Planned Obsolescence
A Meditation on Disposable Technology
One morning, in the middle of Winter, I switched on my main work PC to hear one long beep followed by three shorter ones. The machine booted but the display was blank.
With coffee growing cold and still in my sweats, I checked out a spreadsheet of BIOS error codes I’d found online. It confirmed my first diagnosis: the video card was fried.
Curiously, I then remembered when it happened. There had been a “phhhzzzt” noise in the night at heart-attack o’clock, followed by silence. Utter and complete silence.
Sandwiched between wakefulness and Bioshock dreams, I thought the extreme weather had brought the apocalypse. The power lines were iced up, the generators were down, the roads were impassible. I would get up in the morning to see an old lady greedily chewing the hind leg of a stray dog in the car park.
But, no, it was just a power surge and the sound of silence was the absence of cooling fans. The temporary death of my PC.
It was an old desktop machine, so I was able to order a new video card on the internet. It arrived two days later despite the winter climes and was installed with shaky hands in the time it takes to brew up an Americano.
The chunky old box was again the centre of my office network, despite its age and relative decrepitude.
Do It Yourself
It’s a satisfying experience, being able to crack open a computer, seat new components, then start up your machine afresh — faster, better.
But, here’s the rub, if I had woken to find my Kindle Fire so completely unresponsive or my iPhone’s sound system silent — there would have been little I could do to fix the situation myself. Out of warranty, uninsured, broken devices become nothing more than expensive paperweights.
In point of fact, I can tell you exactly what happens to broken devices because someone sat on my Kindle this week. A rather brusque man in a green anorak. picking through a ham sandwich on the train, claiming half my seat as well as his own.
It wasn’t until later in the day that I realised what had happened. I opened the cover to see the Virginia Wolfe screensaver now looked like the cover of Coldplay’s “A Rush of Blood to the Head”.
You can’t add memory to your iPad. Many notebooks now ship with integral video on the motherboard and no upgrade slot. It’s even becoming a specialist job to replace a simple battery. Not many people have a set of jeweller’s screwdrivers and a spudger to hand… But that’s what you’ll need to get into an iPhone 5S.
One of the key signifiers of 21st century gadget-hood is disposability. Built in obsolescence.
This observation isn’t new. Like many proto-geeks I took things apart as a lad: toasters, tape recorders, old televisions… And like most proto-geeks I soon learned how to put them back together. That is, until I opened up my first Sony Walkman. I gained access to the inner workings easily enough — four screws and a few plastic tabs to unlock — and then it exploded.
The components were spring-loaded; designed to self destruct. My brother, whose player it was, was so unhappy he put HP sauce in my tea. At least, that’s what he said it was.
Fixed Costs
My Kindle isn’t springloaded, but Amazon’s margin on parts is cigarette paper thin, making repair economically foolish.
Cost of repairing my Kindle: £45 including delivery for a new screen, plus a frustrating hour or two following falsetto instructions from a YouTube video as you entirely dismantle then bumpily reassemble the device. Projected probability of success — 63%.
Cost of a new Kindle: £59.
It is, as those who have no knowledge of what the kids say say, “a no-brainer”.
In January, as CES revealed another 6 months worth of innovation and invention, I was cooing and billing with the best of them over phablets, 4K TVs and wearable tech.
One day, these devices will stop working too. One day, you will forget to take off your Pebble before you go for a swim. No amount of rice in a bowl on the window sill will save you. One day some fat bastard in an anorak will sit on your phablet.
Is disposability all that desirable? What waste this tendency generates, as we cast one example of old technology after the other into the landfill, 18 months after it was first loved, then liked, then loathed, then lost.
And it’s not even our land that it fills.
China Crisis
70% of all electronic waste ends up in one country; China. And most of that is in one concentrated area, the Guangdong province. The four small villages of Guiyu are home to a notorious dump known as “the electronic graveyard”. 52 square miles in area, filled with tonnes of waste — some of it hazardous, little of it biodegradable. 80% of the local population work on the site — around 150,000 people. Many of them are living and grafting in unsafe conditions.
And according to the BBC, Guiyu isn’t just processing and recycling broken electronics anymore. Increasingly, the goods that get dumped in China are simply out of life; overproduced stock that’s perfectly good but is no longer current. Last year’s phone. Last year’s tablet.
I’m as complicit in the perpetuation of this cycle as the next tech writer, pointing the spotlight at the next shiny new thing before the old one in your pocket has even lost its polish. That’s one of the things I’m paid for.
But we forfeit many pleasures when the life of our gadgets is so short. And that apocalypse that I dreamed fried my computer? We may be summoning it sooner than you think.
Main image shows women in Guangzhou, China sorting Plastics for melting, courtesy of Basel Action Network — licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs License.
