Someone else recently claimed that the climate catastrophe is actually the result of “consumerism.” People always want the newest phone, they complained.

But when you need a smartphone to access services as basic as “not peeing yourself in public,” it’s easier to see how thin this claim is.

Not only do people need to purchase phones to survive daily life, but they need to frequently replace them—precisely because phones (and most every other product in our lives) are intentionally designed to wear our quickly, or otherwise stop working, to force us to frequently replace them.

I’ve written another thread on product crippling and planned obsolescence as examples of Veblen’s concept of “industrial sabotage,” so I won’t belabor the point here again. But suffice it to say: this is not a personal choice or preference. When our phones stop working, when our clothes fall apart, we have to buy new ones, and capitalists profit.

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https://uxplanet.org/planned-obsolescence-dark-truth-of-the-smartphone-industry-c9131c5ff7c4

#PlannedObsolescence #ProductCrippling #IndustrialSabotage #ThorsteinVeblen