Out in Paperback / Made to Break

Made to Break -- Technology and Obsolescence in America by Giles Slade, Harvard '06 paperback, $27.95, 336 pages, ISBN #0-674-02203-3. Index, source notes, no bibliography or illustrations.

I grew up in a New England household whose guiding adage was, "Use it up, wear it out. Make do, or do without." Yet traveling on a parallel track and strengthening all the time was the doctrine of planned obsolescence, that it's OK, even desirable, for manufactured goods to be thrown away before they break. The legacy of that notion, which independent scholar Giles Slade tells us is nearly a century old, is that some 90 per cent of the 315 million still-usable personal computers discarded in North America in 2004 were trashed and that 100 million cell phones were tossed in 2005.

By the early 1920s, more than half the automobiles manufactured in America were Henry Ford's Model Ts, which he said customers "could have in any color, as long as it was black." Alfred P. Sloan's General Motors broke Ford's stranglehold by introducing annual styling changes, introducing the notion that a car was a reflection of its owner. As one's wealth increased, one could reflect burgeoning prosperity with a larger, more luxurious model.

Slade walks us through how planned obsolescence weathered the Depression and war years, its effect on radio and TV, and the advent of transistors and computer chips. Finally, he turns to what one reviewer calls "the veritable mushroom cloud of electronic waste threatening our planet" and what to do about it.