Shortly after my mother turned 89, I used Skype to call her landline. It was the last time we’d ever communicate that way. My mother is doing well, but Skype is essentially dead. In fact, it’s probably more defunct because no one is trying to revive it. My mother was born before antibiotics were discovered, and she’s still around. Skype was created in 2003 and barely lasted past 20 years.
Technological advancements are inevitable. However, with the current rapid pace of innovation, we’re more used to seeing new tools arrive than old, useful ones disappear. When my grandmother was born, airplanes didn’t exist. When my mother was born, there were no transistors. When I was born, there were no mobile phones. These technologies are still in use. In 2019, Skype was among the top 10 most downloaded apps of the 2010s, surpassing TikTok, YouTube, and Twitter. That was only six years ago.
Is there a word for the feeling of loss when you outlive a technology that significantly impacted your life? Some people are nostalgic for Betamax and Sony Walkmans, even vinyl records, to the point that they’ve become collectibles. But what happens when software disappears? How do we remember and mourn a string of zeros and ones that introduced us to a whole new world?
I was just old enough when Skype emerged to truly appreciate it. As someone who traveled and lived abroad, I made many long-distance calls. These calls to loved ones were special, especially if you enjoyed conversations where each sentence cost you—and sometimes the other person—around two dollars. It made you choose your words carefully. If your father was particularly frugal, like mine, you wouldn’t even attempt to sing the entire “Happy Birthday to You” song, fearing it would ruin his whole year.
Often, long-distance calls involved extended pauses as people struggled to think of things to say that were worth the expense. In my family, we couldn’t come up with sufficiently valuable conversation quickly enough. So, we’d exchange pleasantries, hang up, and then scold ourselves for wasting money on a pointless call. Friends of mine would take notes beforehand to maximize efficiency. In some countries I visited, you had to prepay for a set number of minutes, provide the number you wanted to call, and then wait in a booth to be connected. The pressure to fill those minutes with worthwhile content was intense.
Skype wasn’t the only solution. For a short time, there were specialized international calling companies that offered bargain rates to specific countries, like 20 cents a minute. (I spent much of my phone conversations with my father marveling at how cheap it was.) But Skype was one of the first and easiest to use, and it called landlines for only a few cents. So, if you couldn’t convince your elderly relatives to give up their landlines, it was a godsend. Small talk became possible! You could ramble! You could sing all of “Happy Birthday to You” and get halfway through “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow” before realizing you didn’t actually miss singing as much as you thought.
Skype, created in 2003 by some now-billionaire northern Europeans, used the internet instead of phone lines to connect people. It was sold to eBay in 2005 and eventually ended up at Microsoft, which is now phasing it out in favor of Teams. This is a common cycle in technology: innovation, monetization, destruction. Skype is like that alt-rock band whose live concert was your first, but who kept changing record labels and eventually broke up. At least with a concert tour, you get a T-shirt. All of us Skype users are left with is a faint blue S bubble on our phones.
Perhaps Skype’s appeal to the less technologically savvy was what doomed it. I only ever used Skype for one thing: to call my mother’s landline. I didn’t use it for messaging or video. It offered translation and payments and redesigns, all of which I ignored. I bristled when it briefly started sending me daily news items. I acknowledge my complicity in its demise. For me, Skype was like the BOOST button on my mother’s telephone, which turns the volume up; it had a limited but crucial utility.
Now Skype is gone. Though each of her descendants has tried to get her to use any of the communication methods invented after 1876, my mother still wants to pick up the receiver of a ringing phone, like she always has. For her, zooming is what cars do and FaceTiming is what folks used to call coming over for a cuppa. I will now call her (for free) through one of the other apps, which is only slightly more complicated and allows her to keep her feet planted in the technological era in which she feels safe.
But it feels like the distance is getting wider, that the rubber cord between us is reaching the outer limit of its stretchiness. As digital communication grows more sophisticated, she seems older, farther away, less reachable. I can see and hear everybody else clearly, but mom is just a whisper. And I can’t help worrying that it’s not just inventions that cannot keep up that get abandoned sooner—it’s people. I know Skype was just a stage, and pouting over its demise is like wishing cocoons never became butterflies, but still, I would have liked a T-shirt.
