Planned Obsolescence
Or, why does everything break so fast?
Vacuums & telephones
My grandparents had the same clunky rotary phone (remember those?) for fifty years. My parents had a washing machine older than I was when they celebrated their thirtieth wedding anniversary.
I’ve had my current smartphone for over three years, which already puts me above the average. Oh, and a few weeks ago, my vacuum broke after a modest tenure of a few years, wheezing like an old man who’d been smoking for his entire life. My grandmother’s vacuum (which, for some reason, looks like reversed bagpipes in my memory), would have survived a nuclear war and then still have been able to clean the toxic waste without so much as a cough.
Appliances and electronics are simply no longer made to last. Actually, it’s worse. They are designed to break. Planned obsolescence, it’s called.
Consider AirPods (just as an example; put down those i-torches, Apple fans). AirPods are purposefully designed to function only 18 to 36 months before breaking. After that, they become long-lived toxic waste. Some law scholars even consider the planned obsolescence that AirPods are an example of as a “corporate environmental crime“.
Here’s another fun Apple example. Scroll up until you get to the starting image, then scroll back down here. That’s a Lightning connector port on an iPhone 6s. Firstly, it is an alternative to USB, so you need an adapter to use USB — an adapter Apple sells. But also, take a closer look at the screws. Those are proprietary pentalobe screws to prevent customers from making their own repairs. Making repairs harder makes full replacements look more tempting and when a company has to choose between selling parts or entire products, the choice is whatever represents the most profit.
This is not new.
In Island, the 1962 novel by Aldous Huxley that is the lesser-known, sort-of utopian counterpart to his Brave New World, a journalist is shipwrecked on a fictional tropical island where he is nursed back to health by a local physician, Dr. Roberts, who observes:
Armaments, universal debt, and planned obsolescence—those are the three pillars of Western prosperity. If war, waste, and moneylenders were abolished, you'd collapse. And while you people are overconsuming the rest of the world sinks more and more deeply into chronic disaster.
An important aspect of planned obsolescence is that we (are forced to) replace, but no longer repair and I can’t help but wonder if this mindset has trickled into other ways we engage with the world and the people in it. We are losing the art of maintenance1 — for appliances, infrastructure, the environment…
Repair / replace?
The fun thing about metaphors and analogies is that you can twist, bend, and stretch them until they snap, break, or launch themselves in an unexpected direction.
So, it is tempting to see an analogous shift in relationships. A few weeks ago, I mentioned how endless swiping creates a rejection mindset and how especially women struggle with dating fatigue after being flooded with DMs of the same type of guy over and over. It is also tempting to see rising divorce rates and wonder if there’s a replace rather than repair mindset shift happening here too. If our partner is not the perfect ten2, has it become easier to replace them rather than try to repair what is wrong (if it is at all repairable3)?
A tempting train of thought, but too limited. Humans are not (yet?) mindless machines and there are doubtlessly many factors at play in (re)shaping the way human beings form relationships. Culture, (social) media, the internet, economic and demographic shifts…
How did Apple’s sneakiness lead me here? Back to our good old pal called consumer culture.
In an illustration of the universal ebb and flow of culture, there is a countermovement.
Repair culture is exactly what it says on the (recycled, I hope) tin: a loosely defined collective of initiatives that encourage people to repair things rather than unnecessarily buy replacements. The hope is to inspire responsible consumption through community-based initiatives such as repair cafés. (Here’s a global list, but I’m sure there are plenty more.)
Roughly a month ago, the EU decanted this aspiration into a (provisional) law by passing the ‘Right to Repair’ directive, which should make repairs easier and more accessible, for example, by mandating manufacturers to offer repair services or make repair parts more easily available. The keyword: provisional. It still has to pass both the European Council and Parliament, and I do not doubt that, after that, the governments of the individual member states will argue about it internally. At least the intention is there. Ha, politics.
Should we consider repair culture as an endpoint, though? After all, it’s still predicated on the consumption treadmill that throws products at our heads faster than we can buy them. Here is Vernon Lee (pen name of Violet Paget) in her 1904 essay collection Hortus Vitae:
Despite our complicated civilization, so called, or perhaps on account of it, we are all of us a mere set of barbarians, who find it less trouble to provide a new, cheap, and shoddy thing than to get the full use and full pleasure out of a finely-made and carefully-chosen old one.
A bit over the top maybe; civilization has led to many great things. Still, perhaps we should rethink the nature of the products, as in: make them more recyclable instead of only repairable (not mutually exclusive, of course). Call it clean materials, green tech, regenerative economy, or whatever you like. That is more than repair; that is a change at the very start of the production chain (which will require science and technology, this is not an anti-tech rant).
Beyond appliances, what if we adopt a mindset of cultivation rather than mere consumption? When transplanted onto relationships, though, the analogy strains and bucks against the mold I try to fit it in. A product does not want, but a person does. What if your cultivation mindset meets one that seeks to exploit? I think it takes tremendous strength4 to assume kindness from others, and a willingness to run the risk of getting hurt.
In all honesty, I’m not quite there yet. Growing pains, let’s say.
Someone rings the doorbell.
My new vacuum has arrived.
Wait…
Info nibbles:
💊 Interesting medical studies (in mice/rats, so apply a few spoons of salt): a light-powered pacemaker as thin as a hair and flushing amyloid plaques from the brain.
📚 The Diversity Baseline Survey reveals that cis white women dominate the publishing industry.
🐟 Striped marlins quickly change color while hunting sardines to prevent impaling each other with their spear-shaped upper jaw.
My - rightly famous - repair skills boil down to being creative with duct tape or being stubborn enough to keep going until I figure it out.
People aren’t numbers, but you get the idea. Also, perfection doesn’t exist. In the words of the marvelous Marilyn Monroe:
Imperfection is beauty, madness is genius, and it's better to be absolutely ridiculous than absolutely boring.
Please don’t stay in an unrepairable relationship. If your partner does not treat you right (aka as an equal and a full, independent person to cherish), get out of there (or seek help to do so, depending on your situation).
And profound delusion, cynical me adds, which proves the next sentence. Thank you for joining ‘fun with footnotes’.
What an interesting comparison between replacement culture for belongings and relationships.
I’d also never heard of the Huxley book you quote — it’s now on my reading list!
The US accumulates $1 trillion every 100 days and pays $300 billion interest on its debt. There is more micro plastics in the ocean than fish and more uranium than heavy water. End stage capitalism will end civilization, just like the Bronze-age collapse, yet we are still debating whether we are in the Anthropocene or Holocene? Really!