Planned Obsolescence

Source: Made to Break: Technology and Obsolescence in America
by Gene Slade, 2006

Synopsis: Made to Break takes on a phenomenon so intertwined in our patterns of consumption that we take it completely for granted: planned obsolescence. For a variety of reasons, but spurred mostly by comptetition between Ford and GM in the ‘20s, and fueled by overproduction allowed by increasingly sophisticated manufacturing techniques, competition in the U.S. means that products go through regular changes that may or may not actually make for a better product, with the purpose of convincing people they need to buy newer and better on a regular basis.

Reflection: I very much looked forward to this source. My day job is assembling and fixing bicycles. Like any technology-driven industry, bikes are subject to planned obsolescence. Every time a component manufacturer adds another speed, ensuring customers need to buy a new drivetrain for their bikes, we hear about it. It’s obvious that our patterns of consumption aren’t sustainable, yet my standard response to customers complaining about needing to buy more “stuff,” is that bikes are undeniably “better” than they’ve ever been before, and they will continue to get better. While reading this piece, I came up with the following questions:

1. What does better mean?
2. How much better do we need our things to be?
3. Better at what cost?
4. Accepting an analogy between biological and technological evolution, how has our world changed to act as a driving force of technological evolution?
5. Agreeing that biological evolution is inevitable, is technological evolution inevitable?
6. What is it about humans that makes us susceptible to pressure (dare I say manipulation?) from ads?

Starting from the top, here are some of the things I cite as being better with modern bicycles: due to a better understanding of ergonomics, bikes are safer and more comfortable than ever before. With increasingly better materials and manufacturing, bikes are more efficient than ever before. Due to the trickle down effect inherent in a tech-driven industry, bikes are cheaper than ever before. Clearly, with minimal change to wording, these arguments could be made about cars, computers, and sewing machines. I think we might agree that better in most cases means safer, more comfortable, more efficient, in some way decreasing the amount of work we must do, or decreasing our perception of the amount of work we must do. We’ll explore the latter in greater depth later.

This puts us in a vulnerable position. Can anything be too safe? Too comfortable? Too inexpensive? Accepting the above definitions of better, there is no limit to how far planned obsolescence can take us. Only a fool would buy a car designed and manufactured to be less safe. Note that durability is not featured above. I struggle with this. “They don’t make ‘em like they used to” is a common comment in bike shops, and I’ve always concurred, because they make them better now. After reading this source, it occurs to me that an unintended consequence of planned obsolescence is the belief that widgets today must be inferior, because if they weren’t, we wouldn’t need a new one every year. This is the realm of psychological obsolescence mentioned in the book, and again, it illustrates that this issue lies in our perception of reality.

Tackling the biological/technological evolution analogy, and what has changed in the world to act as a driving force in technological evolution: first, and maybe most obviously, there can be no evolution without overproduction. If a need exists, but the market is not saturated, there is no competition. You can churn out an adequate product, one that offers no advantage whatsoever over other, similar products, and consumers have no choice but to accept it. With the Industrial Revolution (I think. My knowledge of socioanthropology is only slightly deeper than my knowledge of law) and increases in production, consumers were for the first time faced with choices, and it then became important to offer a superior product. This doesn’t, however, address the question of when more durable ceased to be a competitive advantage, and the source does a good job of tackling this issue.

Businessmen and women have never been stupid, and recognized immediately that, if their widget lasted for 50 years, repeat purchases would be infrequent. Thus, durability ceased to be a competitive advantage, and became a competitive weakness. The accompanying ad campaigns convincing us that old was synonymous with inferior were the final ingredient establishing our culture of disposability and habitual consumption. At the time, this made perfect sense. I’m sure some long-sighted individuals recognized that resources were finite, but I think it would have been much easier to believe, at that time, that we could maintain habits of conspicuous consumption forever, and it would only make our lives better. It is the perfect example of Einstein’s quote: “The problems we are faced with cannot be solved with the same level of thinking that created them.” (That may not be verbatim, but you get the gist.)

The game’s changed. We have more people on Earth than ever before, we have sophisticated measures that allow us to watch our stocks of natural capital dwindling, and it’s become clear to some that our culture of conspicuous, repetitive consumption is not sustainable.

But I’ve gotten a little ahead of myself; going back to the bio/tech evolution. Superficially, it would seem that our busier lives and increasing levels of production would be the perfect selection pressure to spur technological evolution, but I think this is a chicken-and-egg question. As we’ll see with our next source, “The (Even More) Overworked American,” there is a correlation between technological advances and hours worked per year, but causation is not clear. We’re caught in an interesting positive feedback loop, in which the ability to produce more with less effort per unit of production has simply pushed us to produce more and more and more and more, rather that producing the same amount and enjoying that free time promised to us by the advertisements. Stay tuned; we’re going to revisit this next time.

Finally, it seems I’ve been avoiding what may be the ultimate question: what is it about us that makes us susceptible to ad pressure? First, I don’t have the answer (it seems I say that a lot). I do have some ideas, based again on my impressively shallow grasp of socioanthropology. Historically, and I mean going way back, when survival was by no means a foregone conclusion, and food, some animal hides, and maybe some attractively shaped sticks and rocks were the extent of our possessions, those items were security. If you had food, you were one step closer to survival. Those sticks and rocks were one step closer too food. Those items were necessities in a sense we are incapable of grasping.

Fast forward a couple hundred thousand years, and those items get a little more sophisticated, but they still represent security. They are still a physical manifestation of survival. I think we still have this instinct. The Industrial Revolution, rise in production, and accompanying rise in consumption moved so much faster than evolution, so that instinctual part of our brains, nurtured to keep us alive through millions of years of evolution, had no chance of catching up. So today we buy our 10,000 square foot McMansions, with our six car garages full of every manner of motorized toy, and we eat our 5,000 calories a day, and we look at all of it, and we want more, because what if the fire goes out and the giant sloths move south and our beloved pounding rock breaks? We’ll die. And where would we be then?