Customer Reviews

Made to Break: Technology and Obsolescence in America

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Giles Slade opens this monograph with a flurry of astounding facts: in 2004, 315 million working PCs were thrown out in North America alone, and in the following year over 100 million cell phones joined them on the trashheap. That's tons of electronic equipment-larded with non-biogradable components and toxic waste-filling up garbage dumps around the world.

What drives this rush to trash? According to Slade, it obsolescence, rather than failure. Your last computer likely didn't wear out-you junked it because a faster, lighter, and spiffier one came out.

Since the Great Depression, it's been clear that consumption, rather than production, drives the economy. With America getting more efficient at producing goods, it follows that, to precent another economic downturn, someone has to convince people to buy more goods.

Slade traces the roots of "repetitive consumption back to the beginnings of branding and packaging in the middle of the 19th century. Over time, the American ethic of thrift collapsed before social pressures to buy new, rather than save the old. The first several chapters nicely sketch the cultural changes-and their underlying economic drivers-that created the annual model change. Similarly, producers began obliquely discussing "planned obsolescene." This could mean, in the case of automobiles, that the customer would decide on his own to buy a more up-to-date car in the latest model, or, in some cases, that internal components unable to be replaced would fail after a set lifespan. "Death dating" products was a controversial practice, but many in various industries (particularly consumer electronics) supported it.

The author is at his best when he is talking about the pivotal players-such as GM's Alfred Sloan and RCA's David Sarnoff-and the modern development of planned obsolescence. He also deftly handles the transition from mechanical obsolescence to psychological obsolescence-the thing that makes some people buy a new car every two years, despite the fact that their old one still works fine. Advertising and marketing efforts convinced the public that, in almost every case, newer was better. Slade uncovers just how our disposable goods, from razors to Razrs, came to be.

The book veers slightly in a chapter on "Weaponizing Obsolescence," which details a compex scheme under which American counter-espionage agents allowed the Soviets to "steal" plans for technology that was designed to fail. While it's a compelling story-you can easily see that this is a screenplay in the making-it takes the book a little off course, and might have been better as a standlone article or book in its own right. Also, there might have been more discussion of another force driving disposable electronics: rising wages and lower costs of finished goods. The parts needed to repair your broken DVD player are probably not expensive, but buying an hour of a trained mechanic's time to repair it is likely more than the original cost. Therefore, it makes more sense to throw it out and buy anew than to get it fixed. Surely, that's got just as much to do with the rise of disposabiltiy as clever marketing.

All in all, this is a good book that raises many troubling questions, particuarly this one: what are we going to do with all of our "obsolete" trash? I recommend it for anyone who's interested in the history of technology, the economy, or consumer electronics.

This book ain't perfect. Slade neglects to carefully distinguish planned obsolescence from other sorts. And the Cold War chapter really doesn't belong in the book. But there are no conspiracy theories here; the only conspiracy in Slade's argument is the profit motive. That is, to the extent that selling products with a short lifespan is more profitable than the alternative, companies will seek to do it. Far from being a lunatic "theory," this is marketing 101. And Slade -- as Vance Packard did before him -- documents it with the words of marketers themselves.

Libertarians who believe that the market delivers only teddy bears and chocolates aren't going to like this book. But for the rest of us, it's an engaging, critical look at how we got to a place where $400 music players and fancy cell phones have become throwaway items.

I had read "Made to Break" years ago, as a teenager, and I remember it being the first nonfiction book I really liked. It opened doors for me, and I went with gusto into such classic texts as "The World Without Us" and Jared Diamond's dense-but-meaningful "Collapse." "Made to Break" got me ready for stuff like that.

It was therefore with some surprise that I found the book to be much narrower in scope than I had remembered it to be. Although it deals with broad trends of the 19th, 20th and early 21st centuries, it goes through them more as a series of museum exhibits than as flowing phenomena (as "The World Without Us" does, for instance). Readers are reintroduced to such inborn phenomena as the yearly model change, the Cold War and what it really means to own a cell phone. Even though Slade is working outward from example, rather than inward from concepts in abstraction, the text is never confusing and rarely boring.

Those who question consumer society at all, whether in whole or in part, would do well to have a look into the events that brought us to where we stand today - and what it means when something is indeed made to break.

Giles Slade makes clear in his new book, Made to Break: Technology and Obsolescence in America, that while American history is often portrayed as the history of innovation, it is also the history of waste. The book covers the development of our "throw-away ethic."

This book examines the issue of "planned obsolescence" and its role in causing Americans to buy more products than what they could have done if companies were more committed to quality. Planned obsolescence leads to a product having a "death date." Slade's book also looks at how such developments as annual models of cars led to consumers getting rid of good vehicles for more trendy replacements. Psychological obsolence leads to obsessive purchasing every bit as much as technological obsolescence. Both company advertising and consumer's love of the new have helped lead to an explosion in both sales of new products and also the amount of garbage that is disposed of every year.


Slade also points out how the huge increase in the number of electronic gadgets only leads to more and more potentially damaging waste products being disposed of. That is because electronic trash contains Permanent Biological Toxins (PBT's).


Slade's book contains a number of eye popping stories about the machinations of entrepreneurs and businessmen alike. This is a must read book.

This book fails to deliver on its potential. It is meandering, disjointed, and bland.

There is little correspondence between the ideas and concepts discussed in the interesting and well-thought-out first few chapters (planned obsolescence, superficial model year changes, advertising, and some cogent thoughts on the seemingly-unique American contributions to the idea of obsolescence) and the more concrete situations the author tries to elucidate in later chapters, making them seem more like padding than useful examples.

Examples:
(1) The discussion of the feud between Zworykin and Armstrong over FM radio is both unnecessarily long and largely irrelevant to the book's supposedly overarching ideas. The successive rises of AM, FM, and television are examples of technological obsolescence, which is neither planned nor manufactured.
(2) The chapter discussing the poisoned computer technology clandestinely funneled to the Soviet Union is completely unrelated to anything the book discusses before or after. That operation was an example of industrial sabotage, not obsolescence.
(3) Finally, while the threat in the last chapter (the toxic materials in the ever-increasing number of electronic devices being discarded every year) is real, the chapter has little to connect it to previous chapters, further contributing to the disjointedness of the book as a whole. Disappointingly, no substantive solutions to the problem are presented.

It is difficult to understand why the author includes no discussion of the evolution of the techniques of planned obsolescence in the computer industry (instead relying again on a discussion of technological obsolescence) - for example, the continuing trend of reducing a consumer's ability to fix a broken product (looking at you, Apple), leading to higher discard rates. He also overlooks the infamous planned inefficiencies in the software industry.

Additionally, the author is curiously shy about presenting specific current examples of planned or manufactured obsolescence. As a result, the book comes off as strangely toothless, particularly given the striking visual of the cover and the provocative title.

Ultimately, both the book's research and the structure of its argument leave much to be desired.

The title "Made to Break" evokes the impression that in some grand conspiracy of sorts the vast majority of products are purposely manufactured to fail, a notion that borders on an urban legend. Giles Slade, billed as an "independent scholar", seems to have started with this premise and then gone in search of support for it. He finds possible clues for variants of this premise in 1920's and 30's business writing but little evidence for any organized, widespread and purposeful manufacturing of modern products so they will break in a short period of time (page 79). Upon failing to find a strong case of what he is looking for, he dismisses arguments to the contrary and assumes it happens anyway (page 81). Failing to show planned physical obsolescence by programmed product failure, he next appeals to the concept of "planned psychological obsolescence". He then blames advertising for whipping consumers into a habitual buying frenzy, a case that has been made by many previous critics of our consumer culture. Of course, there's nothing at all new or particularly revealing in his accusation.

Only the very last 20 pages of the book (261-281) are devoted to e-waste despite the cover graphic's come on. This isn't even enough coverage to make for a good magazine article. A little planned false advertising maybe? Also interesting to note is that the cover photo shows a shipping container of computer monitors that appear ready for landfill disposal where they will proceed to poison all our water, according to Slade's book at least. Until, that is, you accidentally read the photo credit and caption (in very small print by the way) on the inside back of the jacket cover: "The monitors are bound for China where they will be recycled into televisions".

Not surprisingly, Slade is somewhat disposed toward conspiracy theories. He devotes 33 pages to interesting but largely irrelevant spy stories (pages 227-260), sixty-five percent more pages than to the e-waste issue. Of course like any good "C" theorist, he had already talked about the Masons (page 72).

So at a minimum, the title "Made to Break" is somewhat misleading, perhaps purposely so in order to increase sales of the book. But more unsettling to me is that I believe the book is less than totally honest, a pretty harsh criticism that I make only after considerable thought. Let me give only a few of many examples.

Slade makes no mention of the many authors before him, Tenner's "Why Technology Bites Back" and Doner's "The Logic of Failure" for example, who have discussed how product failure stimulates progress and invention and that the complexity of modern products makes some failures virtually inevitable. Even with the best of intentions, we simply cannot make a perfect design the first time out or even the third time out for that matter. And there is no mention whatsoever of Rathje and Murphy's well researched book "Rubbish". "Rubbish" is a wonderful account of the science of garbage, especially the landfill issues Slade so exaggerates.

Citing no evidence at all, Slade on page 37 says that the model T's reliability was greater than any non-luxury car before or since! Hmmm? Hard to believe he's not aware of the 200,000 mile Datsun pickups, Hondas, Volkswagens and Subarus, one of which I owned? He also mentions on page 67 that a 1932 article in "Fortune" magazine "marked the first time that obsolescence was used to describe the social reality that human workers could be replaced by machines". Amazingly, Slade fails to make any mention whatsoever of the English Luddites of 1811 who often destroyed textile machinery in their revolt against being displaced by these same machines. And in America, the folk song John Henry is about the contest between man and machine, among other things of course. Such misstatement of historical fact is not easy to overlook.

According to Slade, ancient Egyptians made monuments to last for generation whereas North Americans make just about everything to break. Forget that the pyramids were built by slaves for a monarchy of indescribable wealth and that their graves were filled with tons of gold artifacts (disposable?). And what about Buddhist temples that are purposely made of wood and meant to be replaced as a symbol of our impermanence? If Slade is going to invoke cross-cultural comparisons to bolster his argument he should at least be accurate and not so selective in his use of historical factoids.

And Slade has a hard time distinguishing between innovation, invention, creativity and "psychological obsolescence". On pages 54 and 55 he opines that new music makes older music psychologically obsolete, new books make older stories obsolete, new movies make older movies obsolete, etc. And, get this, the makers of movies, books and music actually plan to do this. Planned psychological obsolescence exposed! I get the impression that if Slade had his way we would all be watching 1939's "Gone with the Wind" over and over and over and over. No "One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest", no "Brazil", no "Finding Nemo" since it was clearly planned obsolescence that spawned these wasteful products. And "War and Peace" would be the last novel we ever needed. Think of all the paper we could have saved. You get the picture. I cringe to think of the world Slade would have us live in. The word troglodyte comes to mind.

But in the end does Slade eventually redeem himself with the insightfulness of his conclusion? Well, on the very last page of the book here's his thundering conclusion regarding our plight of possibly being buried in e-waste? The solution to the e-waste dilemma "must be the joint effort of informed consumers and responsive manufacturers" (page 281). Hold it, hold it! Where's my quill and parchment? I need to write that down.

The sad part is that there appears to be some interesting material in "Made to Break". Unfortunately, its veracity is not easily checked and is called into question because so many other parts of the book are factually inaccurate or misleading. It's too bad that Slade didn't use this material and his time to put together an articulate discussion of e-waste rather than producing a redundant, muddled polemic about wasteful North American consumers and sleazy, greedy manufacturers.

Slade's book is actually a disservice. A disservice because it gives the impression that our disposable culture is basically the product of bad people who "seemingly worship convenience and greed" as opposed to ancient Egyptians for whom "history reserves a privileged place because of their rich conception of the afterlife" (back cover flap). Slade's assertions and very puzzling comparison with ancient Egyptians distracts us from understanding failures as a result of system complexities and dealing with the perverse incentives in our current economic system and how we might modify them to decrease e-waste. There are much better books on this subject, McDonough and Braungart's "Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things" for example.

I bought a used copy of "Made to Break". Perhaps you should to. That way, lots of paper will be saved by preventing a second printing.

This is one of the best of the "toxic tech" books in current view, by no means completely original, and certainly not the whole story. It gets five stars for its niche. In relation to other books, for example, Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution; The Ecology of Commerce; The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals; Pandora's Poison: Chlorine, Health, and a New Environmental Strategy; any of the books on Peak Oil, and the original book on the down side of industrialization, Manufacture of Evil: Ethics, Evolution, and the Industrial System it falls to a lower level.

What is most important is the emerging literature on Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things We should be LEASING tools and appliances with short lives. The manufacturer should--as that literature recommends--be required to take back the discarded item, and plan for upgrades that do not require the discarding of the entire unit.

See also:
High Tech Trash: Digital Devices, Hidden Toxics, and Human Health
Exposed: The Toxic Chemistry of Everyday Products and What's at Stake for American Power
A Consumer's Dictionary of Household, Yard and Office Chemicals: Complete Information About Harmful and Desirable Chemicals Found in Everyday Home Products, Yard Poisons, and Office Polluters

When I started to read this book I really enjoyed it but after the first few chapters I felt that the rest was filler. I lost interest quickly but think it is worth picking up (at the library) and reading the beginning.