The Following Data Was Lost...

We have a fax machine, and recently it has decided to start receiving faxes again. However, it hasn't done this since 1995 when it belonged to somebody else. Consequently, each time I turn it on a little shiny rectangular bit of paper glides (yes, glides, it has a wonderful sort of clunky elegance) out of the back containing information regarding The Boathouse Restaurant fifteen years ago.

Wonderfully cryptic, needlessly technical and wholly irrelevant snippets of information. My favourite is “THE FOLLOWING DATA WAS LOST: JOURNAL / ENERGY REPORT: THE ELECTRICITY FAILED.”

I imagine The Boathouse Restaurant to be located in Maine – because all Stephen King books are set in Maine – and by a perpetually misty jetty. I fantasise that piece by piece, as these bizarre little messages come through, I'm going to unravel the mystery of The Boathouse Restaurant during the power cut and the alien attack/zombie siege that ensued.

But there's something slightly peculiar about receiving these transmitions from the past, it's like a form of time travel! I'm hoping that it will tie in with me finding a map to some hidden treasure, or the Holy Grail...

Anyway, I love antiquated technology. The clunky fax machine with it's sinister messages reminds me of all the Dharma Initiative stuff they find in Lost. I love it because it scares me. In Lost they find all these huge clunky computers from the 70s, but they all still work and can pretty much do everything that computers do now... they have webcams, IM and all that. Recently I think I've worked out why old technology it scares me – it suggests that nothing ever changes.

Fax machines amaze me, they're such a great idea. Unfortunatley we'd stopped using them by the time I was old enough to need one. I found myself thinking, why don't people send more faxes? But of course, why would we when we have email? Emails seemed so new and impressive and futuristic when we first heard about them, but is there really, fundamentally any difference between an email and a fax?

We're now told that communication is so much easier because everybody has a mobile, but no one had mobiles twenty years ago and they didn't feel a gaping void in their ability to communicate. There were phone boxes on most corners, and kids were given little pre-paid cards to make emergency calls with. Is it really so much different?

Of course, we live in a golden age of iphones which can post on facebook, download films and scan your retina every five seconds (just making sure you're still you!) - but I'm thinking in terms of what current technology is capable of.

Actually, it's perfectly summed up in a song The Future (Isn't What it Used to Be) by my friend Alasdair: “Don't talk to me about the internet and act like I'm supposed to swoon. You're exploring cyberspace, shut your gormless tweeting face, in 1969 a man went to the fucking moon.”

They had spaceships in the 60s! Are we really supposed to feel like an iPad is a major breakthrough?

I'm not saying all this stuff isn't good – but when you just switch your perspective on the whole thing it really does feel like, fundamentally, nothing really changes. The government military/scientists, the vampires, the saucer people or whoever clearly have technology that is incredibly advanced and probably staggeringly more advanced than we're allowed to know, and it's like contemporary technology is ever so slightly tweaked every now and then to give us this impression that things are changing, when really it's pretty much the same. It's like how, when mobile phones first arrived, they kept getting smaller and smaller, and this was in some way good, and now they're getting bigger because they need keyboards, plasma screens and vapourising death rays. Apparently now this is also in some way good. But at the end of the day, it's just a phone and it can't do anything that wasn't possible in 1990. I'm sure Logic 9 is mind bogglingly superior to all its predecessors... and the chasm of difference between the quality of songs composed with 9 and 8 (a mere calculator!) with be colossal, but it's just a tool that makes music, and my favourite piece of music was made in 1801 with a tool called a piano. And no amount of new technology will make Moonlight Sonata any less good or any less valid. Things vary – but nothing ever truly changes.

But why? I suppose the easy answer is that it's a great way of tricking us in to spending more and more money on things we don't need. But, have you noticed that every generation seems to think that it's at the “end”? That it's at the peak of scientific and technological knowledge? We can laugh at people who thought the Earth was flat, or condemn the black slave trade as inhumane, but few of us ever want to admit that comparatively we're just as ignorant. In a hundred years, people will think of chemotherapy as being as ridiculous as using leeches for nosebleeds. Does the belief in the infallibility of modern technology contribute to this ignorance? It certainly does contribute, I think, to the illusion of time. The idea of things constantly changing creates a sense of progression that doesn't really exist. Because we all know that time is an illusion. Lunch time doubly so. But that's another story for another day...

We are as old as the universe and more clever than we know.