copeab@yahoo.com wrote:

Well, you're entitled to that opinion, but really I'd ask you to give the
underlying assumptions some thought. There's a great deal of bizarre
denunciations of "consumerism" and "disposability" but these are the
inevitable consequences of a society in rapid technological flux. Things are
getting better fast, so things go rapidly out of date. A new cellphone is
smaller, lighter, and has more features than one from even two years ago, so
naturally people want to upgrade. Here we are chatting on the internets. 20
years ago, I had a computer with a 3.5MHz processor, a 256x192 display in 8
colours (mapped in blocks) and 48k of base memory, with another 120k paged,
cassette drive, no disks. Boy am I glad that was disposable. I've had 4 PCs-
a 286, a 486, a Pentium II and this one, an Athlon, which is now 5 years old
and the modern stuff is shedloads better.

I don't think the Athlon is better than my old ZX Spectrum because some
nefarious company told me to think that (you imply some kind of brainwashing
conspiracy, as anti-capitalists so often do). I think it's better because it
*is* better. It does more shit. I gladly threw the old ones in a landfill,
where they belong.

The same goes for most products. New ones are better than old ones, so
people upgrade. And that means manufacturers don't make things to last as
long, because they won't be used for long. People will buy a new one
instead. There's this thing people say about how in the old days things were
made to last, I've still got the mangle my great grandmother used, and it's
only had 3 new handles and 4 new rollers. But the fact is, people don't want
to use a mangle, or a washing machine from even 20 years ago, because new
ones are better. If manufacturers made things to last with great cast iron
frames and big knurled brass knobs and so on, they'd last longer, but they'd
cost 4 times as much, so nobody would buy them.

There is no conspiracy. It's called progress. If we leapt in a time machine
and went back to 1970, we'd be culture-shocked. Mono record players,
monochrome TVs, no video recorders, no PCs, not even calculators, phoning
another country had to be booked days in advance. Stoves, vacuum cleaners,
cameras and motor cars would look primitive to us. Bicycles just had one big
wheel at the front, and most people drove horses. We wouldn't want those
products today, because by todays standards they were crap, even the
enormously expensive hi-fi with its groovy brushed aluminium and teak
design. Really.

We replace things to get something better. This is inevitable in a society
on the steep bit of the technology curve. Maybe when we've run out of things
to invent and improve, that will change. But until then, it's entirely
normal. This ridiculous myth of evil corporations forcing us to be consumers
needs challenging and doing away with. Our lives are more comfortable and
cool because of all the amazing gadgets we have; heck, we couldn't even have
had this discussion in 1970, or even 1990 for most people, because there
weren't any internets.

We have all this shit because we threw the old shit away.

I was a kid in the 70s. I read a great newspaper column a little while ago
by a woman of a similar age saying that all these people who bemoan kids
playing XBox or whatever they're called, these people either weren't there
30 years ago, or have forgotten, just how dull it was living in the Stone
Age. If it was school holidays and it was raining, you were fucked. Two
channels on TV, one on Closedown and the other showing cricket, and there
was *nothing* to do. They make it sound as if every day of every child's
life was spent out skipping through fields saying hullo clouds hullo sky,
and we used our imaginations or some crap, when in fact a rainy day meant
sitting with your nose pressed against the window praying it would stop
because you were trapped in a house with nothing to do, in the uncool past,
and you couldn't even play your new Cliff And The Shadows LP, because the
one goddamned radiogramme was in the living room and dad was watching the
sodding cricket.

Progress is great, but the downside is it's created this generation of
people who complain about it, because they can't begin to comprehend how
lucky they are. They sit there reading the fucking Lord Of The Rings and
think it'd be cool if we all lived in The Shire. Well it wouldn't, it'd be
fucking boring as fucking hell, and everyone would smell of cow shit.

The future is great, and we're living in it.

Ian