I bet I intrigue (or confuse) you sometimes with these headlines.

Bear with me for this post, while I tease out what might be an exaggerated comparison, using two things that happen to be interests of mine.

First of all, take a look at this:

Of course, it’s a cassette tape. It may or may not ring a visual bell for you, but this design is popular for showing off tapes on display, because the reels make it look like a tiny reel-to-reel recorder. (The tape doesn’t handle as well on that kind of reel, however, so these are not ideal for actual recording.)

Now, this is not a new-old-stock tape I bought on eBay or something. I bought it direct from TASCAM, who is currently manufacturing it. (TASCAM is one of the old Japanese audio equipment companies—that was their more professional division, and TEAC was their consumer division.)

Not only is this a modern tape, but according to the marketing, it’s also virtually the only “Type II” cassette tape currently in production. Without getting into detail, these were a higher-fidelity type of tape useful for music, while “Type I” cassettes were lower fidelity and more appropriate for dictation.

Now, I’ll say up front, the testing that cassette folks have done on this tape suggests it isn’t very good. In any case, I bought it mostly for the novelty, not to record music on it. TASCAM is clearly somewhat aiming at a collector’s market as well.

However, if you happen to be a cassette-tape enthusiast, you should love this, right? Even if the tape is subpar, a new release like this could breathe life into your hobby, showing other players in the audio market that maybe there’s money in cassettes yet. Maybe in a few more years, someone will finally start making a tape like the best from the ’80s and ’90s. Heck, maybe someone will even start making a true high-fidelity cassette deck, rather than the handful of cheap, noisy ones that are still made today. Reportedly, there are folks working on this right now.

I write all of this to introduce the fact that over at Tapeheads, a cassette enthusiast online forum, the news landed with a resounding thud. Several users there identified the tape as a repackaging of an existing formulation, produced by a different company. Technically it’s Type II, due to the materials used, but it doesn’t really sound like it. Others feel it’s nothing more than a marketing stunt. Most feel that classic, well-serviced equipment and well-stored new-old-stock tapes are the best bet for actual recording and listening. Others are happy for the hobby to die a natural death.

So what the heck does this have to do with NIMBYism?

Well, I noticed an odd and really interesting similarity in the way these self-identified tape enthusiasts responded to this new tape release, compared with the way people with long memories of a place respond to almost any news of new development or projects. I’m thinking of all the sentiments and talking points I hear in those debates, and how many of them appear in some form here.

One user, reasonably enough, wrote, “I think any effort by a company to help (re)introduce cassettes to consumers is a good thing.”

Someone replied, “I am of exactly the opposite opinion—let the old format die gracefully.”

Another user: “I’d hate to say it, but it seems that the cassette community is nothing more than a bunch of flippers, collectors and hipsters. There are very few who actually enjoy using cassettes, since the 70s and 80s. I still have tapes from the 80s myself.”

Someone echoed the idea that it’s a good thing if anybody is trying to make tapes today, and explains that he bought one not because the tape is good but because it sends a signal that there is still demand out there.

A reply: “Instead, you may have given them a wrong signal that they can continue making overpriced mediocre product as long as it has cute reels and carries a name of a once reputable company.”

Another favorable comment (just skip over the brand names and models if they mean nothing to you):

“If I had money to burn, I would buy these tapes to try them, and unless I had reason to believe that they could do damage, perhaps record some non-critical stuff, and listen to them. Then I would wait and hope that incremental improvements bring a great Type II to the market in a few years. TDK’s first Type II tape wasn’t the SA-X. Just because RTM managed to hit the nail on the head from the outset, it doesn’t mean everyone can.”

That’s a pretty good take on all this, isn’t it? Well, not to this user: “No amount of incremental improvements will turn this into something it is fundamentally not.”

There’s more. Read the thread linked at the beginning if this interests you.

These attitudes are interesting to me. The “let it die gracefully” sentiment really reminds me, for example, of how some old-timers talk about new projects in my hometown. They obviously love their town, but they seem to view changing things as a kind of violation of the place, and not as a next step in its life. And so paradoxically, what happens is the place slowly loses its life.

None of this really seems to have anything to do with NIMBYism if you take that term literally and narrowly: “Not in my backyard.” But I try to understand it in a more abstract way, to understand what thought processes and tendencies might lead people to feel like new things will be bad. Some of it is fear of change; some of it is a feeling that nothing we build now will be as a good as what came before; some of it is a desire for continuity in one’s surroundings, especially when those surroundings have been around long enough to serve as mental and emotional landmarks, etc., etc.

I want to understand this not because I think it justifies encasing places in amber, but because the term NIMBY is used in an overly broad way, and assumes a motive and viewpoint that is often not there. Seeing cassette-tape enthusiasts sounding like NIMBYs got me thinking more about this. Why don’t you think about it, too?

Related Reading:

Master of Tape

NIMBYism and Existence Value

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