Made to Break Audiobook by Giles Slade
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Title: Made to Break Subtitle: Technology and Obsolescence in America Author: Giles Slade Narrator: Michael Puttonen Format: Unabridged Length: 9 hrs and 55 mins Language: English Release date: 01-10-14 Publisher: Post Hypnotic Press Inc. Ratings: 3.5 of 5 out of 8 votes Genres: Science & Technology, Technology

Publisher's Summary: If you've replaced a computer lately - or a cell phone, a camera, a television - chances are, the old one still worked. And chances are even greater that the latest model won't last as long as the one it replaced. Welcome to the world of planned obsolescence - a business model, a way of life, and a uniquely American invention that this eye-opening book explores from its beginnings to its perilous implications for the very near future. Made to Break is a history of 20th century technology as seen through the prism of obsolescence. America invented everything that is now disposable, Giles Slade tells us, and he explains how disposability was in fact a necessary condition for America's rejection of tradition and our acceptance of change and impermanence. His audiobook shows us the ideas behind obsolescence at work in such American milestones as the inventions of branding, packaging, and advertising; the contest for market dominance between GM and Ford; the struggle for a national communications network, the development of electronic technologies - and with it the avalanche of electronic consumer waste that will overwhelm America's landfills and poison its water within the coming decade. History reserves a privileged place for those societies that built things to last - forever, if possible. What place will it hold for a society addicted to consumption - a whole culture made to break? This book gives us a detailed and harrowing picture of how, by choosing to support ever-shorter product lives we may well be shortening the future of our way of life as well.

Members Reviews: A Superior Text on the Question of Permanence I had read "Made to Break" years ago, as a teenager, and I remember it being the first nonfiction book I really liked. It opened doors for me, and I went with gusto into such classic texts as "The World Without Us" and Jared Diamond's dense-but-meaningful "Collapse." "Made to Break" got me ready for stuff like that. It was therefore with some surprise that I found the book to be much narrower in scope than I had remembered it to be. Although it deals with broad trends of the 19th, 20th and early 21st centuries, it goes through them more as a series of museum exhibits than as flowing phenomena (as "The World Without Us" does, for instance). Readers are reintroduced to such inborn phenomena as the yearly model change, the Cold War and what it really means to own a cell phone. Even though Slade is working outward from example, rather than inward from concepts in abstraction, the text is never confusing and rarely boring. Those who question consumer society at all, whether in whole or in part, would do well to have a look into the events that brought us to where we stand today - and what it means when something is indeed made to break.

Not what I was expecting, but engaging notheless When I bought this book I was expecting more of a expose of the conspiracy behind planned obsolescence. What I got instead was a fascinating history lesson about the great technologies of the past. Planned obsolescence was a necessity to these companies, not a conspiracy. The book is very informative and well researched. It changed the way I look at waste, obsolescence, marketing, and the economy.