> What has changed in our society that these things are no longer valued? Utility. Not much else. > it feels like fundamental values in society have changed,

> What has changed in our society that these things are no longer valued? Utility. Not much else. > it feels like fundamental values in society have changed, and the lack of interest in these items is symptomatic. Not really. I think, in this case, it's just progress marching forward. As better-functioning devices emerge, the less useful ones slowly go away. Over a century plus, the phone evolved, and an earpiece you hold one-handed or could squeeze between your shoulder and ear did in the candlestick in. Touch-tone did in rotary and cordless was eating away at corded, and then mobile phones have mostly obsoleted the landline phone completely at this point. > shifted radically and quickly to hyper-capitalistism / objectivism as our truth I'm not sure that is the case. Being able to have both hands free while talking was so useful; by the time I was born, a candlestick phone was almost an absurd anachronism. By the time I was in high school, almost everyone was using cordless phones with a ~200' range. By the time I left college, everyone had a phone in their pocket. And each time, the tech made life measurably better. > in a reactionary surge we seem to ridicule everything else, there is no room now for these things. I'm not sure that's the case. Often, obsolete things are preserved as a source of inspiration, nostalgia and sometimes humor. The image of trying to operate a candlestick phone one-handed is comical because the device was a RADICAL improvement, but implemented in a way that made it very difficult to use. My first "mobile" phone weighed nine pounds and was so big it came with a lunch-box-size duffel bag to hold the transceiver and battery. When my contract was renewed two years later, I moved on to a pocket-size phone. It worked better, had about ten times the battery life, and didn't require a duffel bag to hike it around. When I talk to people who worked with me back in the early 90s, we laugh about the bag phones. We all made a lot of business happen with them, but the next iteration made the bag phone almost so difficult it was absurd.