next to at school. People who should have known better.

But back to the Ferrari. Which I find a rather stark reminder that the narrative of the first part of my life, that ‘things can only get better’, was not some universal truth. Progress doesn’t always move forward. Sometimes it stalls. Sometimes it even goes backwards. And my life seems to have been made up of three distinct eras which show this forwards-stop-reverse sequence.

In the first era, from 1960 to about 1989, there was a relentless pace of change. It was an optimistic time (despite the fact that through the Seventies the UK was a rapidly declining power and, by the end of the decade, an economic basket-case). Ideas, music, the arts, culture in general, and society at large, were vibrant. The UK was a great place to live because exciting stuff was happening out there.

In second era, which ran until about 2012, all the excitement was happening through the looking glass of the screen. But it was all so terribly, terribly exciting that nobody seemed to notice that everything that wasn’t digital had stultified.

Then in the third era, things have gone backwards. Optimism has given way to anger and distrust. Very little that is genuinely innovative or exciting enlivens our lived experience any more; the 2010s feel like a creative wasteland. (Things have even so slipped at Apple that their once cutting-edge interface design looks like it is being done by bored computers). Most of us now hanker after some time in our lives when we were more engaged with the world around us. Even millennials, who don’t remember much before the millennium, are inventing a ‘physicalised’ past they prefer to the present—a world of artisan bakeries and listening to vinyl and film photography and driving around in refurbished VW camper-vans. And our politics is leading the charge; we’re going ‘back to the future’ under the leadership of old men and women (May, Corbyn, Trump, Clinton, Sanders—their average age is sixty-nine years and two months). Currently they’re selling us a vision which is set somewhere between the 1950s and the 1970s (but there’s an ominous sense it will end up in 1932).

When I look at the picture I don’t see a Ferrari. I see the Doc’s DeLorean. He and Marty drove back to 1974 and decided to stay there, because they saw what was coming. Wise choice.