The nonfiction book that I’m reading right now is worth talking about well before I’m finished.
The book is Made to Break: Technology and Obsolescence in America by Giles Slade. The book is a history of consumerism and the factors that led American inventors and companies to deliberately create obsolence in consumer products. Ok maybe that doesn’t sound like simulating reading but it really is.
The book opens with the shocking numbers of computers and cell phones that are discarded annually. For example, “in 2005 more than 100 million cell phones were discarded in the United States.” That’s 50,000 tons of still-usable equipment. The compact design of cell phones means that it is easier to throw them away than disassemble them, recycle them, and make new ones. All those phones, added to the number of discarded PCs, then the number of TVs are equal to a toxic time bomb according to Slade. “We do not have enough landfills to store and then ignore America’s growing pile of electronic trash.”
Good heavens.
The big scary numbers in the introduction captured my attention, but the real grabbers were in the upcoming chapters on what led to today’s present toxic state, all of which are a contributing factor to the climate crisis Al Gore talks about in the movie An Inconvenient Truth.
Basically mass production is one of our great problems. In the late 19th-centry when the economy changed from man-powered to machine-driven, company bosses stayed up at night worrying about that fact that they could over produce more goods than could be readily consumed. Rather than reducing production, they came up with ways to get people to consume more.
Slade gives a brief history of crackers–once sold in a barrel and then individually packaged and “branded” with guaranteed freshness–of King Camp Gillette and his invention of disposable razors, and other crazy stories.
It’s fascinating to think about the origins of branding and packaging, how clever we were at creating repetitive demand, how we sat around dreaming up ways to encourage disposability of things–some of which I greatly appreciate like sanitary pads and tampons, bathroom tissue and bandaids but also of consumer electronics, automobiles and clothes.
Slade talks about the anti-thrift campaigns during and after the First World War, during the Depression, and after the Second World War, and how entrenched that thinking is today. He talks about the history of the automobile and the creation of the annual model change–change for style sake vs. change for improvement. The Academy Awards make an appearance in the story as an example of a marketing strategy to encourage repetitive consumption. The movie industry’s own version of the annual model change, as was the New York Times‘ establishment of the bestseller list for books.
Slade’s story involves a lot of name dropping, but I love it. He’s got the history of autos and why we started painting them different colours, the history of light bulbs, the history of crackers (the National Biscuit Company, which we know as Nabisco), and the history of the radio and why RCA was adamently against FM radio (it was seen as a direct competitor to TV, which was not yet being marketed).
Made to Break is a wild read, and I’m only a third of the way through.
has an excerpt of the first chapter if you need to peruse of the writing. And here’s the