the edge of obsolescence

desktop tabs on a summer day

This summer, obsolescence is not subtle but relentless. The sun, lost behind a soft, indefinite sky, measures the season in humidity and the long white-blue stretch of the light. I lie on my bed on my stomach, legs kicked up at the knee behind me, crossed at the ankle. Another granular moment where I am supposedly surrounded by abundance. My phone is within reach, material abundance distilled into circuitry. There is, on it, an infinity of things to do. Scroll, type, refresh. Boredom, that private ache I thought obsolete, nips at my synapses. It’s not unwelcome exactly, just strange. I thought I had outgrown it, or it had outgrown me.

Obsolescence, I have begun to suspect, is alteration. Translation of an object into something else, an archival echo. I notice it not only in devices or formats, but in social rituals, the overwhelming unanimity of immediacy.

My browser is crowded with scrappy tabs: a 1982 article on the aesthetics of ruins; Facebook Marketplace listings for a mid-century lamp I can’t afford; a forum thread about a discontinued perfume that I am mourning I finished my bottle of; three versions of the same focaccia recipe. The quiet tyranny of all these small open doors grips me, not one of them urgent, not one of them closed. The screen becomes a cabinet of miniatures. I am reminded in this of Aby Warburg’s unfinished Mnemosyne Atlas, that sprawling assembly of panels of photographs, maps, paintings intended to trace the migration of symbols across centuries. Of course, my tabs are a lower-rent atlas of passing curiosities, online ephemera instead of iconography, but serving the same longing: to anchor position in a drifting constellation of meaning.

The architecture of attention today is discontinuous: a scatterplot over a straight line. A notebook entry becomes a tab becomes a notification becomes a message becomes a photo. We live among incomplete gestures in the manifold invitations of parallel possibilities. Digression as deviation feels like an old notion, now it is simply the terrain.

On a walk recently, I stopped by a stretch of overgrown woodland where nettles claimed ground beside the wide, ribbed leaves of dock plants. As a child I learned that nettles sting; dock leaves soothe - a pattern old enough to predate naming. Press a dock leaf to your stung skin, and the fire will recede. I hardly ever tried it, the knowledge itself seemed sufficient. They weren’t planted in such intimacy; still, they thrive in adjacency, as though remedy and harm require company. The thought follows me home, trapped in the notes app of my phone in my pocket, followed by a “nature is janusian…use for substack maybe?”

By mid-afternoon, the room has changed temperature almost imperceptibly. The kind of shift you feel first on the skin and only later acknowledge with the mind. I try to read, but instead find myself cataloguing the sensation of paper against my fingers, comparing it to another in the pile of books I have started and failed to continue. Clothbound versus paper, serif against sans. They seem like evidence, subtle markers in the archaeology of the printed word. I wonder how long these choices were actually thought through for.

The book lies open but I have drifted to somewhere else. Back to the cabinet of curiosities I have been assembling without design. A review for a 1970 Czech film has captured my interest. I watched the film in the original Czech with English subtitles whilst making dinner, but I now realise a lot went over my head. I stirred the pan with one hand, paused and rewound every few minutes, the steam from the pot as much an actor as the characters on screen. I don’t know if I will ever revisit the film with full attention, but to do so would be to collapse that strange accidental collaboration between the filmmaker and my kitchen.

I notice this in other media too: songs I’ve never quite made it part the bridge of, books stuck in limbo, notebooks dense with beginnings and sparse on endings. Perhaps the unfinished and the finished have a symbiosis not unlike the nettles and dock leaves: the worth of a completed work is partly made by the gravitational pull of the incomplete that came before it (the pile of substack drafts that spurred my almost-3-month hiatus from the app).

Evening sharpens the outlines of things as the street grows quieter in degrees. I return to the tabs and see them less as demands than as an ecology. Each still alive because unresolved. I think of seed banks, where dormant plant varieties are kept at low temperature until a crisis requires their revival. Perhaps these tabs, these curiosities, are my cognitive seed bank, kept against a season when I will know what to do with them.

I pour a glass of water and watch as a tiny air bubble climbs the cylinder, slow enough to track its ascent. I follow it upwards until it blooms against the surface and dissolves itself invisibly back into the whole. In a faint tremor of the water, perhaps from a passing car, I catch the thought that obsolescence may be the slow redistribution of meaning. An object recedes, but the pattern it left behind seeps elsewhere. We call it obsolete when we no longer see it in its native habitat, but that is only because we are woefully unskilled at following migration routes outside of the obvious.

In this way, my library of unfinished media feels less abandoned than relocated to a different stratum of my attention. The same must be true of cultural forms. The rotary telephone appears as a retro design cue on a touchscreen, the texture of VHS scan-lines live on in an overlay filter. This is the afterlife of objects. Somewhere between living memory and artefact lies a third category: latency.

Outside, the sky has shifted into its blue-hour compromise, a hue that refuses simple naming. Obsolescence, I have decided after much contemplation, is often a matter of vantage. We know this instinctively with language: words pass out of colloquial use only to be revived in poetry, where their oblique edges catch the light differently. Physical objects participate in the same cycle.

Perhaps this is all a long-winded excuse for my lack of ‘closing’ (tabs, drafts, films), but closure is overrated as a mode of attention. Latency, by contrast, has space for return - the opportunity to avoid becoming obsolete.

When I look out of the window, the blue-hour light has cooled toward a quieter lilac. Shadows have pooled between the trees of my garden. Somewhere below me, someone is peeling the leaves off coriander stalks. It is the moment where I most feel the mutual dependance of stillness and movement. Without pause, return has no force. Without latency, closure would be impoverished, a flat line instead of a curve. Earlier in the day, when the light was still warm and unbroken, I stood in the garden, letting the sun rest against my face, banking the heat and brightness for some future hour. That same warm seems to hum faintly in the air even now. The tabs remain open, holding their patient line.

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i have to thank you all dearly for your patience, writers block really and truly overcame me. i’ve gotten a couple of messages from people recently saying they’re waiting patiently for my next post and asking when it will be, and the embarassment borne of that finally drove me to finish a piece, so this one is dedicated to you guys. let me know what you think!