Mending is better than spending

Something I love about speculative fiction is that it looks at trends that were nascent at the time of writing and extrapolates them out to their logical conclusions. Several weeks ago I read Aldous Huxley’s 1932 book Brave New World. It was…odd, not at all what I was expecting. But there’s one thing that has really stuck with me.

I don’t think it’s spoiling too much to say that a key method of social control in the world Huxley envisioned is the use of hypnopedia, playing repeated audio recordings while sleeping, on children in order to condition them to norms the leaders found desirable. (While it’s considered bunk now, presumably it was hot new psychology at the time.)

One phrase that was repeated over and over, tens of thousands of times, to children as they slept was, “Spending is better than mending.” The reason, we’re told, is that it’s necessary for industry.

Huxley saw that infinite, perpetual growth would demand infinite, perpetual consumption. What he missed was that he assumed the state would need to enforce consumption as a societal value. Instead, what we got was a combination of enshittification and deskilling.

Not much more than 50 years ago it was common for at least one member of a household to know how to sew or to change the oil in a car. While rarer than sewing, it was far more common then than now for someone to know how to solder. Now, when a sweater starts unraveling, most people throw it out and get a new one. When an appliance breaks, you get a new one. Yes, appliances have gotten more complicated, but I’m pretty sure socks haven’t fundamentally changed in the last 50 or even 100 years.

When it came to people repairing what they have instead of being new stuff, mass deskilling isn’t something that governments or industry needed to enforce; it happened because cheap, low-quality, mass-produced goods flooded the market. Everything from clothes to kitchen appliances to computers are now intended to be — and treated as — disposable thanks to poor quality, poor repairability, and planned obsolescence. People don’t know how to how to fix things because we as a society decided things aren’t worth fixing. I think that’s a shame.

The same thing happened with software. I’m hardly the first one to notice this, but those of us who learned to use computers before the internet became 3 conglomerates in a trench coat seem to be the ones who are comfortable with fundamental concepts of modern computing. We know how to use computers, but the megaplatforms abstracted away anything tweak-able or fixable.

Take the file system: if something goes awry while you’re working on a document, you could try opening that file in another app or editing the preferences file/plist of the app you’re working in. On the other hand, when Google Docs breaks there’s nothing you can do; you’re out of luck, completely beholden to some corporation elsewhere. What even was the point of personal computers when we’re all back on mainframes?

The playbook, then, is to come up with something supposedly easier than what we’ve been doing, make it so no one knows how to do what they used to do for themselves anymore, and rent that capability back to us. It happened with clothes. It happened with cars. It happened with appliances. It happened with software. Now they want to come for thinking itself. What could go wrong?

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to learn to darn socks.