On one level, Giles Slade’s new book,
Made to Break: Technology and Obsolescence in
America, can be read as the played-straight history of
the demise of things like the paper shirt front, tailfins on cars,
and the pinball machine. Slade ranges considerably wider than his
title lets on, however, and raises fundamental questions about the
American culture of consumption.
The book is in large
part a fascinating intellectual history of how marketers demolished
the American tradition of thrift. Henry Ford, for instance, made
his name by designing a rustic yet dependable car that would just
about last forever. Then he was almost unmade when General Motors
found that a little style went a long way in luring customers to
its showrooms. The truly brilliant discovery was that by updating
the style, if not the substance, of its cars
every year, GM could create obsolescence on
demand and sell a never-ending stream of cars.
With that,
America was off to the races. In 1958, obsolescence pundit Brooks
Stevens declaimed, “We make good products, we induce people
to buy them, and then next year we deliberately introduce something
that will make those products old-fashioned, out of date, obsolete.
We do that for the soundest reason: to make money.”
One of the best chapters in the book is a madcap,
revisionist-history riff on the Cold War arms race as the ultimate
in perpetual obsolescence — or, as Eisenhower put it,
“the never-ending replacement of older weapons with new
ones.” (Slade also tells the story of what may be
history’s leading example of deliberately engineered
technological failure: how, in a stratagem worth of James
Bond’s Q, the CIA surreptitiously passed off some bad
microchips to the Soviets and blew a Siberian gas-pipeline project
sky-high.)
Once you read Made to
Break, it’s hard not to notice — more often
than you’d like — the feeling that Brooks Stevens
called “the desire to own something a little newer, a little
better, a little sooner than is necessary.”
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline How to be #1 in the world and still be a loser.
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