Made to Break (Part I)

The next time you need to replace your computer or car, don’t think that you got the most you could out of it, because it was designed to last much shorter than it could have. This past week, I have been reading Made to Break: Technology and Obsolescence in America, by Giles Slade. So far, the main goal of this book has been go give the reader a clear understanding of what planned obsolescence is and the history behind its creation. Planned obsolescence is actually a simple idea, but being that it completely goes against the business ideology prior to it, it took some time to really become a widespread method of production. Planned obsolescence is the idea that companies purposely design their products to fail after a certain time period, usually being earlier than normal, in order keep customers coming back to buy more products. This method of conducting business began around the time when General Motors started using an early form of obsolescence in order to compete with Ford. After the success General Motors achieved using obsolescence, this idea quickly spread to all other products. The main argument I think Giles Slade makes in this first part of this book is that the whole idea of planned obsolescence is, in essence, causing people think that instant gratification is best mentality for any buyer.

Although planned obsolescence is often thought of as designing products that fail after a certain time period, there is a whole other side to it that most people don’t even realize. Designing products that fail sooner than they should is only the physical part of obsolescence; there is also the psychological part. As Giles Slade discusses, this psychological part of obsolescence is all about trying to instill the idea in people’s minds that waiting for something to wear out or break before replacing it is pointless and people should buy new things to stay modern. Basically, it’s all about creating a sea of potential buyers that actually want to buy new products just because they are new. Giles Slade really defines what the psychological aspect of obsolescence is all about when he says “If a person has money to purchase the latest items of self-presentation, he or she seems superficially more affluent and therefore presumably more socially successful, more desirable.”(pg. 50) He really says it all right there, the businesses used advertising and marketing to create an environment in which people would actually feel undesirable or even ashamed if they weren’t using the most up to date technology or sporting the newest fashions.

The problem though is that this mentality leads to people constantly acting on impulse and not actually thinking about the consequences of their actions. Such a mentality is supported in Neil Postman’s Technopoly. In Technopoly, Neil Postman discusses how people are willing to blindly adopt new technologies and throw old technologies in the trash without even thinking about what they are giving up, which is a very similar mentality to that of obsolescence. Giles Slade even brings up technocracy as a movement created in order to get out of the great depression, but according to him technocracy was not very successful and for the most part faded away, while Neil Postman seems to argue that it was quite successful and in America it even evolved into technopoly. Personally, I feel that Giles Slade’s argument is very valid and obsolescence definitely causes people to think that they should just buy anything they want right now and never think about what could happen tomorrow. The effects of this mentality can been seen today in the landfills full of scrapped CRT televisions and old computers and other various older technologies that no one knows what to do with. At the rate people are throwing away old products, if a proper method of disposal is not invented, we are going to run out of space for all of the trash in the near future.