In Praise of Obsolescence

During the 1970s–1990s, hundreds of gay switchboards operated across the United States as volunteer-run telephone services providing information, referrals, and crisis support to gay and lesbian communities. This essay analyzes gay periodicals, call logs, volunteer training materials, classified advertisements, and organizational correspondence from Indianapolis and other cities. Through these fragmentary archives, I demonstrate how they can reveal alternative technological histories. I argue that gay switchboards embodied “prefigurative obsolescence”—a queer practice of building technologies designed to eliminate the oppressive conditions that necessitate them. Drawing on media archaeology, genealogy, and acoustemology, I contend that gay switchboards represented a fundamentally different technopolitics than today's crisis-industrial complex, where crisis becomes a domain of formalized work, value extraction, and biopolitical management. While contemporary crisis hotlines operate through surveillance, risk assessment, and carceral intervention, gay switchboards practiced distributed care aimed at community liberation rather than institutional self-perpetuation. My analysis reveals how an “acoustemology of common identification” enabled both care and exclusions along racial and class lines. Despite these limitations, prefigurative obsolescence offers crucial insights for abolitionist approaches to crisis response amid ongoing debates over police abolition, mental health reform, and community-controlled alternatives to state-sponsored intervention.