Odds are, you’re reading this blog post on your phone or laptop. When did you last update its operating system? When was the last time you replaced it with a newer model? A month ago? A year? Five? More?
The technology that increasingly pervades our daily experiences, such as our phones, cars, and even kitchen appliances, has in the last several decades undergone a major shift from analog to digital. With this technical shift has come a shift in function, practice, and values that all center around the idea of obsolescence.
As we descend farther into late-stage capitalism and commodity culture, obsolescence has become not just an issue of increasingly rapid changes in consumer style and taste but also a quality built into the products themselves. This phenomenon, called planned obsolescence, ensures that products become obsolete, not just culturally, but physically—they break or break down more easily, they eventually fail to update altogether, and they lose compatibility with newer products—all to ensure that we keep buying new things.
This problem of quality does not map neatly onto the analog/digital dichotomy—after all, even the remaining analog products made today are cheaper and less sturdy than they have been in the past. Plus, you might ask, analog objects in the past broke down, too, so what’s the big deal?
Kevin Piotrowski’s stunning photographs will help to probe this question, and along the way might reveal some ways by which we relate to the products we consume. They will help to think about both the shift from analog to digital and the consistency across time of a commodity culture that places value on progress, innovation, and the new.
Kevin’s photographs feature the Cavalcade, a repurposed five-and-dime store in Croswell, Michigan, that houses Kevin’s impressive collection of kitchen appliances and other analog technologies, mostly from the 1950s. It also serves as a studio in which Kevin makes use of the items in his collection and creates video reviews as a way to share and celebrate analog technology.
In his photographs, we see a seemingly endless array of tea kettles, crockpots, blenders, and ovens. The composition of these photographs—angled in such a way that we see neither the beginning nor the ends of the rows of appliances—suggests that this collection extends into infinity, not limited by the actual space of the warehouse. Further, we are invited to imagine that the Cavalcade is actually a liminal space that houses every tea kettle, crockpot, blender, and oven that has ever been discarded, like an island of misfit appliances, an analog graveyard.
But we know from Kevin that the Cavalcade is not a place where analog technology goes to die. In fact, here it is saved from the landfill, a real-world analog graveyard, and instead gains a new creative and aesthetic life. Plus, Kevin stresses, every object in this warehouse still works. If that’s the case, if these appliances are not functionally obsolete, then what are they doing here? Why aren’t they still populating the kitchens of America?
In short, obsolescence. As a 21st-century audience, we might initially recoil at the garish colors and designs of some of these appliances, especially the, dare I say ugly, plaid patterns and stripes on the thermoses and crockpots. That response indicates one major level of obsolescence at work here—the shifting aesthetic tastes of consumers.
But, you rightly protest, these technologies still work! And you’re right, they do, and with much more longevity than the appliances of today. Why is that? One reason, perhaps, is that for a long time, analog technologies were built to last. In fact, they were built to be repaired, and people earned a living doing just that. Often when an analog technology breaks, its owner can take it apart, see what’s wrong, and fix it by replacing a part or repairing an internal structure. But notably that structure was transparent and, theoretically, accessible to everyone.
In contrast, the digital technologies of today are built to be replaced; once no longer functional, they’re often meant to be traded in or otherwise discarded for a new model. This focus on replacement enhances and is enhanced by the increased opacity of digital technology: the parts and pieces of digital tech are getting smaller and smaller, harder and harder to see and therefore repair without specialized tools and expertise. The black box of digital technology, then, allows producers to trap consumers in an inescapable loop of discard-and-replace as reparation becomes increasingly inaccessible.
Should we, then, just abandon digital technology and rebuild society around analog technology and repairability? Of course, that would not be easy or likely even possible, especially while obsolescence is a matter of consumer taste as much as product functionality.
Perhaps, though, that transformation would not even be desirable. After all, there are myriad ways that digital technology has improved our modes of engaging with the world. If not for digital technology, we would not reap the benefits of the democratization of information and the connectivity afforded us by the Internet. We might not be able to have such far-reaching discourses about society, capitalism, and the environment without digital technology.
So there is a complex tension between analog and digital technology that makes the erasure of one or the other problematic. In fact, this tension is inherent in Kevin’s engagement with both forms of technology: even as he celebrates analog appliances through their use, digital technology is an essential mode through which he shares and engages with these technologies in community with others. This tension, too, extends to the fundamental drive of the Analog Anthropocene project, as all our featured photographs were taken on 35mm analog film, physically developed, and then scanned to be shared digitally via Instagram, our website, and in posts like the one you’re now reading on your digital device.
Thus, the solution to the problem of obsolescence does not necessarily lie within the opposition between digital and analog. The blanket vilification of digital technology obscures the ways that it has served as a tool for empowerment, agency, and connectivity. At the same time, the wholesale dismissal of analog technology relegates so many fulfilling, functional objects to an untimely grave in the form of landfill waste. It might, therefore, be in our best interest to problematize this binary between digital and analog, or at least question our attachment of morality to one side or the other.
Beyond this binary, we can see that the underlying ideology of progress—accompanied by the prioritization of novelty, convenience, and ownership—has pervaded American consumerism since the advent of modernity itself. Thus, the core issue is not digital vs. analog but what that dichotomy represents about our values and attitudes toward consumption, values and attitudes that are firmly rooted in the capitalist system.
It is this system that incentivizes obsolescence—both that of taste and product function—in the name of accumulating capital and encouraging endless cycles of production and consumption for the sake of growth. In this light, we might begin to interrogate the ways that we are complicit in the problem of obsolescence (and, more broadly, capitalism), both culturally and materially, and to imagine the ways we might be able to disrupt the cycle of consumption that ultimately harms both ourselves and the planet.
One place to start might be contemplating those rows of tea kettles, crockpots, blenders, and ovens at the Cavalcade, where we can wonder about the internalized desire for novelty that leads us to send perfectly functional products to the island of misfit appliances before their time.
