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Saving the Suburbs
There’s a section of a John Mayer interview in the offbeat documentary California Typewriter where the guitarist muses on his philosophy towards technology in his day to day life. “I think the best way to live is to incorporate the best of the last hundred years into a hybrid that works.” Specifically, in regard to why he uses typewriters, he says: “I’m not using it because it’s hip. It’s the best version of the idea that’s come around.” It’s an approach worth considering in an age where thousand dollar iPhones are designed to slow down and fail a few years after you buy them in order to make room in your pocket for the next cycle, a new generation of smart phone technology that may feature only marginal or skin deep upgrades over the old phone, but is marketed with such breathless awe that you’d think a new printing press was being invented every other financial quarter.
A similar dynamic exists in the auto industry. Though the planned obsolescence here is a little more diffused, at the end of the day firms need to sell new cars to people with perfectly good cars every year in order to stay viable. In America and, indeed, in a global market that still finds itself under significant American influence, the efficacy of the old adage “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” will always run up against the fact that there’s no profit to be had from not fixing something, no matter how not broke it may be. And so we end up…
