APPLE WILL SAVE CAPITALISM, AGAIN
14 June 2010
The iPhone 4 is going to change the world, again, apparently. The advertising slogan - 'This changes everything. Again' is not simply Apple boasting about their inventiveness, as in 'hey, look we did it, again'. It is in quite blatant non-ironic language, a statement of an acceptance of planned obsolescence, it is actually selling us the concept of planned obsolescence as a trendy status signifier. It says: 'we know that you know, that secretly you love buying the same things over and over again - it makes you feel hip, ironic, sophisticated and up to date.' The ad says 'we know you are going to enjoy parading your new phone in the full knowledge that we have just made your last iPhone obsolete, because it has also made everyone else's obsolete. Only, you are one ahead of the pack - Again '. Why, you may ask, are apple buyers not insulted by the picture of them that is being painted here?
The reasons this advertising works for the generation it is aimed at is that they have a unique relationship to the concepts of mass produced waste and recycling. They seem to believe that innovation for it's own sake, is ethically justified and politically beneficial, as long as you recycle the things that you have just thrown away. On a subconscious level, they seem to understand, something only futurologists are talking about - that recycling is good for the economy. That in fact, recycling is going to save Capitalism.
This may seem pardoxical, as it is now beyond question that Capitalism profits from it’s deliberate production of waste. For this paradoxical statement to work as a proposition a third element must be entered - Generation Y. Perhaps the original line should then read ‘The recyling behaviour of Generation Y is going to contribute to a massive leap forward in the profit margins of Capitalism through rejuvenating it to beyond the point of it's inherent systemic entropy.’ Let me explain.
Generation Y are twice the size of their predecessors GenX and have almost three times the spending power (US population stats - Gen X 43 Million, GenY 82 million). Gen Y have just very recently arrived on the scene as CEOs, homebuyers, investors and spenders. Their arrival spells, for many analysts, a new boom time which will last well into the 2030s. GenY are ‘into’ recycling and shopping and they do not see the two things as opposed or paradoxical. For them eco is part of the word economic. One need only look at their iconography: the recycling symbol is perhaps the paradigmatic emblem of Generation Y. Talking to GenY-ers, who very often cite New Age beliefs and imagery, the very idea of recycling may (for them) have some relationship to the emblem of the serpent eating it’s tail in ancient Celtic mythology, or of the infinite circle in Buddhism. Over and above this eclectic mysticism GenY see themselves as recyclers on a foundational level: their recycling habits are in many ways the ‘jiminy cricket’ good conscience of their consumption-selves. Recycling enables them to feel politically active while doing nothing more than shopping then taking half an hour a week to sort out their garbage.
Gen Y 'believe' in Recycling. Consider the following from popular GenY magazine REALL. ‘If it's true that we are all from the center of a star, every atom in each of us from the center of a star, then we're all the same thing. Even a coke machine or a cigarette butt in the street in Brixton, is made out of atoms that came from a star… they have all recycled thousands of times, as have you and I. We are the things we consume.’
Taking this credo to it's conclusion - Imagine if you will a utopian recycling city. The people who work in the malls - shop in the malls, and the waste they produce is recycled to make the products that are sold in the malls - and entirely self-enclosed world in which even waste is turned into worth.
What is the problem with this picture? Stasis. If an economy doesn’t grow, it dies. How does it grow? It has to have higher demand for commodities, hence more commodities, hence greater waste. This creates a problem which posits ecology and consumerism as irreconcilable. Put quite simply – Growth is caused by waste and debt, it is people spending more money than they have and using more resources than they have before. (To boost consumption, and ideal hypothetical culture would take all of it’s possessions at cyclic periods, and throw them into a pit and burn them. The best way to achieve this, as Orwell and Benjamin both stated, would be to live under a state of war, but of course, as close as we are to this, this would be unacceptable to today’s consumer). So we inhabit the contradiction - The ecologists want us to consume less, and the retailers want us to consume more at the expense of ecology. Gen Y recycling is the third way.
Paradoxical as it may seem recycling has proven a boon to consumption in existent retail outlets. Two malls in Holland, with extensive recycling facilities (including electronics bins, furniture drop-off zones etc) have demonstrated increased consumption as a result of their green policy. Furthermore psychographic studies on a sample group of C12 consumers (Mackenzie 2009), has shown that increased recycling leads to heightened consumption. The reason?
Rather than fixing or making do – recycling is an active destruction of commodities, which nonetheless has a positive ethic attached to it – the consumer can feel they are ‘doing good for the world’ by disposing of out of date equipment, fashions etc ‘so that other people less fortunate can use them’ or ‘so that the materials can be broken down and re-used’. The ‘do-good’ factor allows the consumer to ‘feel-good’ about themselves which then allows them to ‘treat-themselves’ to further new commodities. Furthermore the idea that new products are ‘more energy efficient’ or ‘made from recycled materials’ makes the purchase of new commodities even more attractive, makes consumption in fact an ethical positive. (Irrespective of what the real eco-implications of recycling on such a vast scale are – these facts being hard to access and also of little interest to consumers). To paraphrase Brave New World -
‘Consume today – use it up and throw it away.’ Again.
This is not fiction however, the merging of planned obsolescence and recycling is already well underway. Retailers in Germany are now taking note of these stats and developing comfortable drive in recycling zones as a major part of their restructured shopping centres, not as an afterthought stuck on the edge of the car park ( a phenomenon which still blights so many British malls). In Stuttgart, an innovative arrangement has seen the privatised formerly local council waste facilities relocating and working in tandem with a regional mall – the result was an almost total recycling of waste - including food for composting, recycling of paper, bottles, cans, plastic packaging, electronics, mobile phones, laptops etc – and all of this at a drive-in point at the end the Mall. The ‘re-life-zone’ is ultra modern, hi-tech (and apparently odour free) and has turned recycling into a sociable, fun, activity as opposed to a burdensome obligation, or an activity for penitents – as it is often seen in the UK.
Since the instigation of the mobile-phone-bin, sales from the adjoining mobile phone retailer showed an 18% increase. An innovative venture with a certain multi-national clothing manufacturer ( who we shall call 'G') has also shown how profits can be increased through recycling. In 2009, G initiated it’s ‘colour bins’, whereby consumers could gain loyalty card points by recycling specific coloured clothing. Four points for yellow, three for orange etc. By cleverly setting the colour point scale G increased the discarding and recycling of the preceding seasons colours, encouraging and rewarding consumers for disposing of their wardrobe quarterly. Thus if last seasons colour was Cerise, then maximum points were awarded for the cerise bins. This has proved so successful that plans are afoot to awarding even higher points for the discarding of ‘this seasons’ colours.
As for Apple, there is now iPhone exchange, which turns the trading in of certain materials, deemed by Californian law to be toxic waste, into an active and positive eco-experience. (Even the advertising round the iPhone 4 seems to have been recycled from past ads - a revolution in communication. Again.)
Between mall recycling and recyclable phones such 'innovations' have provided solutions to the old the conflict between retailers and ecologists - A way past the old ethos of ‘waste not, want not’ towards ‘waste and want’. Now consumers can have their cake and eat it too, then recycle it and eat it all over. Again.
Wait, doesn't that sound like something thats not actually cake?
EWAN MORRISON 2010
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