Great post, this puts into words things that I’ve been mulling over in my head for about a year now. Also: new fear unlocked, buying a new dishwasher.
Same, I’ve been thinking a lot about perverse incentives created by the need for constant growth. The article does such a great job illustrating how capitalism creates increasingly unusable products fuelled by phenomenal waste of resources.
That’s possibly the greatest extraction of capitalism: directing production into the pointless and harmful. Income inequality is large, war and coercion unfathomably cruel, but forcing production to be directed away from what is needed is a theft from every person that rarely gets counted. Imagine what could be done if 50% of production was actually directed for human need. Imagine the ability to be proud of your labor because you know it helps people. Imagine solving world hunger and poverty and seeing the real progress that is possible but held back by the anarchy of bourgeois production.
indeed
I have to buy a new refrigerator soon and I swear if I can’t find one without software…
