The Shock of the Old : Review
An alternate take on the history technology reveals how new technology adoption is an economical problem.
I came to “The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900” by David Edgerton while reading Robert Charette’s “Inside the Hidden World of Legacy IT Systems.” Charette comprehensively lays out the unfathomable expense that old IT systems have on our society. Since 2010, corporations and governments worldwide have spent an estimated $35 trillion on IT products and services. An ever increasing amount of this total goes towards maintenance of aging IT systems. Per Charette:
In his landmark study The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900 (Oxford University Press, 2007), British historian David Edgerton claims that although maintenance and repair are central to our relationship with technology, they are “matters we would rather not think about." As a result, technology maintenance “has lived in a twilight world, hardly visible in the formal accounts societies make of themselves."
I turned to the book to try to find deeper insights into how maintenance of other technologies can be applied to the crushing problem of “Technical Debt.” What I found, however, is a more fundamental theory of technology.
The History of Technology
Edgerton posits that the traditional narrative of technology is deeply flawed. The typical story considers a new technology as a sort of miracle that emerges from the imagination of the inventor. After this technology was created the world was eternally changed.
This isn’t the case. Take nuclear power, for example. This, admittedly, magical concept was to completely change the world. But did it? Despite the proliferation of the atom bomb during the war, it’s usage in Japan likely wasn’t anymore effective or efficient than a traditional bombing campaign. Nuclear power, while efficient and clean, still can’t get over the hump to be a major energy producer for the world almost 80 years later.
Edgerton shows that all new technologies have alternatives. The staying power of older technologies are longer than expected. Finally, just because something is new or innovative, doesn’t mean it will be used and it doesn’t mean that it will have a large impact on the world.
A modern example I kept thinking about myself while reading was remote work. During the pandemic most white collar workers did their jobs from home. This work-from-home paradigm is heralded as a sea change in the way we do our work. But this is something that has always existed. Before Zoom there was Skype. People have been conducting business “remotely” over the phone for a century. Even before the phone, letters were written to correspond with business partners around the world. Now, even excessive Zoom fatigue is causing many workers to turn their camera’s off stepping back into the world of the dreaded conference call.
Maintenance
Many modern technologies come with massive maintenance price tags. The airline industry is a great example of this. In the 1960’s maintenance was 35% of flying costs. This number improved overtime due to organizational capitol of the airlines. The more they maintained, the better they got at it.
Sky high maintenance costs prevent the poorer from adopting new technologies. My favorite picture in the book depicted a Ukrainian farmer collecting hay on his oxen-pulled cart. The discerning eye reveals this cart actually had wheels that came from a car! At the time of the picture, these farmers didn’t have enough money to maintain a tractor, but they did find a use for its parts. Edgerton provides numerous examples of what he calls “Creole” technologies, where modern technologies are broken down into more cost effective solutions.
Software
As explained at the beginning, software maintenance costs are astronomical. Engineers are in high demand, and even more so for older programming languages like Cobalt. Phil Murphy, the Governor of New Jersey, even pleaded for any Cobalt developers to step forward to help fix New Jersey’s broken unemployment system.
These astronomical costs mean that only the wealthy likely experience problems with legacy code. Indeed, the finance and banking industry hold many of the oldest and most painful legacy systems. The oldest legacy system in the US government is the IRS Individual Master File. It is 60 years old and still processes the majority of tax returns in the US.
If you are not the US government or the Bank of England then you’ll likely just go under before you can afford to keep these legacy systems around long enough. Marc Andreesen’s maxim “Software Eating the World” takes on a more sinister tone in this context. An organizations IT costs will eventually swell until a point where they can’t afford anymore. Since it is invisible, it might not be so obvious, but software is extremely expensive!
Conclusion
What I learned most from this book is that there is always an alternative in technology. What leads a given person to choose a particular technology most often depends on economics. In the context of software, it’s large, wealthy organizations that have the highest likelihood to take on technical debt, because they can affording to do so. A leaner shop has no choice but to bite the bullet, and jump into the cutting edge.