Technological innovations are often, on the face of it, quite stupid. The idea that you might want to walk down the street holding a mobile phone in front of your face, just to experience the wonders of video calling, is clearly ridiculous: collisions and alarming pedestrian injuries are the only possible outcome. So it's no great surprise that Which? magazine has informed its readers that the much-vaunted 3G mobile phones, for which the operators paid billions of pounds to the government in airwave rights, are not a must-have upgrade after all. The phones are "too bulky" and network coverage is limited, Which? says, so don't buy one for Christmas.
And yet, had I not recently left the country, I too might have been tempted. Imagine being able to download a pixellated trailer for Bridget Jones 2 and watch it at the bus stop! Imagine being able to watch a clip from the Band-Aid video, with tinny MP3 sound, wherever you are !
Of course, we hadn't already imagined such things. The telecom companies imagined them for us, and then fondly imagined that we might buy into the dream. This is how the technology industry, as the paradigm of modern capitalism, works: they invent new desires for us.
And we buy them. That's the postmodern age: the commodification of desire, the invention of a free-floating desire that attaches to no objects in particular but just feeds on new desires. Luckily for the tech companies, there are some people who jump at the chance to buy into new gadgets before they are fully ready and cheap enough for the mass-market. They are called early adopters, and their fate is a terrible one. I should know, since I am one myself. And if you've already bought one of the early 3G phones, you're one too. Bad luck.
Early adopters have a Mecca: it's Tokyo's Akihabara district, also known as "Electric City", a neon-soaked warren of high-rise gadget emporia. There, in 1999, I bought a digital camera, a new-fangled type of gizmo that few people in Britain had heard of. Over the next few years, I watched in mounting dismay as digital cameras became more popular, cheaper and more powerful, until better models could be had for a quarter of the price I had paid. Did I feel stupid? Did I feel burned? What I actually did was this: I splashed out more money last year for a new one, one that let me feel pleasantly ahead of the curve once again. But I know that cannot last for ever, and I'll probably have to buy another in a few years.
Thus early adopters are doomed to a treadmill of anxious consumption. Essentially your first action is to pay a large instalment on a subscription to a future that does not yet exist. You are betting on other people eventually feeling the same desires.
And it's worse if that future never arrives. Early adopters of the Betamax home-video format in the 1970s could only look on in dismay when their investment was nullified by the triumph of VHS. All sorts of apparently marvellous inventions, such as the famous Sinclair C5 electric tricycle, or doomed videogame consoles such as the Atari Jaguar or Nintendo Virtual Boy, have been ignobly consigned to the dustbin of history right after a few early adopters bought in. Those who invested thousands in a Segway motorised scooter on the wave of absurd hype that accompanied its launch a couple of years ago can join the club.
In the late 1990s, meanwhile, it looked for a while as though the Minidisc format was the future of portable music: smaller and more convenient than CD. Reader, I bought a Minidisc player in Akihabara, too. It was shiny and metal and cute, and I bought lots of Minidiscs to transfer my CD collection on to.
Now, Minidisc is not quite completely dead. Many people still use them in Japan and continental Europe. And, like Betamax, Minidisc found a home in the professional media world - it is used extensively in radio. And it is still a good choice as a portable recording device. But my Minidisc player - much more expensive and less capable than current models, of course - no longer satisfies my gadget lust. I barely use it. Minidisc is old news. The new news is iPod. And I think I need one of those.
Early adopters also buy idealistically into a notion of progress despite clear evidence to the contrary. One of the best gadgets I ever bought, also in 1999 (clearly an ill-starred year for bets on the future), was a Psion 5mx, a palmtop computer with a laptop-style keyboard that I still think is the best portable writing machine yet devised. Sadly, not enough people thought the same, and despite some success with that model and its successor, the Revo, Psion eventually stopped making such gadgets altogether.
When my 5mx died a few years later (early adopters take the short life of hardware as a philosophical given, of course), I looked at the new alternative. Microsoft-run PocketPC PDAs had snazzy colour screens. They also had inferior software, were slower, and had no keyboards. So, of course, I bought one. That's early-adopter logic for you: OK, so maybe it's worse than what I had before, but it's new . Nowadays my mobile phone does all those diary and phonebook functions tolerably well, so my PocketPC is relegated to the status of portable chess computer. Well, at least that's something. I had never known, after all, that I needed a chess computer the size of a cigarette packet that I could carry around with me all day.
There is clearly great pathos in the life of an early adopter. You might think we should just stop being so silly, save our money, and wait to see what really catches on. But the logic of the industry is such that, if everyone did that, no innovation would ever become popular.
Imagine the third person ever to buy an ordinary telephone soon after Alexander Graham Bell had invented it. Who was he going to call? Maybe he bought two phones, one for a special friend. But still, the utility and eventual ubiquity of the device wasn't clear at the time. Indeed, the telephone was originally marketed as a way to listen to music concerts from the comfort of your own home. Nobody dreamed of the possibility of being able to speak to any one of millions of people. And yet if Telephone Man, and the subsequent hundreds and thousands of early adopters after him, had not bought into the idea, the vast communication networks that we all take for granted today would never have been built.
It will be the same if, say, hydrogen-powered cars ever become mainstream. For a while there will not be enough refuelling stations to make the car an attractive proposition, and not enough cars on the road to make building a refuelling station seem a good business decision. You need a phalanx of early adopters to tough out such chicken-and-egg situations for the good of everyone.
The same goes, indeed, for all new technologies. Those yuppies holding bricks to their ears that we laughed at in the 1980s made your current mobile phone possible. People who bought DVD players when they still cost £500, instead of 30 quid at the local supermarket, made sure that the new format succeeded. Early adopters' desire for desires bankrolled the future. And what did they get for their pains? They got a hole in their bank accounts and inferior, unperfected technology. But still, they got it first . And today they are still at work, buying overpriced digital radios, DVD recorders and LCD televisions, and even 3G phones, so that you will be eventually be able to buy better and less expensive ones.
So next time you see a gadget-festooned geek and feel tempted to sneer, think for a minute. Without early adopters, there would be no cheap mobile phones or PDAs or DVD players; there would be no telephone or television either. We are the tragic, unsung foot- soldiers of the technology revolution. We're the desire-addicted vanguard, pure in heart, dreaming of a better future. We make expensive mistakes so you don't have to. Really, we are heroes.
