planned obsolescence
They finally got me. Between high-quality photo bursts, countless apps that never ended up being useful for more than a few seconds, and crucially, 33 GB of music that I own, my 64GB iPhone 8 Plus ran out of space. The phone’s internal response to this was to fight like hell as if it’d just been read it its last rites, and begin deleting all of the apps that I *do* find useful, banking and navigation and transit apps that I use every day, without first asking me. A warning shot of sorts. Imagine that for a second, a phone on its deathbed, tucked into a scratchy hospital blanket in a harshly lit room, about to be flushed to Hell where it belongs, me crying at bedside and thinking about all the good times we shared together, like all those times when I had you in my pocket and how dumb it made me feel. Wait that was every day. Or when I frantically refreshed Instagram to see who was watching my story, or when I frantically refreshed Twitter to make sure whatever dumb joke I wrote four minutes ago didn’t land with a thud, or when I checked my email on a Sunday afternoon for reasons on which I’m not entirely clear. Or when I did all of this after midnight on a weeknight and then went to bed but didn’t sleep because I had residual blue phone light coursing through my eyeballs. We love our screens don’t we folks. And when they die after a couple of years, just as the technology companies want them to, we upgrade to shiny new ones. We now treat phones like dogs in that when one dies there’s a grieving process and then you start looking online for the next one that best fits your personality, then you make the trip to the phone store or order online and post a video of you unboxing it on Instagram and then you hold onto it until it dies too. In economic terms this is called planned obsolescence—the phones not the dogs obviously, with dogs that’s just called the natural life expectancy—and it’s a huge problem birthed by greedy tech companies who manufacture addictive, expensive yet ultimately mostly disposable devices that probably end up in landfills because up until recently it wasn’t super clear how to recycle them or if they could even be recycled and even now that part still has to be difficult for some people. The phone store usually takes your old phone but who knows what they actually end up doing with it. Companies can kind of tell their customers they’re doing a good thing and then just not do it after all—there are places you can do it like Best Buy but who even knows where it goes once you drop it in that bin by the door. Here in Philadelphia we burn 50% of the shit people recycle and we could be inhaling fumes from old iPhones and greasy pizza boxes and giving kids in poorer communities respiratory diseases as I type. Sounds about right actually.
When I lived in Orlando I had a job at an ultra lounge as a barback where I didn’t make very much money and worked very late nights and had to deal with the worst of the worst and I drank way too much while I worked and also whenever I wasn’t at work for that matter. I witnessed fights in the club, men punching women, overserved kids falling off our upstairs alley entrance and cracking their heads open on the pavement below, a man with a gun being arrested at the bottom of our stairs. These people drank too much and then they threw up on our floors in front of the bar so they could drink more and we wouldn’t see the vomit until we closed because of how dim the lighting was. Sometimes they would puke in our urinals. They would snort cocaine in our bathrooms and spill cranberry juice on our white couches. I would take the bus downtown for almost an hour from my apartment five nights a week, then I would get done with work at 3 a.m., and wasted, ride my bike home, sometimes with a slice of pizza in one hand from one of the windows that stayed open after all the bars closed to serve people like me. Once I dropped a slice cheese-side down about 30 seconds after I started to ride and I picked it up, blew as much dirt off as I could and still ate it. This was not a bright time in my life to say the least. But I liked riding my bike. There was something about the air that time of night, the quiet warmth of it. One season I got a second job at one of those seasonal Halloween stores that pop up in vacant strip malls this time of year. The pay was comically low and I had to listen to the same ten Halloween songs on a loop as I stocked and restocked sexy pirate costumes and at one point I even had to stand on the highway outside in one of those inflatable pumpkin suits in the year-round central Florida heat and wave at cars to make sure they knew we were there and ready to sell them cheap witch hats and Barack Obama masks and ceramic pumpkins that would break if you looked at them wrong. But I needed the money so I went. It was a little closer to my place in Altamonte Springs so I could bike there. I had an 80GB iPod full of music to listen to on the ride and I’m relatively certain I didn’t even have a cell phone yet, or at least not a smartphone. Some of you might be too young to remember this but when smartphones were first being manufactured they were, to many, luxury items. Being a poor guy I knew they weren’t for me and honestly I didn’t even want one because the idea of being constantly available to everyone didn’t appeal to me. Funny isn’t it. I’d gotten the iPod as a gift from my old bosses from the ice cream shop in my hometown, one of many things they’d done for me in my time there that they didn’t have to do. They also lent me money to buy a car, paid for a new transmission when the old one in said car blew, and paid me enough at my foodservice job to live alone in my own apartment, which I think is stuff I’d maybe mentioned in the past so sorry for repeating myself. It’s just that they asked me to pay it forward and that was so nice and I hope one day I can. Back to the iPod. I was riding my bike to work at that Halloween store one day and a car exiting a parking lot didn’t see me and hit me. My body flew up onto the hood and fell back into the road. I broke my left kneecap in the accident which is something I’ve written about before I think but more importantly I broke my iPod in the collision and could never afford to replace it on account of it being a gift and also the two bad jobs. To this day it’s the only piece of technology I can think of that has legitimately brought me more joy than pain as an adult. When you’re mostly alone at the outset of adulthood music can be a life saver.
iPods stayed around for a few years after that, getting smaller and cheaper, which never appealed to me because I’d amassed such a large MP3 library from buying new and used CDs and ripping them, vinyl download codes, downloading free files from record label websites and yes I’ll admit it a lot of illegal downloading from one of my favorite labels Mediafire Records. Years of “work” went into my old iPod, I used it constantly, on the bus, on my bike, in the car, and yes, on my bike but I swear that’s not why I got hit. And stupidly, my only backup of all this music was on my desktop computer which of course also eventually stopped working. I couldn’t tell you why I didn’t do a better job protecting my music that I cared about so much. Maybe it’s because I was beginning to see it as disposable as the tech itself. Who’s to say. I just thought it would always be there until it wasn’t.
I’m eligible for a phone upgrade and could in theory get a new phone with more storage space and load my MP3s onto that but really other than the whole running out of space thing there really isn’t anything wrong with my current phone, plus it would cost me a couple hundred bucks upfront for the upgrade which when you live paycheck to paycheck and prefer to spend what little money you have on other more fruitful things and more enriching experiences is something to always consider. I want to say I envy y’all who don’t have to worry about that but I’m not sure I do anymore. What’s the point. So I’ve been using Spotify in the interim and to say it hollows out the music listening experience I grew to love as a teen and young adult would be an understatement. It’s bad enough that the majority of the money for these streaming platforms is being held hostage by the tech companies that built them. From a listening standpoint, in theory, this should be great, access to all the music you’d ever want to hear with no downloading, no fuss, no work other than a type into a search bar. But that’s not what I do and I have a feeling that’s not what a lot of people do either. What we do instead is listen to a dozen or so albums over and over again while the service “curates” playlists and radio stations and shows us other things we may like based on the information they are collecting from us. So far, the artist radio stations seem to play the exact same songs in the exact same order, nerfing any sense of discovery. The platform allows users to create their own playlists but with the aforementioned limitations of listening habits it’s lost its luster. There’s no attention paid to sequencing, theme, quiet vs. loud, or anything that ever went into making a mixtape or CD. I’ve never felt so out of the loop before and so unmotivated to do the work to return to the loop. Not a great feeling. Given all the real problems in the world so many disadvantaged people are currently facing it’s certainly not much. But it feels like the most formative time of my life, my entire identity really, is over and I just have to coast now until I stop breathing. Damn that shit really happened just now. I better go. Talk soon.