a crank's progress

There is no such thing as planned obsolescence. What is a thing is pricing products to the market, making things that are “good enough” but that the buyer doesn’t expect to last forever. If you need a pair of scissors to open an occasional parcel or cut something, you can get by with a cheap pair. If you are someone who makes a living or has a hobby that requires them as a tool, you will reach for the better ones. But both exist just as both needs do.

Same with car brands or bicycles or cameras, what have you. If you buy a Chevrolet, you have no right to expect whatever a Cadillac offers. Think of something you use every day, and ask yourself if it’s the very best you can buy. Is it something you could only buy once and never need to replace? If so, good for you. If not, why not? Assuming price is the reason, why are some cars or bicycles or cameras more expensive? Simply put, you don’t get as much at the lower price points. Lower quality materials, fewer features, lesser quality (more lax inspections/fewer rejects), that sort of thing.

Does anyone really believe that manufacturers design products to fail? Or do they simply not build in as much durability as a way of meeting a price target? Durable goods like the examples above and more besides don’t come with a time limit: in many cases they can outlive the original buyer, with care. One doesn’t have to look hard to find 20 or 30 year old or older cars still on the road. But their owners have made that happen, where today’s owners are not concerned about maintenance. Accordingly — to meet the market — carmakers will offer long service intervals, since they know people won’t bring their car in for even an oil change that can take just a few minutes. So how do they stretch the service interval? Instead of a 4-5 quart oil capacity, they might design in a 10 quart sump, and allow the larger quantity of oil to carry the burden. Think about that, as we ponder how we can slow climate change.

And many families have washing machines or other appliances that many others would have replaced. Too often what is called obsolescence is simply hunger for the new shiny version…a washing machine that can sense how dirty the clothes are or a car with more features, a phone or computer that runs as fast as the old one when it was new. None of that says obsolescence to me: it all sounds like consumer choice in the marketplace.

Do companies make new products, hoping you’ll buy them? Of course. Do they sometimes find it uneconomical to support old shavers or home entertainment equipment? Of course. But that’s not planned obsolescence: that’s just progress, of a sort. We don’t always get better stuff, to be sure, but it’s up to us to make the choice to move with the times or analyze our needs and make sure we get what we want.

Most of the things people say are now obsolete are not at all: unless they have consumable parts, they probably work as well as they ever did, even if everything else has changed around them. 20 years ago, no one imagined vinyl records would re-emerge as an audio format, but here we are. They survived cassettes and CDs and are thriving in the media-less streaming era. Yet how many people said their old turntables and receivers and speakers were obsolete?

So no, there is no such thing as planned obsolescence. No one has yet found a switch or timer than renders a product inoperable no matter how well maintained or serviced it was. Why you will find is consumers who get bored with what they have or envious of what their neighbors have. This is one instance where consumers do own the responsibility for their choices. We can’t stop climate change through individual action but we can make better purchasing decisions that might make a difference.

Marx wrote about alienation, as a way to explain how workers were alienated from the work they do, as the factory system devalued craft and skill and turned workers into tools — easily replaceable and limited in function. Workers should, within reason, be able to buy the things they make or at the very least value their work as if they were responsible for the effects of it. How many people work making things whose purpose and function they disagree with? Social media, advertising delivery systems, and high-frequency trading systems often recruit some of the brightest graduates, who could be working in medical research or education or other more valuable work but the pay differentials make it hard to resist the less meaningful jobs they accept. How many people go to work in those fields to earn enough to do what they really want with their lives and how much of their lives do they spend getting to that point?

On a recent trip, I saw a bumper sticker message that stayed with me…”We miss Trump at the gas pump.” How do you unpack that? Do people really think the POTUS has that much control over the price of gas at the pump? Sure, they can pursue policies that could lower the price of gas but there is no direct link. Under Obama, the USA became the number one oil producer in the world but I don’t recall any Venezuela or Saudi Arabia gas prices.

But why gas? Why not bread as in other times? Bread riots are not a historical footnote. We hear about food shortages, food deserts, food pantries, all kinds of inequalities related to food but by and large, food is abundant in the USA and much of the developed world: the distribution of it through markets is the issue. The fact that people are more concerned about the price of gasoline and the perceived loss of security that high gas prices could cause than about food, the shortage of which might create a situation they might need to flee, seems to be a kind of alienation. They are estranged from the common reality and choose to live in their own self-reinforcing reality.

So what does gas represent to those people who miss the world their leader created for them? One could argue it represents freedom or independence…but from what? What power does it grant? It offers the power of movement, to avoid having to adapt or work or live with people they don’t want to. Coupled with ruinous land use policy that allows speculators to pocket the unearned value of land and transportation policy that favors cars over people, you end up with white flight, with voluntary segregation…but not where people are forced to move. They move willingly, leaving little of value behind but location…which cities fail to value properly. Built-out, heterogenous/diverse urban streetscapes are devalued and abandoned, replaced by new car-dependent suburbs or new towns. And the cycle of gentrification repeats.

This is another form of alienation, from society and their fellow citizens, where they don’t recognize their commonality, and as a result they turn inward, absorbing self-curated news and information from social media or the narrowly-defined media providers that reinforce their beliefs. They have become alienated from the consequences of the choices they make, as a result of not seeing themselves as part of a society. Recent events reject that idea.

A lot of this comes from Adam Curtis’s video documentary series, the Century of the Self, Hypernormalization, and Can’t get You Out of My Head. He explores and explains the changes in society over the 20th century as people in the developed world have been turned away from the feeling part of a society and into more individualistic thinking, disconnected from shared purpose, even as they share work spaces, schools, and the responsibilities of civic life. But as we see all too often, people value their rights more than they accept their responsibilities. Rights without responsibilities are entitlements or privileges, unearned carveouts of the commons.

So what does this have to do with land, which seems to the dominant theme here? Land is the physical manifestation of the commons, and much of the foregoing touches on the break between private and public goods, including two different UK prime ministers — from the same party — denying the existence of society and then, 40 years later, affirming it.

I see this split between individualism and society everywhere it seems, right down to our recent heat wave, where so many people feel compelled to buy air conditioning, ignoring that air conditioning is part of what the reason for the heat wave — the increased demand for energy that will be met by fossil fuels, which drives a greater need for A/C and so on and so forth. And now, two days after the heat wave, the temperatures are normal, but once people install A/C, they will turn it on in June and leave it on until September, closing off the world. We seem to have lost the ability to share any kind of sacrifice, if there is any way to buy our way out of it.