Isn't 99.99% of growth and change in the present stage of capitalism unnecessary, only selling disposable goods to disposable people who are compelled to work harder to buy more disposable goods, simply because fixing things doesn't make profits?
E.g., Joe Nocera writes:
<blockquote>[C]ustomer support is expensive for gadget makers. ''A phone call costs a company 75 cents a minute,'' said the writer and technology investor Andrew Kessler. ''An hour call is $45.'' As prices have dropped sharply for computers and other digital devices, keeping those phone calls to a minimum has become supremely important to consumer electronics companies that want to maintain their margins and profitability.
That's why all the big tech companies try to force customers to use their Web sites to figure out problems themselves. It's why so many of them bury the customer support phone number. And it's also why, when you do call, companies like Dell teach its support staff to diagnose computer problems over the phone, and then talk you through some fairly complicated repairs. With its machines so inexpensive, Dell simply can't afford to allow too many customers to ship the computer back to the company to be fixed.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Steven Williams, a lawyer who brought a class-action suit against Apple a few years ago over the failed battery problem, told me that he was amazed to discover, as the litigation began, that Apple seemed to feel, as he put it, ''that everyone knew iPods were only good for a year or two.'' Thanks in part to the lawsuit, the battery issue is one of the few Apple will now deal with: if your iPod dies because of the battery you can send it back and get a new one for a mere $65.95, plus tax. Of course, you then lose all your music.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
A final note: You may have noticed there is no Apple spokesman defending the iPod or Apple's customer support in this column. When I called Apple, wanting to know, among other things, how long Apple believes an iPod should last, I got a nice young woman from the P.R. department. She said she'd try to find someone at the company to talk to me. That was on Wednesday.
I'm still waiting. ("Good Luck With That Broken iPod," New York Times 4 February 2006)</blockquote>
In this context, a certain conservative sensibility of being content with things that work and making improvements on them only when we want, which has become alien to modern conservatism (which is merely a variety of liberalism) a long time ago, is not just environmentally sensible but a revolutionary defiance of the status quo.
Yoshie Furuhashi <http://montages.blogspot.com> <http://monthlyreview.org> <http://mrzine.org>