You’ve seen the Best Buy “Buy Back” commercials, the unveiling of the newest editions of things consumers don’t have–and the stinging agony that accompanies being left behind, duped into buying into that which was built to die. It’s a clever marketing strategy, funny because it’s gesturing the truth of consumerism: both commenting on the psycho-social constraints of the consumer (no one’s denying the fact that we all want what’s newest, fastest, sleekest), while at the same time honestly naming that this exploitation of the consumer isn’t going to change. That products are going to be built to die seems to be written into the plasma interlacing of each new technology, an obsolescence that keeps you coming back, because you’re now dissatisfied with the hardware storage capacity you knew nothing about until the newer had twice as much, now dissatisfied with the screen thickness, knowing that this new one fits in an envelope, etc…
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This phenomenon is known as planned obsolescence, the fated creation and predestining of a company’s newest technologies, to leave the consumer in a middle ground between despair (at their perfectly functional, outdated item) and abiding love (for the company that’s made it even better this time!). In September’s Atlantic, though, Rob Walker points out (confessionally) that this gadget-thirst goes unquenched, not solely because the product is re-packaged and supplied, but because the consumer is ever-hungry for an excuse to gather something–be made?–new. In short, folks will wait for the new iPad, not because their old one does so much less, but because our desires and wills routinely and systematically malfunction. Who doesn’t want to be, as Best Buy heralds, Future-Proof?
We’re all familiar with the sinister idea of “planned obsolescence,” a corporate strategy of supplying the market with products specifically built not to last. Consumer-culture critic Annie Leonard describes such items as “designed for the dump”; she recounts reading industrial-design journals from the 1950s in which designers “actually discuss how fast can they make stuff break” and still leave consumers with “enough faith in the product to go out and buy another one.” When that doesn’t work, she says, the market suckers us with aesthetic tweaks that have no impact on functionality: the taller tail fins and shorter skirts of “perceived obsolescence.”
But the emerging prevalence—anecdotally, at least—of the gadget death wish suggests an intriguing possibility: where electronic gizmos are concerned, product obsolescence is becoming a demand-side phenomenon.
Consider that most ubiquitous gadget, the mobile phone. According to J.D. Power and Associates, the typical American gets a new one every 18 months. This is not because of some time bomb in the design that renders a phone useless over that span. ReCellular, a big recycler and reseller of mobiles, collects millions of unwanted phones every year. Joe McKeown, the company’s vice president of marketing and communications, told me that many are several years old—not because they’ve been in use all that time, but because, after being replaced, they were dumped in desk drawers and forgotten. But despite this, only 18 percent of the phones the company collects are “beyond economic repair,” and thus broken down to recyclable parts. The rest either work fine or can easily be refurbished and put right back into the marketplace. The problem, if that’s the right word for it, is that new devices perform more functions, faster—and people, as a result, want them.
This demand-side obsolescence does not extend to all products, of course. I have no death wish, for example, for the three-year-old dishwasher now in terminal condition in my kitchen. But the light-speed innovations in consumer electronics have turned many of us into serial replacers. A dealer in vintage home-entertainment equipment recently convinced me that it used to be possible to buy a top-notch stereo system that really would function admirably for decades. Imagine, by contrast, that tomorrow some company unveiled a cell phone guaranteed to last for 20 years. Who would genuinely want it? It’s not our devices that wear thin, it’s our patience with them.
The very real problem of electronic waste makes people like me hesitate to replace good-working-order possessions. Yet at the same time, we like to stay current with new technological innovations. So rather than provide evidence of some cynical corporate strategy, our gadgets’ minor malfunctions or disappointing features or unacceptably slow speeds largely provide an excuse to replace them—with a lighter laptop, a slimmer tablet, a clearer e-book reader. Obsolescence isn’t something companies are forcing on us. It’s progress, and it’s something we pretty much demand. As usual, the market gives us exactly what we want.
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