Making Gadgets Wireless Only Conceals Our Dependence on Them

In the middle half of the twentieth century, the designer Raymond Loewy -- the subject of today's Google Doodle -- streamlined products ranging from locomotives to pencil sharpeners, wrapping the complex gears, pumps, and combustion of modern machinery in sleek shells that promised progress and forward movement. He crafted an equally glamorous image for himself and the profession he christened “industrial design” (although his most enduring designs were in fact not industrial but graphic, including logos for Lucky Strikes and Exxon).

Loewy’s image making is evident in this office mock-up, which was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in 1934. For the photo, the designer poses among his vehicle designs in a setting where the desks, chairs, and even the walls are curved, with black metal piping to create a sense of motion.

This glamorized workspace includes no trash cans, and its two lamps operate without electrical cords or outlets. The office embodies streamlined autonomy.

For years, the museum's industrial design collection reflected the same fantasy. When Paola Antonelli arrived as MoMA's design curator in 1994, she discovered that someone had systematically vandalized the collection’s lamps and electrical appliances.

Their cords had been cut off.

Instead of a working artifact capable of lighting a room or whipping up a soufflé, every piece that used electricity had become an inert sculpture. These icons of modern design could no longer tap the electric power that had once defined modernity.

Antonelli never found out who was responsible, but she can imagine the reasoning: “The cord is not pretty.”

Flip through a home-furnishings catalog or an interiors magazine, and you’ll find the same selective vision.

Where possible, stylists hide cords for a photo shoot, taping them behind sofas or under windowsills. Where that’s not possible, Photoshop eliminates the evidence. “A lamp’s power cable must no more break the line of a designer table than a finger should obscure the serif of a corporate font,” says the Sydney-based photographer Robin Ford. “In the ‘high church of style’ cables are ritually cut and their very absence is a symbol of sanctification.”

Removing cords enhances a setting’s glamour. As interiors stylist Adam Fortner notes, cords are unruly objects that tend to twist their own way, destroying a scene’s carefully composed lines. “They’re really random.”

While we usually ignore them in real life, cords attract attention in a still photograph. To charm viewers into imagining how the room or the lamp might fulfill their lifestyle dreams, the cords must go. No one is supposed to notice their absence, however. Removing them represents darkroom grace, a tool of seduction but not a seductive end in itself.

In other cases, however, wirelessness is itself the object of desire.

From the radio to the iPad, wireless devices have long been among the most glamorous of new technologies. They promise to cut the ties that bind us to our desks, our homes, our mundane existence.

Wireless technology bestows on ordinary mortals the power to pluck from the atmosphere unheard voices and unseen images. It creates the illusion of proximity, immediacy, even intimacy. It transports us from our real surroundings and embodies escape.

“The first wireless product with glamour would have to be the pocket transistor radio,” says David Hall, who runs Plan59, an online museum of mid-century advertising images. In the 1960s, the tiny radios came to symbolize the footloose freedom of youth. The classic 1964 movie *The Endless Summer *follows two surfers traveling the world with their boards and, almost as prominently, their transistor radio.

Three decades later another glamorous image captured a similar dream: the laptop computer at the beach. A popular stock photo in the 1990s, it evoked an alluring mix of escapism and productivity. With the right technology, the image suggested, you could do your work and have your fun at the same time.

As laptops became ubiquitous, experience largely destroyed the fantasy. People discovered that working at the beach is still working -- and that laptops and cellphones only make escape more difficult. The stock photos still sell well, but now they’re as likely to illustrate articles on how to avoid stress on vacation as to promote the dream of a mobile, entrepreneurial lifestyle.

Still, there is something truly liberating about the power to choose where to work, not to mention the ability to summon libraries of information, impeccable directions, or thousands of movies from the air.

The dream of autonomy exerts a potent influence on the shape of new technologies, spurring demand for wireless networks and cloud computing. Apple can celebrate the iPad (and its latest Airs) as “magical” in large part because the device can operate for such long periods without wires or visible connections.

But, alas, wirelessness still remains something of an illusion.

“Magicians who use wires in their act don’t let you see them, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t there,” cautioned the technology columnist Chris Taylor after Apple introduced the iPad 2. “In this case, the wire is the same old white cable that you’ll have to use to sync your iPad to your PC or Mac from Day One.” It was, he said, a “clunky throwback” for “a device that’s supposed to be about effortless connecting.”

Wireless syncing has since done away with that cable, but electric current still requires connections, if only to recharge batteries. The wires have become less numerous, but they haven’t entirely disappeared.

*Excerpted from The Power of Glamour by Virginia Postrel, published by Simon & Schuster, released today, November 5, 2013.
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Loewy office image: Library of Congress

Wired Opinion Editor: Sonal Chokshi @smc90