One aspect of the old farm machinery still in use in our fields is
the striking elegance and longevity of its design, which casts into sharp
relief the frequent shoddiness and incoherence of new manufactured goods. However
bright, shiny, and slick a new product looks, odds are that it betrays some
sort of fatal dysfunction, or even breaks down, in a matter of weeks – or days.
Compare old potato washers, seeders, spaders, tractors, and other
technological relics – which are still in use after perhaps half a century,
given regular maintenance – to a common manufactured good brought into the
market today, and one sees there is much to be desired in contemporary
craftsmanship.
The lower the price of the good, the greater risk one runs, but
this problem even crops up in higher end goods. I’ve seen $100+ hiking shoes
and refrigerators that cost in the thousands break down far before any sort of
reasonable expiration date.
Even when it comes to low tier goods, I find myself hungrily
browsing the aisles of a Goodwill or some other thrift store, looking for older
used goods in decent shape.
Strikingly enough, the visceral visual cues that accompany dying
things are quite absent. The more shoddy and fragile the product, the more
compellingly new, slick, and over-designed it looks. The old Poe story comes to
mind about the dying man kept in suspended animation, who then liquefies at the
end of the story.
There are plenty of interlocking economic and political dynamics that
account for this phenomenon: the political favoring of capital comes to mind,
which brings with it economic concentration and the formation of monopolies, deregulation,
planned obsolescence, legal capture, and other nasty trends with their share of
social and material consequences.
Because of these facts, shoddy craftsmanship and technological
dysfunction cross lines of price and exclusivity, and crop up with greater
force the more complex and interconnected the processes of manufacture are. Like
a coming winter, material dysfunction creeps in until it produces a new climate
of quality, and regulations are even more relaxed amidst a milieu of habituated
consumers. The hands get thrown up right around the point at which there are
enough instances of fatal automobile dysfunction to raise an eyebrow, yet
nothing serious is done, save a few symbolic regulatory gestures. The usual political state affairs passes: no
executives are seriously punished, and no one seriously considers restructuring
the industry in question.
What’s more, such a dire state of affairs produces its own spheres
of anti-production, in reaction. As a monopoly ties up a market and floods that
market with generally increasing mediocrity, the superfluous labor that the
market sheds and displaces reforms around productive enterprises that exploit
the very weaknesses the monopoly introduces.
Take the case of Microsoft’s software products, which thanks to an
aggressive campaign of monopolization, the company has managed to stuff down
the throats of every domestic, commercial, educational, and institutional organization
it can muscle over. The Windows 10 platform renders automatic updates mandatory,
updates which more often than not scuttle hardware and software systems with their
application. These systems are now too complex, and there is not enough
organizational power or personal talent within the software engineering teams
to effectively manage the complexity.
Meanwhile, the superfluous labor shed off by the monopoly’s abuse
of the body politic coalesces into new productive centers, establishing
operations that seek to exploit every weakness that said inferior software and
hardware systems display, stealing and manipulating valuable data flows that
are then laundered every which way, at a growing scale and level of sophistication.
Not a promising economic base with which to establish more
sophisticated and powerful technologies.
