Core77

Richard at CPH127's got a great book review up on Made to Break, Giles Slade's hardcover on "technology and obsolescence in America." (The best is how it's paired in the "better together" Amazon pitch with "High Tech Trash: Digital Devices, Hidden Toxics, and Human Health" by Elizabeth Grossman.)

The review's juiciest bit is "Like Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney fighting a Cold war in a terrorist world long after the Iron Curtain has come down, Slade persists in a world view that is decades out of date. That world simply doesn't exist anymore." But he follows it up with this fantastic paragraph, and then a lot more:

But a subtler point lost on Slade is that [planned obsolescence] doesn't exist because it doesn't need to. Another world has replaced it, that of voluntary obsolescence, which serves the economic purpose even better. Like the transition of Cold war to ad hoc terrorism, this shift is also one from top-down authoritarianism to decentralized action. The approach of planned obsolescence has so pervaded and framed our consumption mentality that we (as consumers) don't need to have products go out of style on a planned basis or have them fail on schedule for us to be more than happy to replace fully functioning products with new ones. This fact has saved Apple's bacon and made them the darling of Wall Street again.