Help me internet, you’re my only hope.
If I can come up with some neat name for a kinda-new-maybe-“concept”, I’ll get cited lots by academics, my Hype-index will climb into the positive, and I won’t get laughed at in the rare job interviews that I stumble into.
The situation is this
There are such things as skeuomorphs. These are deliberate design ploys to make people feel that the New Thing is actually very similar to the Old Thing. To reassure people/not scare the horses – because user/customer acceptance of an innovation is make or break. (See Old Nick Machiavelli -1).
Easiest example – EV charging points explicitly designed to look like old petrol bowsers.
Okay, so, skeuomorphs are about The Old Ways Being The Best (See old Douglas Adams – 2)
Now, read this excerpt in the Grauniad from Jay Owens’ book “Dust: The Modern World in a Trillion Particles.”
For two centuries, London’s buildings were black. Blanketed in sulphurous soot from coal fires – the famous London “pea souper” fogs – a thin layer of carbon coated every surface in the city. London was so dirty that there was no memory that it might ever have been any other way. During the restoration of 10 Downing Street in 1954, it was discovered that the familiar dark facade was not actually black at all, but originally yellow brick. The shock was considered too much for the country to take and the newly clean building was painted black to maintain its previous, familiar appearance.
I laughed out loud with delight when I read that and announced my larcenous intent.
But I tweeted at haste before googling at leisure and “reverse skeuomorph” won’t cut cheese or mustard. I think I was thinking of reverse salient” (3) But in any case, it’s already taken, and not quite for what I mean.
There’s an AI summary (4).
So, what are we going with here?
- Retconomorph (Retconning is retro-active continuity creation, often used in sci-fi)
- Retroskeuomorph – that’s fugly (not always a barrier obvs).
- Skeuomalcrum – portmanteau of skeuomoprh and simulacrum. See fugliness statement above.
- Insert your idea I can rip off here…
We’re after something that captures the idea that “‘The Old Ideas Are The Best’ and even if we gotta reinvent the past to fit today’s needs then, dammit, that’s what we are going to do.”
(I am sure there are at least oh, 1,984 articles about this online, most of the throwing around a mash-up of around Baudrillard’s simulacrum and/or E.P. Thompson and/or Hobsbawm and Ranger and/or Procrustean Bedbugs).
Or is there, in fact, already a name for this thing I am claiming to have “discovered” and I need to find a different obscure idea to slap a label on? The game is the game, after all.
Footnotes
(1) Nick Machiavelli said it best: “There is nothing more difficult and dangerous, or more doubtful of success, than an attempt to introduce a new order of things in any state. For the innovator has for enemies all those who derived advantages from the old order of things, whilst those who expect to be benefited by the new institutions will be but lukewarm defenders. This indifference arises in part from fear of their adversaries who were favoured by the existing laws, and partly from the incredulity of men who have no faith in anything new that is not the result of well-established experience. Hence it is that, whenever the opponents of the new order of things have the opportunity to attack it, they will do it with the zeal of partisans, whilst the others defend it but feebly, so that it is dangerous to rely upon the latter.”
(2) Douglas Adams said it second best: 1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.”, The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time
(3) Wikipedia – “A reverse salient refers to a component of a technological system that, due to its insufficient development, prevents the system in its entirety from achieving its development goals. The term was coined by Thomas P. Hughes,[1] in his work Networks of power: Electrification in western society, 1880-1930.”
(4) (so-called) AI summaries – someone needs to write about them, but without using AI. There’s a lotta hallucinating going on, and they are part of the whole “uncanny” thing that’s happening, the enshittification and the enshittosuffocation. But that can be for another day. But if I ever read another Masters’ Thesis written with obvious bad AI, Imma scream
marchudson.net 
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