Ending over mending: planned obsolescence is killing the planet | Jeff Sparrow | Opinion

In his novel Brave New World, Aldous Huxley writes of a society in which recorded voices subliminally prepare babies for their future role as consumers.

“I do love flying, I do love having new clothes,” they whisper. “But old clothes are beastly. We always throw away old clothes. Ending is better than mending. Ending is better than mending.”

Huxley depicts a dystopia. But the slogans he describes might equally apply to common products today.

“Before Apple, everything was interchangeable. Sure, every phone had its own special part, like different cars. But now, each year, Apple is changing its design on purpose to make it harder for us to fix them.”

That’s Nicholas Muradian from the repair company Phone Spot, talking about the serialisation of components for the new iPhone 12.

The latest iteration of Apple’s flagship product can’t be repaired – or, at least, not without using the company’s expensive proprietary service.

That’s not uncommon. Some manufacturers now build with special screws or glue parts together, specifically to prevent home maintenance. Others simply don’t provide the basic components that would give their products a longer life.

As the Australian Productivity Commission takes submissions into its Right to Repair inquiry, it’s worth thinking about how the items we use daily became so disposable.

When the second world war ended, the tremendous productivity of the wartime American economy suddenly posed a problem, with manufacturers desperately requiring new markets to keep their assembly lines humming.

Disposability was one of the solutions adopted, as the industrial designer Brooks Stevens explained.

“Our whole economy is based on planned obsolescence,” he said, “and everybody who can read without moving his lips should know it by now. We make good products, we induce people to buy them, and next year we deliberately introduce something that will make those products old fashioned, out of date, obsolete. We do that for the soundest reason: to make money.”

Consumers in America and throughout the world were encouraged to become dissatisfied with perfectly serviceable items, so that instead of making one-off purchases they updated seasonally.

That psychological campaign was reinforced by mechanisms that made the continued use of household items difficult. As one designer exulted the “planned existence spans of products” was “the greatest economic boost to the American economy since the origination of time payments.”

Environmentalists now refer to the late 1940s as the “Great Acceleration” – the period in which humanity’s impact on the planet increased exponentially. If you’re 80 years old or more, something like 90% of carbon emissions ever generated by humans can be dated to your lifetime, a consequence of the deliberately wasteful economy unleashed during the post-war economic boom.

The lack of repairability does not merely exemplify the problem with how we consume. It’s also symptomatic of the way we now produce.

Until a few hundred years ago, people made or did things because those things were immediately useful to them or someone they knew.

Today, however, we live on a system dependent on commodity exchange. Capitalists don’t make items because they’re needed. They make them because they can be sold – which isn’t the same at all. An item of plastic tack counts as a sale, just as valuable as a vial of Covid vaccine.

The relationship between human labour and its consequences become obscured by a process focused on the abstractions of profit. Climate change thus manifests as something entirely out of our control, rather than the result of particular choices made by particular people.

If we want to reverse the ecological catastrophe engulfing our planet, we must refocus attention on what is produced and how.

By tinkering in their garages, the hobbyists who take apart electronic devices exert a skerrick of agency over the gadgets churned out by multinationals.

And that’s all to the good.

In an increasingly fragile world, we need more — much more — control over production. We need conscious choices which resources we use and which we don’t, instead of letting giant corporations do whatever makes them the most money.

Obviously, we are not going to end global warming just by repairing our iPhones.

Yet if we can’t even do that, what chance do we have?

Last year tied with 2016 as the warmest ever recorded. In the era of catastrophic climate change, it’s very clear where ending over mending leads.