At the IFA consumer electronics show in Berlin last week, Panasonic launched a new TV that can analyse the light conditions in your living room and adapt its video signal to match. Meanwhile in New York, since 31 August queues have been forming outside Apple’s Fifth Avenue store for the new iPhone 6, even though it isn’t released for another two weeks. O2’s Refresh contract promises that you can “change phones as often as phones change”, while T-Mobile’s JUMP! (“just upgrade my phone”) package spells out the agony of being tied to last year’s model: “You’ve served your last two-year sentence.” Sign up, sign up to the upgrade culture.
There is no denying that the upgrade cycle has got shorter. A survey by an online retailer this year found that under-25s felt smartphones needed replacing after a mere 11 months; it takes some of us that long to understand how to use them. Even large items like TVs, which hitherto were assumed to last for at least seven years, have now been swept up into the upgrade phenomenon. Each autumn the major electronics manufacturers release newer models that purport to render older ones if not redundant then somehow lacking.
Of course, you will say, only brainwashed sheep are susceptible. But this ignores the fact that, after only a few years, devices become supposedly obsolete: my printer is “no longer supported” – this makes me feel that it’s not just the machine that is vulnerable but me too. Or they break down and the repair costs more than replacing them.
The compulsion to trade in perfectly effective devices for the latest enhanced version afflicts even sensible, thinking individuals. Resistance has come to seem slightly perverse. When the contract for my smartphone recently came to an end and I opted to keep it and pay much less monthly, my mobile provider was frankly mystified.
I may be content with my ancient phone but I don’t, alas, exist on some higher plane: I’m as susceptible to the titillation of “new season” or “just in” as the next person. How could it be otherwise? Material objects are not only freighted with personal and cultural meaning but also define us: an email is “Sent from my iPad”, rather than the sender. Our longings attach themselves to things: by upgrading our gadgets, gizmos and garb we feel in some sense that we’re upgrading ourselves. Conversely, those who resist – unless emboldened by ideological reasoning – are at risk of FOLLOH: fear of looking like old hat. As for the manufacturers, they have to make us fall in love with an object but also be willing to ditch it and buy another. The solution? Tie us to a brand and then ply us with upgrades. Since there are now more mobiles than people in the UK, upgrade culture must persuade us that, even if we hadn’t realised it, we have a deep desire for a newer version of what we already possess. What’s more, we want it now. This plays on our most infantile inability to delay gratification – no wonder it’s so irresistible.
There is, of course, a lie implicit in the upgrade: it sells itself as the definitive product, the ultimate satisfier of needs, to conceal its own transience. To admit that it will soon be superseded would be to renounce its own raison d’être, to pulverise its own libidinous power, to defetishise itself – which is not something you expect a fetish to do.
Yet, apart from the temporary state of fulfilment achieved at the moment of purchase, upgrade culture leaves us in – indeed encourages – an almost permanent state of dissatisfaction: there will always be something newer and better around the corner.
Since economic growth depends on novelty, it also requires us to discard things. So we dispatch our detritus to developing countries – this counts as recycling – where our e-waste is dismantled and incinerated, releasing toxins into the atmosphere. Of course the whole cycle is deeply unsustainable, using up valuable raw materials like copper and tin, and damaging people’s health and the environment in the process. Climate change will inevitably put an end to it, if human beings haven’t first. Eventually we’ll have to remember how to repair and retain, even if we have to call things retro in order to keep loving them.
In the meantime I can suggest a low-tech alternative (a lowgrade?) to a Panasonic TV that adjusts to your living room light. It’s called a dimmer switch.
Twitter: @AnneKarpf
