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I'll start from quoting another film:
Man, I see in Fight Club the strongest and smartest men who've ever lived. I see all this potential, and I see it squandered. God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables – slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We're the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our great war is a spiritual war. Our great depression is our lives. We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars, but we won't. We're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off.
The problem here is that things are so crazy, so irrationally done, that one struggles to connect dots and find a pattern. In the film, Joseph asks us to imagine building a table. Naturally (?), when a craftsman builds a table for his own dining room, he builds it for durable beauty and use. It is an heirloom in training. The contrast between this set of value judgments (quality of wood, joinery technique, etc) from that which guides the manufacture of tables for mass markets is so great that it is absurd. One is concerned with using the best (and often most costly) materials, while the other is concerned only with the price point. When price and profit are the only considerations, in abstraction the illusion of quality is the only consideration. Where can the table be made of composite board and still maintain the look of solid wood? Is it more effective to make the best table possible for $200, or to make a $50 table and spend $150 on marketing and promotion? If we look at the state of our markets, the answer is clear. The world is ready to sell us trash. Trash which we're ready to buy. In part, this is because we've been conditioned by the efforts of advertisers to desire the product (or perhaps to feel a lack of the product), and in part because we're so illiterate with respect to propaganda that we're sheep lead to the slaughter. Sadly, many of the items we buy are priced more because of the marketing it took to get us to buy it than because of the intrinsic value of the product itself. These advertisers didn't do anything for us, the consumer. Their work adds nothing to the durability, utility, or beauty of the table. If anything, their ongoing work at advertising the new table that's just hit the market will teach us to hate our table, to have a table-shaped hole in our hearts. "It's so ugly. It's a piece of shit anyway. After I cash my paycheck, I'm going to go to Target and get a good table." (Did I tell you about the time they were giving out free face paints of targets at Target?)
And then we have the concepts of intrinsic and planned obsolescence described in the film. Basically, in some markets technology advances so quickly that the moment an item is sold it becomes obsolete. This often means that if you buy a computer and then take it back within the 30 day return policy, it will be thrown away as junk because it has already been outmoded. If not, it will be sold to wholesalers for liquidation markets at steep discounts of MSRP. In other markets, products are manufactured according to certain allowances which dictate how durable an item must be. It must be durable enough to survive its warranty, but shoddy enough to ensure a constant supply of customers.* We don't even think about this phenomenon anymore. We would never just dump $5,000 dollars out of our car every two years, but this is exactly what the average new car buyer does, in abstraction. And they're, we're, giddy when we do it. We get the keys from the loan handler, we pull out of the dealership, we drop a stack of benjamins out of the window, and we drive to Outback to celebrate. We're insane.
The preliminary question is: What is economical about any of this? If economy (oiko-nomos), rules for the house, are meant to describe wise models for efficiency and enjoyment, then they aren't economical at all, right? If waste is bad, if necessity is bad, if lack is bad, if degradation is bad, then the way things are being done now is insane. This must be acknowledged before moving on. We must learn to question the way we view reality because, the psychologist is very sorry to tell us, we're clinically insane.
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*An interesting exception to this that I can think of is Apple Macintosh computers, devices, and cell phones. If you take reasonable care of your iPhone, it will last so long that it is no longer able to display webpages or operate applications. Luckily, few do so, so it is commonly accepted that Apple and affiliates will stop offering support after about 5 years of the model's release. This is an impression that I have; I'm not implying that there's a policy on this. Contrast this with other brands of cell phones. Perhaps the genius of a Samsung phone is that it breaks before it loses its app support.
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