Power Button: A History of Pleasure, Panic, and the Politics of Pushing

by Rachel Plotnick

A look at the origins of an American button-pushing society and the illusion of effortless control at the touch of a finger.

Push a button and turn on the television; tap a button and get a ride; click a button and "like" something. The touch of a finger can set an appliance, a car, or a system in motion, even if the user doesn't understand the underlying mechanisms or algorithms. How did buttons become so ubiquitous? Why do people love them, loathe them, and fear them? In Power Button, Rachel Plotnick traces the origins of today's push-button society by examining how buttons have been made, distributed, used, rejected, and refashioned throughout history. Focusing on the period between 1880 and 1925, when "technologies of the hand" proliferated (including typewriters, telegraphs, and fingerprinting), Plotnick describes the ways that button pushing became a means for digital command, which promised effortless, discreet, and fool-proof control. Emphasizing the doubly digital nature of button pushing--as an act of the finger and a binary activity (on/off, up/down)--Plotnick suggests that the tenets of precomputational digital command anticipate contemporary ideas of computer users.

Plotnick discusses the uses of early push buttons to call servants, and the growing tensions between those who work with their hands and those who command with their fingers; automation as "automagic," enabling command at a distance; instant gratification, and the victory of light over darkness; and early twentieth-century imaginings of a future push-button culture. Push buttons, Plotnick tells us, have demonstrated remarkable staying power, despite efforts to cast button pushers as lazy, privileged, and even dangerous.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Design

424 pages, Hardcover

Published September 25, 2018

Reviews

[Eric · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's a little too in the weeds for me but I respect it for what it is. I don't think I've ever read a book about something that is so in depth in its history and it's about buttons, so if you're really into buttons this is the dream. It's really interesting and by the lengthy notes section the author did more than enough research, but know what you're in for if you pick this up. It's not an exhaustive history, and it does that thing that I hate where it spends 99% of the book talking about things that happened before the 21st century and maybe a couple pages on contemporary times. Maybe I just don't like reading historical nonfiction lol. But it does give perspectives I've never once thought about and is nowhere near as dry as I'm making it out to be, it's just in depth.

[necronizer]

Never have I thought I would read a highly detailed research about the shared history of buttons and all the major events of our world.

It's funny thinking about how people used to see a button as a threat to humanity's many roles that used to exist during those times and how ingrained buttons have become in our lives in the present day. It is also funny to think that this exact same thing happened with other new inventions! The calculator, the telephone, the first television, these are the instances where history had repeated itself where these new inventions sold to us by big corporations became so ingrained in our lives that living without them becomes impossible.

And in the modern years, we have seen more of this with social media, Uber, Swiggy/Zomato and honestly it makes me think that if the history would repeat in the same direction for GenAI...

That would be an extremely grim future, one I am definitely not ready to be a part of.

[Hal]

Mentioned in article about the history of buttons