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

What built in obsolescence ultimately produces is not progress, but permanent provisionality. Nothing is allowed to settle. Systems are designed to be replaced before they become fully known. Objects arrive with an expiry date already humming beneath the surface. Even digital things, ostensibly eternal, are kept in motion through update cycles and compatibility traps.

The present becomes a narrow ledge between depreciation and replacement.

This has consequences beyond technology. It shapes how we imagine futures. When everything is temporary by design, planning becomes speculative. Long term thinking thins out. The future feels less like a destination and more like a sequence of forced upgrades. The promise is always the same: this will fix it. The result is familiar: it rarely does.

Toffler’s point about accelerative change also lands rather neatly here: we are being pelted with so much “new” at such velocity that our poor, overcaffeinated nervous systems can barely keep up. It is as if civilisation is leaning over our shoulder, jabbing at the update button before we have even figured out where the last one moved the settings. Little wonder, then, that we stagger about in a sort of cultural jetlag, blinking at each innovation like it is a prank someone is playing on us.

The violence here is not dramatic. It is procedural. It happens through updates, incompatibilities, withdrawn support. It rarely announces itself. It simply leaves you standing with an object that still works, in a world that no longer acknowledges it. It is amazing how cruel a shrug can be.

On the surface, everything accelerates. New models. New versions. New standards. Underneath, a growing archive of intact, functioning things waits, excluded by policy rather than physics. This creates a haunted present: full of ghosts that are not dead, only locked out.

The past does not need rescuing. It is remarkably good at surviving when allowed to. What needs attention is the present, the conditions under which time is no longer permitted to behave naturally.

Systems could be designed for persistence. Formats could be maintained. Repair could be supported. Compatibility could be treated as a public good. That these things are not prioritised is not a technical necessity. It is a value judgement.

The myth says: time must move forward like this. Experience says otherwise.

The fact that emulation works at all, that archived media can still function when given the chance, reveals that obsolescence is not destiny. It is enforcement.

Against this, repair, emulation, archiving, reuse, and stubborn maintenance look less like nostalgia and more like temporal dissent. They do not deny change. They deny compulsion. They deny being rushed. They insist that not everything must go when told.

There is no call to abolish obsolescence entirely. Some things do wear out. Some systems genuinely improve. But treating disposability as default has consequences we rarely account for. It teaches us to expect loss. To accept disappearance. To distrust persistence.

In the long run, this does not make us adaptable. It makes us cautious, fragmented, and oddly sentimental about stability.

The quiet appeal of old machines, old software, old media is not that they are better. It is that they stay. And in a world organised around replacement, staying has begun to feel like an act of defiance.

If built in obsolescence has a mythology, it is one of perpetual renewal without return. A future that never arrives, only updates. Against this, the most radical gesture is not acceleration, but maintenance. Not progress, but continuity. Not the new, but the still working.

And perhaps that is the point we keep circling without quite naming it: that under conditions of enforced impermanence, persistence becomes meaning. Not because it is romantic. But because it is rare.

And if nostalgia feels louder now than it used to, it is not because people have become weaker or more backward looking. It is because objects are no longer allowed to age. And in a world that refuses duration, the thingness of stuff becomes one of the few remaining ways to hold time together long enough for a life to make sense.