“Why is your shake machine never working?”
The lady screams this into the drive-thru speaker through the open driver side window of her minivan with jarring aggression. It was as if she truly believed this was a conspiracy against her specifically and the injustice was simply too much for her to take lying down. She wanted an answer. Demanded an answer.
And I had one: planned obsolescence.
Things aren’t built to last, they’re built so that they require constant maintenance. New parts, constant repairs. In other words, because: jobs.
They’re built so that after long enough (but no longer) they have broken often enough or severely enough that you feel compelled to upgrade to the brand spanking new version or model. So the cycle continues.
This is what they call built-in or planned obsolescence. And even when things would last, like your phone or your laptop, you’re meant to see them as obsolete, forced to experience them as obsolete. This is perceived obsolescence.
Because: jobs. Because: its good for the fucking economy. I mean, hell, if things worked well and endured, that would certainly be bad for business.
We live in a disposable society. They need you to keep buying, buying, buying, spending money on maintenance and ultimately throwing away the old and buying anew, and so the garbage keeps piling up. And we feel like we’re making a difference when we throw our waste away in trash cans. We feel righteous in our act of frowning, shaking our heads at those who just toss trash out their windows and onto the streets, conveniently blind to the fact that the trash we place in the ordained receptacles doesn’t just magically vanish into thin air. It’s just a longer journey to littering, that’s all. It’s just a more complex way of being a litterbug. Factor in the gas required to pick up the trash and dispose of it elsewhere, it might be better for the environment to just toss it out the window.
That trash can, it isn’t some black hole. The garbage man doesn’t deliver our trash to a rocket that’s then shot at the sun, straight into the heart of our big, blazing incinerator in the sky. No, all our shit goes somewhere, its just that its somewhere out of sight, out of mind, and that’s good enough for us. We don’t want to make a difference so much as we need to feel we are doing so. So we don’t litter, we give it to them to litter for us in areas designated for that purpose. So we can keep all our litter in one place. So we have our shit together, keep all our litter in one wastebasket. Specifically, it’s all delivered unto landfills or dumped into our oceans, where they collect into loosely-concentrated vortices of trash like Great Pacific garbage patch.
And it doesn’t stop there. We don’t just litter the sea and soil. Wherever we go, there we are, with our ever-growing piles of shit. It follows us to the sky and beyond.
While I want us to migrate from our pale blue and beautiful nest of a planet and establish our presence in space, to colonize other planets, moons and asteroids, I would would prefer we don’t extend to the cosmos at large the kind of selfish, shortsighted behavior that’s led us to polluting the earth. Sad truth is, we’re actually off to a great fucking start.
Since the launch of Sputnik in 1957, we’ve literally upped our game when it comes to littering. A cocoon of trash now encircles the earth, an artificial Terran aura composed of screws, lens caps and paint chips, old satellites and rocket stages. NASA and the Air Force has to keep track of this shell of litter around our little island earth to determine safe launch windows. It has long been predicted that collisions between two such objects could trigger a chain reaction known as the Kessler Syndrome that could destroy satellites currently in use and which we rely upon quite heavily, pose a potential physical danger to both astronauts and people on the ground and create a global shield composed of debris so small our instruments would be incapable of detecting their presence. Space missions would become impossible. We would be bound to the planet.
If the human species were to vanish off the face of the earth today, how long until the trash on our land and in our oceans decompose, until the space junk burns up in our atmosphere or breaks ground and succumbs to the elements?
If the human species keeps chugging along at its ever-increasing rate, how long until we have actual continents of trash? How long until earth herself is but a yolk cushioned by her atmosphere, encapsulated by a thick shell of space waste?
Transmissions to Earth 