How long do you think a wardrobe should last? According to one of my teenagers, six years is a good run. Six years? Some of the wardrobes I was brought up with were over 200 years old, and I’m not talking stately homes, just old family wardrobes. According to my kids ‘only Narnia has wardrobes that old.’
Now it could be that I’ve moved from Europe to Australia, and things tend to be younger here. But no-one past the age of 30 would doubt humans have recently developed a cultural expectation of extreme impermanence – from Twitter to global politics. Where does it come from? The digital age where pixels flash?
No. It’s more centred around physical items. One particular consumable has pivotal control over consumer conditioning, lifespan expectations and (funnily enough) also the flow of pixels. The mobile phone.
A phone used to sit in the corner for 20, 30 years. Even when they went mobile, initially they were designed to last, provided you didn’t drop them down a well. A decade no problem. Then Apple discovered the joy of fragility.
Sleek, desirable, and delicate. And with such a princess you wouldn’t expect the new model to use the same charger, would you? Or the case. Or the apps. Programs like Norton pave the path of applications with a set lifespan. It makes sense: viruses change all the time, so should your antivirus, right? Desktop computers dwindle in number compared to laptops, because like the phone, no one wants to be tied down to use their computer. But laptops are fragile. The proportion of income spent on information technology rises with each year, and we barely notice the creep. The charisma of the smartphone seduces computer technology and the union produces rapid generations of indecisive half-breeds of ipads, tablets and overgrown phones, each one declaring itself the new way-to-be. Many users ditch the computer altogether and are smartphone-dependent for all internet needs.
Each time our smartphones magically ‘expire’ at the end of their contract period, we have to move all our contacts, our intimate conversations, our life, to the new device. It’s like moving home. You’re fond of it but it’s done its job, life goes on, you’ve been posted elsewhere. We leave a trail of used devices behind us like Hansel. For many, their phones hold ‘everything’, and we’re conditioned into believing in the natural order of decay from the inside out, from one of the items most central to our lives.
It is not strange then that a physical storage device like a wardrobe should be well and truly past its best in six years. What are clothes compared to your whole online life and contacts, after all? This disposability is quite apart from the whole issue of the seemingly insatiable craving for the latest everything – which is hardly a new human phenomenon but is being exploited to the max by the technology industry. Some of my kids have the odd obsession of going through the tins and boxes in the kitchen and checking the ‘best before’ dates on everything. If a carton of yoghurt has yesterday’s date on it, it’s virtually impossible to stop them disposing of it like toxic waste, at arm’s length. The notion that perhaps there are variables in the perishability of yoghurt, or that the manufacturers are not gifted with omniscient foresight, or that your nose and eyes might give you clues as to the health of the yoghurt in your fridge more immediate than the stamped date, is impossible to comprehend. Its viability has imploded as surely as a neutron star.
This mindset has much greater implications than simply on the consumer level. Everything is disposable. No-one even expects politicians to stick to the policies they made or promised – besides, who would remember anything from that long ago? Investment in infrastructure is pushed down the list of priorities, on national and corporate levels. Technology moves so fast that it’s almost impossible for a company to neither limp along with antiquated tools nor stagger under the financial and intellectual burden of constant updates. One of the few sectors engaged in empire-building is… information technology.
‘Memento mori’ and Ozymandias are all well, but this approaches insanity. The implications of this global conditioning are much more profound than would be apparent from first glance, and it grows by the day. It harmonizes with the flash-hysteria of peripheral news items, with the cult of celebrity, with the ever-shortening timelapses before a movie is ‘remade’. The new keeping-up-with-the-Joneses is how up-to-date politically ‘correct’ you can be, depending on what is in fashion, not on what makes sense or follows any logic. Opinions and views become some of the most disposable items, as well as the most incendiary.
What is the remedy? What the world looks like to teenagers and kids who have known nothing but this transitory existence, one can only guess at, but from the perception that clothes storage over a decade old is so unimaginable as to be relegated to the world of C.S. Lewis, we can start to glimpse the maelstrom of transience. The effects of the conditioning on economics, ecology and sustainability, business interactions, and social attitudes are relatively easy to track. The deeper impact on self-perception and sense of identity is less immediately visible. With such shadowy impermanence of the ego, entirely malleable according to what digital form it takes, where does the future of the modern human psyche lie?
Now it could be that I’ve moved from Europe to Australia, and things tend to be younger here. But no-one past the age of 30 would doubt humans have recently developed a cultural expectation of extreme impermanence – from Twitter to global politics. Where does it come from? The digital age where pixels flash?
No. It’s more centred around physical items. One particular consumable has pivotal control over consumer conditioning, lifespan expectations and (funnily enough) also the flow of pixels. The mobile phone.
A phone used to sit in the corner for 20, 30 years. Even when they went mobile, initially they were designed to last, provided you didn’t drop them down a well. A decade no problem. Then Apple discovered the joy of fragility.
Sleek, desirable, and delicate. And with such a princess you wouldn’t expect the new model to use the same charger, would you? Or the case. Or the apps. Programs like Norton pave the path of applications with a set lifespan. It makes sense: viruses change all the time, so should your antivirus, right? Desktop computers dwindle in number compared to laptops, because like the phone, no one wants to be tied down to use their computer. But laptops are fragile. The proportion of income spent on information technology rises with each year, and we barely notice the creep. The charisma of the smartphone seduces computer technology and the union produces rapid generations of indecisive half-breeds of ipads, tablets and overgrown phones, each one declaring itself the new way-to-be. Many users ditch the computer altogether and are smartphone-dependent for all internet needs.
Each time our smartphones magically ‘expire’ at the end of their contract period, we have to move all our contacts, our intimate conversations, our life, to the new device. It’s like moving home. You’re fond of it but it’s done its job, life goes on, you’ve been posted elsewhere. We leave a trail of used devices behind us like Hansel. For many, their phones hold ‘everything’, and we’re conditioned into believing in the natural order of decay from the inside out, from one of the items most central to our lives.
It is not strange then that a physical storage device like a wardrobe should be well and truly past its best in six years. What are clothes compared to your whole online life and contacts, after all? This disposability is quite apart from the whole issue of the seemingly insatiable craving for the latest everything – which is hardly a new human phenomenon but is being exploited to the max by the technology industry. Some of my kids have the odd obsession of going through the tins and boxes in the kitchen and checking the ‘best before’ dates on everything. If a carton of yoghurt has yesterday’s date on it, it’s virtually impossible to stop them disposing of it like toxic waste, at arm’s length. The notion that perhaps there are variables in the perishability of yoghurt, or that the manufacturers are not gifted with omniscient foresight, or that your nose and eyes might give you clues as to the health of the yoghurt in your fridge more immediate than the stamped date, is impossible to comprehend. Its viability has imploded as surely as a neutron star.
This mindset has much greater implications than simply on the consumer level. Everything is disposable. No-one even expects politicians to stick to the policies they made or promised – besides, who would remember anything from that long ago? Investment in infrastructure is pushed down the list of priorities, on national and corporate levels. Technology moves so fast that it’s almost impossible for a company to neither limp along with antiquated tools nor stagger under the financial and intellectual burden of constant updates. One of the few sectors engaged in empire-building is… information technology.
‘Memento mori’ and Ozymandias are all well, but this approaches insanity. The implications of this global conditioning are much more profound than would be apparent from first glance, and it grows by the day. It harmonizes with the flash-hysteria of peripheral news items, with the cult of celebrity, with the ever-shortening timelapses before a movie is ‘remade’. The new keeping-up-with-the-Joneses is how up-to-date politically ‘correct’ you can be, depending on what is in fashion, not on what makes sense or follows any logic. Opinions and views become some of the most disposable items, as well as the most incendiary.
What is the remedy? What the world looks like to teenagers and kids who have known nothing but this transitory existence, one can only guess at, but from the perception that clothes storage over a decade old is so unimaginable as to be relegated to the world of C.S. Lewis, we can start to glimpse the maelstrom of transience. The effects of the conditioning on economics, ecology and sustainability, business interactions, and social attitudes are relatively easy to track. The deeper impact on self-perception and sense of identity is less immediately visible. With such shadowy impermanence of the ego, entirely malleable according to what digital form it takes, where does the future of the modern human psyche lie?