Made to Break: Technology and Obsolescence in America
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.20 (880 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 0674025725 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 336 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2015-10-21 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
Amazon Dude said A good read.. An enjoyable, easy read. Also touches on how elements of planned obsolescence also fosters innovation and invention. Meanders a little bit, but that doesn't take away from the interesting subject matter. Recommended.. "An interesting look at obsolescence" according to Dave Schwartz. Giles Slade opens this monograph with a flurry of astounding facts: in 200An interesting look at obsolescence Dave Schwartz Giles Slade opens this monograph with a flurry of astounding facts: in 2004, 315 million working PCs were thrown out in North America alone, and in the following year over 100 million cell phones joined them on the trashheap. That's tons of electronic equipment-larded with non-biogradable components and toxic waste-filling up garbage dumps around the world.What drives this rush to trash? According to Slade, it obsolescence, rather than failure. Your last computer likely didn't wear out-you junked it because a faster, lighter, and spiffier one. , An interesting look at obsolescence Giles Slade opens this monograph with a flurry of astounding facts: in 200An interesting look at obsolescence Dave Schwartz Giles Slade opens this monograph with a flurry of astounding facts: in 2004, 315 million working PCs were thrown out in North America alone, and in the following year over 100 million cell phones joined them on the trashheap. That's tons of electronic equipment-larded with non-biogradable components and toxic waste-filling up garbage dumps around the world.What drives this rush to trash? According to Slade, it obsolescence, rather than failure. Your last computer likely didn't wear out-you junked it because a faster, lighter, and spiffier one. , 315 million working PCs were thrown out in North America alone, and in the following year over 100 million cell phones joined them on the trashheap. That's tons of electronic equipment-larded with non-biogradable components and toxic waste-filling up garbage dumps around the world.What drives this rush to trash? According to Slade, it obsolescence, rather than failure. Your last computer likely didn't wear out-you junked it because a faster, lighter, and spiffier one. 15 million working PCs were thrown out in North America alone, and in the following year over 100 million cell phones joined them on the trashheap. That's tons of electronic equipment-larded with non-biogradable components and toxic waste-filling up garbage dumps around the world.What drives this rush to trash? According to Slade, it obsolescence, rather than failure. Your last computer likely didn't wear out-you junked it because a faster, lighter, and spiffier one. "A Superior Text on the Question of Permanence" according to Captain Video. I had read "Made to Break" years ago, as a teenager, and I remember it being the first nonfiction book I really liked. It opened doors for me, and I went with gusto into such classic texts as "The World Without Us" and Jared Diamond's dense-but-meaningful "Collapse." "Made to Break" got me ready for stuff like that.It was therefore with some surprise that I found the book to be much narrower in scope than I had remembered it to be. Although it deals with broad trends of the 19th, 20th and early 21st centuries, it goes through them more as a s
His book shows us the ideas behind obsolescence at work in such American milestones as the inventions of branding, packaging, and advertising; the contest for market dominance between GM and Ford; the struggle for a national communications network, the development of electronic technologies--and with it the avalanche of electronic consumer waste that will overwhelm America's landfills and poison its water within the coming decade. History reserves a privileged place for those societies that built things to last--forever, if possible. America invented everything that is now disposable, Giles Slade tells us, and he explains how disposability was in fact a necessary condition for America's rejection of tradition and our acceptance of change and impermanence. What place will it hold for a society addicted to consumption--a whole culture made to break? This book gives us a detailed and harrowing picture of how, by choosing to support ever-shorter product lives we may well be shortening the fu
He also explores the debate over "planned obsolescence"-decried by social critics as an unethical affront to values of thrift and craftsmanship, but defended as a Darwinian spur to innovation by business intellectuals who further argued that "wearing things out does not produce prosperity, but buying things does." Slade's even-handed analysis acknowledges both manufacturers' manipulative marketing ploys and consumers' ingrained love of the new as motors of obsolescence, which he considers an inescapable feature of a society so focused on progress and change. Historian Slade surveys the development of disposability as a consumer convenience, design feature, economic stimulus and social problem, from General Motors' 1923 introduct