{"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":228,"pdf_page":236,"physical_index":236,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"fe07e5512b015e28d76f0315e7a1a00bb2f439ef87ff64b2bc82d2f89323aecf"},"chapter":"FOR","content":"eager and willing to take hold of anything new either in the shape of a new invention or new designs or styles or ways of living. 2) A readiness to ‘scrap or lay aside an article before its natural life is completed, in order to make way for the newer and better thing. 3) A willingness to apply a very large share of one’s income, even if it pinches savings, to the acquisition of the new goods or services or way of living” (p. 246). Although Frederick wrote her book before the Depression had taken hold, she, like London, argued that, for the sake of economic stability, consumption should be regimented according to the requirements of the Taylorist system of mass production.8\n\nIn the postwar period, however the term planned obsolescence takes on a very marked negative moral charge. Perhaps significantly, Vance Packard makes no mention at all of London’s positive account of planned obsolescence in his influential 1960 book on the topic. Packard’s primary target was rather the industrial designer Brook Stevens, who, in the early 1950s, advocated planned obsolescence as vital for the health of business and the economy at large.\n\nIn the middle years of the century, planned obsolescence was typically regarded as problematic because the practice supposedly short-changed the consumer. Businesses were seen as reneging on their obligations to the consumer by cutting short the duration of potential useful activity facilitated by commodities they sold to the public, either by engineered “death dates” or by inducing psychological dissatisfaction. From the early 1970s onward, however, concerns about planned obsolescence took an environmental turn. The practice was condemned on the grounds that it produces pollution and waste, with adverse efects on the environment. At the same time, in the last quarter of the century the perceived locus of the problem to some extent shifted from nefarious business practice to misguided or unthinking consumers.\n\nPlanned obsolescence has continued to have a significant presence in public discourse up until the present day. However, the negative moral aura carried by the term dissipated to a significant extent toward the end of the twentieth century. The term became more neutral and descriptive, used in particular in reference to increasing technical obsolescence associated with information technology, which tends to be narrated as a quasi-natural process. By the century’s end planned obsolescence came to be viewed much as Babbage and Frederick saw it, as a normal corollary of technical progress.\n\nI would suggest that the waxing and waning of concerns about planned obsolescence reflects tectonic changes in capitalism. The evolving discourse about planned obsolescence, as mentioned earlier, tracks the decline of capitalism’s Golden Age corporatist form, in which a stable arrangement between labor and business ensured that increases in labor productivity would be reflected in increasing real wages (Glyn 2006). Arguably the environmental critique was able to take center stage discussions about product obsolescence in part because the moral framework undergirding Golden Age corporatism had receded somewhat. In that framework, labor, productivity, wages, and consumption had been brought together in a moral economy hinged on the fair exchange of equivalents. I will return to this line of interpretation in the discussion at the end of the chapter.\n\n228\n\nTime for Things","previous_page":227,"next_page":229}