Joshua Cohen - Book of Numbers

Throughout the history of this technology, though, each device had to have its own controller. This was the Nazi standard for remote zeppelins. This was the American policy too, for remote submarines. Each device would follow its leader, bound to its controller by proprietary signals and waves. Call it the Führer principle, or just call it monotheism, or monogamy, under Eisenhower and the rise of the home electronics industry, this was law. Though even the most wealthy or most attuned 1940s and 50s consumer still had to make do with a cabled control that would tangle the pets and trip the children, all just to work the radio, predominantly.

And this was the situation through the 60s, until the market penetration of ultrasonics, or the control of TVs by audio frequencies too high for anthroperception. Then came our decade, the 70s, by the middle of which major advances had been made in infrareds, or the control of TVs by visual frequencies too low for anthroperception. This was the break, the redshift. Standards, as like the universe, only expanded.

Now you cannot think about online. In the midst of the 70s nobody thought the future was going to be this nothingness, this immateriality that stores everything and the software that links everyone to it and one another. At the time that was fiction, pulp sciencefiction to everyone but the tech insane and US army researchers. The rec pop was out shopping for fridges and freezers, dishwashers, TVs, and so it was booley that the hope for the next new advance would be for a device that connected them all, for that one single item of hardware that connected each average user to all of his or her domestic possessions.

Back then the future, the only future, was the remote. The remote, its hope, was the original online.

Around 1980, each home electronics brand went about developing its own remote, one remote that would control its every product, which was easy or relatively easy and even costeffective because all it meant was that all the controls for all its products would all be contained on a single slab. A remote would be divided into trays keyed by function: the TV controlled in row 1 with volume and channel, the videocassette recorder controlled in row 2 with Play, Stop, Rewind, Fast-Forward, in row 3 the button for the stereo cueing the synth muzak, in row 4 the switch lighting the sex candle — together comprising a multifunction remote no larger than unifunction remotes because everything was getting smaller and reduced except the options, the expectations.

But then the next innovation would be about, we are not sure, 82, 84, when the idea gradually became to make a remote that would work across brands, to make it not just compatible panbrand with regard to TV formats — NTSC (America, Mexico, Canada, Japan), and PAL (South America, Europe, China, half of Africa), even SECAM (Soviet Union, half of Africa) — and videocassette recorder formats — VHS, Betamax — but also to clunk it scalable to any and every product/standard conceivable. This was the goal of the independent remote designers, the mavs who inspired by the phenomenon of the corded telephone becoming cordless were trying to do the same for other devices, trying to get all the entertainment wires, all that wirelessness, to fit onto the tiniest number of the tiniest chips that could sit comfortably or not on the tiniest slab that could be manufactured at the tiniest cost so that it would not matter when it was lost, and it would be, between the cushions of the sofa.

We might stress that since their very inception cordless phones, by which we mean phones just without cord, not portable or mobile much beyond their base station chargers, had been compatible with most if not all telecom providers. The chips were the enablers, limited pellets of silicon that served an apparently unlimited range of functions, as like a single snackfood delivering the tastes of chocolate, vanilla, pork rind, popcorn, pretzel, and chip in every bitesized bite.

Ironic that this gadget, so simple to imagine, turned out to be so difficult to develop. It takes a whole lot of labor to keep the customer lazy, but the price of this was higher. Adjusting for inflation it was a height between the costs of launching satellites into orbit and laying the transatlantic cables. Both of which had worked. This, however, was all false starts. Snafus. Unfixes. Incompletes. Approx a dozen design firms going raped ape over plurassigns, simclicking. Approx 100 engineers, couched in advanced degrees, all dedicated to improving the couch experience — what a way to trash a life.

The most soulwasting project in the history of tech. The stupiest and most wasteful expenditure of money, time, intelligence, and energy project in tech history.

E. Ver.

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Now initially the way the unimote business went was custom, bespoke, and so never very profitable. High end always begins high pricetag, given the R&D and STailing, the specs tailoring altering by device, with features always being taken in and out, given the manufacturing costs, and the vendor percentage, which can cut into margins considerably.

An A/V vendor with more overhead than sky has would sell a home entertainment system of mixed brands, the best of each brand because one does TVs better, and another does speakers better, to a decent earner with the spouse equivalent and the two point fives and the four floors mortgaged out in the parklands, ready to blow an unexpected bonus on better picture than from an ocean vista and better sound than from a splash in the waves. The vendor would then contract with one of the many indie design outfits staffed by disgruntled engineers hired away from home entertainment equipment manufacturers for their familiarity with the proprietary wireless frequencies used by different brands, who would cobble together a remote that conjoined the features of all the devices of all the brands, devoted.

But even if this could take weeks, for the designer and manufacturer, or a month, for the consumer, and even if again the costs were crazy all around and for the consumer could be equal to, for a full domestic theater remotegration, or remote integration, the expense of finally having that missing point five of a child, what was beyond all that, what left that dissuasion far and distant behind and rendered the devoted remote business not remotely remunerative or even feasible, was that its products always broke, even if just dropped on the carpet, or sat on by a sitter, or else from having been handled roughly by the post. But because this was Western suburban consumption in which everything including life itself was held to its warranty, the customer would call the A/V vendor and the A/V vendor would have to provide service, would have to jeep out and try fixing the remote on location, not because the post was untrustworthy but because it was both cheaper and kept the customer satisfied if the vendor did not have to package the remote off to the designers again, for them to repair it, or to the manufacturers again, for them to furnish a replacement.

Half the complaint calls that came in were from customers with units so broken the vendors were at a loss, but the other half were from customers just wondering about proper usage, and so alternate tollfree numbers were set up and operators were underpaid in India, every Indian who had never been accepted to engineering school following the troubleshooting/FAQ script — Does the unit have batteries? Does your unit have separate or joint On/Off buttons? If separate, are you pressing the correct one? Or both simultaneously? If joint, are you sure the device is not already Off? Or On? Are you operating the remote within 28 feet or 8.5 meters of the equipment you wish to control? Are you pointing the remote correctly, in the direction of the equipment you wish to control? The lines busy, the holds long, clients calling from their carphones in traffic, put on hold for longer than traffic, only to be disconnected, getting picked up on only to yell about how previous calls had been dropped.