Mindy Seu (b. 1991, California) is a designer and technologist based mostly in New York City. Her expanded practice includes archival projects, techno-critical writing, performative lectures, design commissions, and close collaborations. Her newest writing surveys feminist economies, historic precursors of the metaverse, and the materiality of the web. Mindy’s ongoing Cyberfeminism Index, which gathers three many years of on-line activism and web artwork, was commissioned by Rhizome, presented at the new Museum, and awarded the Graham Foundation Grant. She has lectured internationally at cultural institutions (Barbican Centre, New Museum), tutorial establishments (Columbia University, Central Saint Martins), and mainstream platforms (Pornhub, SSENSE, Google), and been a resident at MacDowell, Sitterwerk Foundation, Pioneer Works, and Internet Archive. Her design commissions and consultation embrace initiatives for the Serpentine Gallery, Canadian Centre for Architecture, and MIT Media Lab. Her work has been featured in Frieze, Dazed, Gagosian Quarterly, Brooklyn Rail, i-D, and extra. Mindy holds an M.Des. Harvard’s Graduate School of Design and a B.A. Design Media Arts from the University of California, Los Angeles. She is presently Assistant Professor at Rutgers Mason Gross School of the Arts and Critic at Yale School of Art.
Now, take a moment to observe some of the demo. I ask you, is that not a powerful factor? Does it not look pretty great, even by today’s standards? By all measures, it was a technical marvel and a very good user experience. However it failed – bitterly. Bell Telephone’s plans for the PicturePhone have been formidable, if not outright delusional. The cost of a PicturePhone plan was $160/month. Today, flagship mobile phones sell at around $1000 a chunk, however could you imagine paying that price every month for service? That’s what $160 would have felt like in 1970. Bell set up PicturePhone booths in New York, Chicago, and Washington, D.C. 20/minute to use them. When was the final time you dropped $one hundred fifty in a vending machine? That’s the kind of expense we’re talking about. As batshit because the economics of the PicturePhone have been, Bell’s purpose was to build a $1 Billion firm – 100,000 PicturePhones in the first 5 years; 1,000,000 by 1980; 12,000,000 by 2000. Despite making an excellent piece of tools and actually dazzling the technorati of the time by making it work properly over previous, twisted copper wire, that was never going to occur.
Today, it’s straightforward to ask why Bell wouldn’t have simply subsidized the product within the early days to construct the market. The answer is regulation. On the time, Bell owned many of the infrastructure – the network over which the PicturePhone was transmitting. Taking a loss on the device to lock in customers would have triggered a massive antitrust case, and well, again then firms truly cared about that sort of thing and so did the government. So, the PicturePhone was forced to be exorbitantly costly. Though an financial misfit, the PicturePhone was an excellent machine and a fair better catalyst. Researchers at Bell Labs knew that a digital future was at hand, and that new infrastructure would be required to assist it. Several years before the PicturePhone was released, Bell produced a movie representing their view of the future, known as Seeing the Digital Future, which anticipated a lot of today’s digital and internet-driven culture.
Creating the PicturePhone allowed them to experiment with among the interactions they anticipated would turn into commonplace, whereas also demonstrating the necessity for upgraded infrastructure. That Bell engineers were able to ship a gadget that transmitted strong sound and picture over existing telelphone traces was extraordinary. That they have been in a position to create such a compact, desk-ready device that was suitable with the telephones already sitting on them was additionally. That the PicturePhone had a digicam that used actual glass optics and was refocusable and repositionable remotely makes me covet it, even now. Beyond these options, the PicturePhone released in 1970 anticipated a lot of today’s internet expertise. Fluid and frequent digital connections between people, completely, but also the multimedia nature of how we alternate info today. Bell added video to what had been a completely auditory connection experience thus far, but they also built add-ons to connect PicturePhone to mainframe computer systems, share slides over the screen, and even a mirror module that would allow the unit’s digicam to broadcast paperwork you had in your desk.
Undeniably cool, although admittedly niche for the time. Bell hoped that gaining a country’s value of subscribers would power a nationwide upgrade in digital infrastructure. As it would end up, even the web, as we comprehend it right this moment, wouldn’t try this. We would must distribute credit for making the common American understand the need for fiber optic cable amongst a diverse constituency – from Google to Pornhub. Pricing and infrastructure could be blamed for what would turn into a $500 million loss for Bell Telephone. Even that quantity doesn’t really describe how a lot of a misfire the PicturePhone was compared with the fact that in the primary 6 months, solely 12 customers subscribed to the service, and by the time it was officially canceled, it had precisely zero of those clients left. But even in 1970, there have been greater than 12 people rich sufficient to be early adopters. So why didn’t they?