{"resolved":true,"match_type":"uuid","source_type":"original_book","book_id":"10f0f318-a2eb-4ea9-8798-d4fb0304f8c3","title":"Time for Things Labor, Leisure, and the Rise of Mass Consumption","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9780674250529","requested_by":"printed_page","book":{"source_type":"original_book","book_id":"10f0f318-a2eb-4ea9-8798-d4fb0304f8c3","id":"10f0f318-a2eb-4ea9-8798-d4fb0304f8c3","uuid":"10f0f318-a2eb-4ea9-8798-d4fb0304f8c3","title":"Time for Things Labor, Leisure, and the Rise of Mass Consumption","normalized_title":"timeforthingslaborleisureandtheriseofmassconsumption","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9780674250529","isbns":["9780674250529","9780674250536","9780674979512"],"parsed":true,"ai_readable":true,"document_type":"book","page_count":355,"navigation_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/10f0f318-a2eb-4ea9-8798-d4fb0304f8c3","title_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/title/Time%20for%20Things%20Labor%2C%20Leisure%2C%20and%20the%20Rise%20of%20Mass%20Consumption","fixed_page_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/10f0f318-a2eb-4ea9-8798-d4fb0304f8c3/page/{printed_page}","path_api_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/book/10f0f318-a2eb-4ea9-8798-d4fb0304f8c3/page/{printed_page}","read_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/10f0f318-a2eb-4ea9-8798-d4fb0304f8c3","page_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/10f0f318-a2eb-4ea9-8798-d4fb0304f8c3/page","search_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/10f0f318-a2eb-4ea9-8798-d4fb0304f8c3/search"},"page":{"printed_page":219,"pdf_page":227,"physical_index":227,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"1594dfed9029f9d1240971b01e51d9c21d927c9e3ce7c724146e7884b023bb1a"},"chapter":"FOR","content":"commodities was thought to have been intentionally limited or degraded by practices of so-called planned obsolescence on the part of industry.\n\nPlanned obsolescence has a complex history, the shape of which depends on the makeup of the set of practices and ideas to which the term is taken to refer. Concerns about planned obsolescence are from one perspective continuous with perennial worries about uncertain product quality. Product adulteration, for example, was an ongoing issue in America throughout the nineteenth century.1 Adulteration was a central concern within an older moral economy and was framed in terms of rights to subsistence in a custombound setting, the classic account of which is given by E. P. Thompson (1993). Food safety was certainly a matter of concern into the modern era of consumer activism. In the United States, worries about product contamination animated the consumer movement in its first phase, during the Progressive era, which culminated in the creation of the Food and Drug Administration in 1906. However, adulteration and contamination most often involve perishables rather than durable goods, so those worries were less applicable to the kinds of goods produced by the nascent system of industrial manufacturing. If planned obsolescence is taken to mean preemptive changes in product design reflecting awareness, on the part of producers, of the mercurial character of taste, then the practice dates at least as far back as the eighteenth century (McKendrick, Brewer, and Plumb 1984). Indeed, the modern dialectic between shifting tastes and changing design probably goes back as far as the ending of sumptuary laws at the waning of the middle ages—and insofar as we have plenty of archaeological evidence of changing styles in artifacts manufactured for exchange, conceivably all the way back to the early beginnings of commodity production. The understanding of something like planned obsolescence as a necessary consequence of the industrial economy, on the other hand, can be found in the nineteenth century. For example, Charles Babbage (1832), the influential engineer and mathematician, argued that the rate of industrial technological progress was such as to guarantee that manufactured products would rapidly be superseded by newer, improved versions, rendering them obsolete.\n\nDespite these conceptual precursors, the actual term planned obsolescence first appears in the 1930s, in the decade after General Motors introduced the marketing strategy with which the term was later to become synonymous. It was in the middle years of the twentieth century, however, that the term became a lightning rod for criticisms of industrial capitalism. The term began to gain notoriety following its promotion in the 1950s by the influential industrial designer Brook Stevens, dubbed “the crown prince of planned obsolescence” (Slade 2006). In a brochure published in 1953, Stevens defined planned obsolescence as “instilling in the buyer the desire to own something a little newer, a little better, and a little sooner than is necessary” (Adamson 2003, p. 129). He later set out the place of the doctrine in the role of the industrial designer: “Our task is to induce the public to buy or to possess something that is always new, and thus to promote the industries to go on with production” (Heskett 2003, p. 4). The crystallization of the moral controversy around planned obsolescence can be dated in particular to the publication in 1960 of Vance Packard’s best-seller, The Waste Makers. Reflecting the timing of Packard’s polemic, The Barnhart Dictionary of New English Since 1963 (1973) registers planned obsolescence as an important new phrase in the language in the early 1960s. During that decade, the issues surrounding planned obsolescence came into sharp focus and were broadly thematized and discussed with some urgency across the public sphere. In the 1960s, planned obsolescence became part of the stock list of complaints about capitalism. It was, for example, listed as one of the chief ills of capitalism in the 1962 Port Huron statement, issued by the Society for Democratic Students. The statement condemned: “The tendency to over-production, to gluts of surplus commodities,” claiming that the system “encourages ‘market research’ techniques to deliberately create pseudo-needs in consumers—we learn to buy ‘smart’ things, regardless of their utility—and introduces wasteful ‘planned obsolescence’ as a permanent feature of business strategy” (SDS 1964, pp. 15–16). C. Wright Mills (2008, p. 177) made a similar point in his essay “The Man in the Middle,” written in 1958: “Continuous and expanding production requires continuous and expanding consumption, so consumption must be speeded up by all the tactics and frauds of marketing. Moreover, existing commodities must be worn out more quickly for as the market is saturated, the economy becomes increasingly dependent upon what is called replacement. It is then that obsolescence comes to be planned and its cycle deliberately shortened.” Assessments of this sort could be folded into the current of twentieth-century American social thought critical of the emergent industrial order, which included the writings of such figures as Thorstein Veblen, Vance Packard, Kenneth Burke, J. K. Galbraith, Marshall McLuhan, and Stuart Chase (Brick 2006; Horowitz 1994). However, the concern over planned obsolescence extended well beyond a narrow circle of public intellectuals. In the middle years of the century it became commonplace in discussions about the operation of the industrial economy.\n\nMoral Panic about Utility\n\n219","previous_page":null,"next_page":220}