The Gentle Violence of Obsolescence Vs the Thingness of Stuff (Part One)

Nostalgia is often described as a feeling, which flatters it enormously. Feelings are flighty. They arrive late, leave early, and can usually be distracted with a cup of tea. Nostalgia, when it really gets going, behaves nothing like this. It lingers. It settles in. It rearranges the furniture. It sends otherwise reasonable adults searching for obsolete hardware at indecent hours, convinced that this time the missing piece will fall into place.

This is not a mood swing. It is what happens when pressure builds.

That pressure has a name, and it is not particularly romantic: built in obsolescence.

Built in obsolescence is often discussed as a technical or economic problem in the tones reserved for dull inevitabilities.

Of course things break.

Of course software moves on.

Of course spare parts are discontinued.

Of course you need a new one.

Progress. 

Apparently.

The story is familiar enough to feel almost dull, which is precisely the point. Obsolescence works best when it looks like maintenance rather than aggression. The framing is too tidy, which should make us suspicious.

What interests me is not the engineering, but the experience.

Because built in obsolescence is not just a strategy for selling replacements. It is a temporal discipline. It governs how long things are allowed to remain present, useful, or intelligible. It decides when an object is permitted to persist and when it must be declared past, regardless of its actual condition.

In that sense, obsolescence is not about things breaking. It is about time being enforced.

White goods are the most obvious place to start because they are honest in their dishonesty. A washing machine, a fridge, a boiler no longer pretend to be lifelong companions. Their mortality is priced in. Warranty periods replace durability. Repair becomes either impossible or economically irrational. You are not expected to maintain the object. You are expected to replace it.

In a world without planned obsolescence, objects age. They wear out gradually. They gather dents, scratches, small indignities. They remain usable while becoming imperfect. Memory and material life erode together, at roughly the same pace.

Built in obsolescence does not allow for that kind of dignity.

The object does not age with you. It does not gather patina or narrative weight. It jumps directly from “working” to “nonviable.” One day it is present; the next day it is administratively dead.

This produces a peculiar inversion. The middle state is removed. There is no lingering. No gradual withdrawal. The thing does not become obsolete because it no longer functions, but because it no longer fits the timetable.

This is not decay. It is eviction.

And it performs a neat little magic trick while it does it: it presents itself as inevitability. There is no alternative. This is just how things are now. Inevitability, though, is another kind of myth, a story that disguises choice as nature. (Nothing personal. Just policy. Just the calendar. Just the quiet little boot.)

This is where nostalgia enters, not with a sigh, but with a clipboard.

Nostalgia, in this context, is not a longing for golden afternoons or simpler times. It is irritation at being told something is finished when it plainly is not. A washing machine that breaks after twenty years produces irritation and maybe a swear word. A washing machine that cannot be repaired produces something closer to resentment.

The object has not failed.

The system has.

Digital media make this clearer because they lack physical alibis.

A ROM does not rot.

Archived software does not fade.

The code remains perfectly intact, waiting, capable of running forever.

Nothing has happened to the thing itself.

Everything has happened around it. Formats change. Operating systems update. Hardware architectures move on. Drivers vanish. Licences expire. Compatibility is withdrawn. Permission is revoked. Access is rescinded.

Do not look behind the curtain.