The Innovation Delusion by Lee Vinsel & Andrew L. Russell
Author:Lee Vinsel & Andrew L. Russell [Vinsel, Lee & Russell, Andrew L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Crown
Published: 2020-09-08T00:00:00+00:00
CONSUMER GOODS AND THE RIGHT TO REPAIR
One of the most remarkable things about our society is how relatively few of our broken possessions most of us will repair.
We have become a culture of disposability. It is hard to overemphasize how new this is. For most of human history, objects were both produced and maintained locally. Blacksmiths, for instance, not only forged items like knives, axes, and axles for horse carts but also kept them in decent condition. Fashions changed slowly, and people made their clothing and furniture to be durable, often repairing and preserving them for a lifetime or more. As the historian Rosalind Williams notes, “In some parts of the world, the basic garment of the common man went unchanged for centuries—the poncho in Peru, the dhoti in India, the long shirt in China, the kimono in Japan.”13 In such a context, “possessions were handed down from generation to generation.”
Mass production changed all of this, first and foremost by driving down prices. At first, decreasing prices meant that even average people could afford consumer goods like electric toasters, radios, and televisions. But the process continued, eventually making objects so cheap that we came to view them as disposable. It’s now cheaper to buy a new toaster than to repair one that is acting up.
The easy availability of inexpensive goods has shaped our everyday experience. The fact that we can go to a big-box store or press “buy now” on the website of an online vendor and fill our homes with inexpensive objects is near magic. Average Americans today own quantities and qualities of goods that only the wealthiest individuals could afford a century ago. Even relatively poor people own mounds of cheap crap that mostly goes unused.
Over the course of the twentieth century, new homes were built with ever-increasing amounts of storage room, including the advent of the walk-in closet. While garages were originally added to properties with the purpose of storing cars, 93 percent of Americans now use their garages as storage spaces, and 30 percent of homeowners do not have enough room in their garages for a car.14 Moreover, in recent years, the self-storage industry has grown in leaps and bounds, becoming a $38 billion a year market that one in eleven Americans uses.15
Some people find this plethora of goods overwhelming. The organizing guru Marie Kondo’s book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up became a mega-bestseller when it was published in the United States in 2014. Some have argued that Kondo’s decluttering philosophy only works for the privileged; it’s easy to throw things out or give them away when you are confident you can replace them whenever you want.16 But the reception of Kondo’s bestseller showed that many Americans were becoming frustrated with the piles of cheap stuff that overflowed from their closets, garages, and lives.
In the meantime, even when an object in our life is expensive enough to repair, it has become much more difficult to do so. Much of this difficulty is because computers have been built into so many things around us—most notably our cars.
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