To sum up this chapter, and the two that went before, standardization, where it concerned consumer goods, was as much a moral as a technical matter. The moral dimension of standardization subsisted in the value attached to the production of “honest” commodities—those imbued with solid and durable qualities, indexed by trustworthy signs (brands and product certifications), underwritten by commercial warranties, to some degree safeguarded by the regulation of the state and courts, and policed by testing activities in the public sphere. There was a clear sense in which people, as wage earners and consumers (or rather, as wage workers who consume), were, to an increasing extent over the course of the century, seen as being entitled to products that met those ideals. But this entitlement did not entail a right to a form of life within which accumulated commodities could actually be made use of in practice. Rather, the emphasis was on the properties of the things themselves, and particularly on the duration of useful activity they contain in potentia. In the next chapter, I consider the moral reaction to cases (imagined or real) in which the entitlement to fair, standard durations of use power in products was thought to have been violated by manufacturers.
Product Testing and Product Regularization
217