Planned Obsolescence

My mother has a Kenwood Food Mixer which simultaneously represents everything that is good and bad about the human race to her. The Kenwood, as it is referred to, was a wedding present upon marrying my father.

"It's...What year were you born?"
"1980"
"Well then it's...(counts on fingers)...9, almost 10 years older than you. And it's never given A DAY of trouble."

They don't make them any more. You can't get them. They don't make them.

Sometimes when at a family get together I can see my mother cast her eye around the particular kitchen, to find what food mixer these people have. The relevant mixer will comfortably confirm my mother's gut instinct. It's not The Kenwood. It doesn't look nearly solid enough. Plastic.

My mother sometimes buys denim jeans from Tesco. They can cost as little as 4 euro. But they're just the same as the ones you'd pay 50 euro for in town. There's no difference. They're the same jeans.

"Sometimes I think they're better."

I was flicking through a colour supplement recently advertising a home-ware sale in one of Dublin's big department stores, probably Arnott's. They listed a Kenwood food mixer that was reduced to 299 from 599. I brought this to my mother's attention to try and explain the Kenwood issue from my point of view.

While I do accept things are no longer 'built to last', it doesn't mean they don't exist. Here was proof the standard of The Kenwood was still available, it was just highly priced. The trend in modern consumerism has long moved away from quality to accessibility. We can have more things, at inferior quality. Most people would (perhaps sensibly) opt to buy a cheaper, inferior mixer rather than the 599 Kenwood nowadays.

I like to believe that, in her day, while people had less, what little they had was of a similar standard to that of the most fortunate. Perhaps you had scant furniture, but you had one item that would not have looked out of place in any house in the city, carefully preserved and passed through generations so you too could have a slight taste of what the good life may be like. (I like to celebrate the grace of other people's poverty maybe.)

Now pragmatism rules; They perform the same function anyway. There's no difference between them really, it's all advertising. They're the same jeans.

My mother wouldn't have a word of this. She'd seen those Kenwoods. They're awful. The plastic knobs wouldn't last a week.

They don't make them any more. You can't get them. They don't make them.

Watching Manchester United over the last few years I constantly hope for the club to address the poor quality of its midfield. Try and find a purposeful, powerful body of players that could comfortably rank against their stellar cast of the 90s. Perhaps a big money signing would do it, preferably from one of their rivals. Or maybe they have a box-to-box midfielder in the mould of Roy Keane waiting in their youth ranks. Something is drastically needed to end this limbo-like stasis of an aged Scholes and insufficient Carrick.

I see they're looking at Joe Cole as a free transfer. The similarities to the Owen signing are eerie.

But he's free.

He's just as good as anyone else.

There's no difference.

Jabulani as capitalist failure?

I've been reluctant to grant too much weight to the idea that the poor quality of the Adidas Jabulani ball is at fault for the poor quality on the field in this World Cup. Part of this is because any criticism of it seems a sort of faulty logic. It can't be poor for both strikers and goalkeepers, can it? Surely what hinders one benefits the other? But criticism of its performance seems universal throughout all players, coaches and pundits - with former Liverpool player, and Adidas Predator boot creator, Craig Johnson composing a 12 page letter outlining its deficiencies to Sepp Blatter and charging it with with the dramatic claim of possibly 'ruining the game as we know it'. Now it seems a body no less auspicious as Nasa have confirmed this opinion, going on to discuss something called the 'knuckle effect' which I'm not overly interested in to be honest, at least at the moment.

What interests me more is the lack of anything anybody can seemingly do about it. From before the start of the World Cup rumblings about the ball were brewing and it quickly became a talking point. Everybody seemingly knew this ball was going to be a problem, so surely our efficient market (which FIFA so willingly embrace), responding to demand and necessity would swiftly rush in and solve this problem effectively - perhaps through re-engineering or replacement with a superior substitute. Er no, that's not possible actually. Due to a very complicated and important process which we'd rather not discuss, no change is available - Adidas have paid us a shit load of money you see.

There's so much invested in this and it is not just money but expertise - the thermo dynamic sealing was supposed to be great progress, a striking display of Western dominance and security that we are still at the forefront of progressive, beneficial technology. Like financial products, efficient market hypothesis, and the complete adoption of a FIRE economy - failure cannot be tolerated. Not that it won't happen, we just won't/can't admit to it when it does. In the same way the financial crisis was initially attempted to be explained away as a smallish problem resulting from an insignificant sub-prime market (rather than the culmination of decades of financial alchemy which is still waiting to truly unwind such is our fundamental inability to deal with it without acknowledging a lot of unpleasant truths about our exact position), the problems were down to altitude apparently. When teams more used to playing at altitude then claimed that they had never experienced this effect, certainly not to this extreme degree, a rebuttal was unforthcoming.

This obvious failure is then compounded by the fact that the ball is displayed absolutely fucking everywhere throughout the tournament. Has the official ball always been such a prominent part of proceedings in recent times (I was away for 2006 but can't remember the ball being such a feature in 2002)? The sight of the players coming out of the tunnel marching towards the ball on its little podium like it's Excalibur's sword, the prominent place on the desk at press conferences - it's a level of product placement that would make Alan Partridge blush. Do Adidas not realise what bad PR this has now become? Can they not do the decent thing and sweep it under the carpet and we can all get back to pretending it doesn't exist.

And surely this is what power, and traditional capitalist success is - the leeway to make mistakes. The surety that you can have a few duds and still reign supreme, comfortable in the knowledge that perhaps there's no room in the market for new challengers or perhaps a more commendable belief that you can still prosper in the future by doing the right thing (hmmm). This clinging to the idea of the Jabulani as something to be celebrated seems jarring. Is it as important to Adidas as financial products were to the banking system? Presumably not, I mean surely scrapping it would not induce bankruptcy, yet this ardent propping up of it seems remarkably similar to the banking industry (and perhaps whole national economies). It's such a display of weakness it makes you feel an instinctive sort of unease.

I had similar thoughts to this in the immediate aftermath of Thierry Henry's handball in the World Cup Playoff. While Irish, I tend not to get too excited by international sport, at least not team sports where they usually comprise a number of people I don't really like. While not struck by righteous indignation by Henry's action, being such a cynical soul, I was taken aback by just how upset I was. At 29 this was undoubtedly the most impacted I'd ever been by a sporting performance (and it was the performance, not the result -we've had a few - that was so astounding: to dominate France (before everyone and their dog was doing it) in not just possession but style! And in Paris! It may never happen again in my lifetime).

When, the admittedly dreadful, John Delaney of the FAI then made the plea to FIFA to allow us into the World Cup as a 33rd team there was almost universal embarrassment among Irish people. While this can be somewhat explained by the curious 'inferiority complex yet willingness to walk down a street pissed with our trousers down' that we seem to carry as a nation, there was a general feeling that this was a preposterous request. Small-time. Cringe-worthy. Personally I couldn't see what was so wrong, wouldn't it perhaps even be charming? An excerpt in the narrative that would need to be explained as an interesting episode in history where in the interest of fair play...

But this is not possible. There is no space in the system for change. Even if we wanted to, we couldn't. While I now expect this from our financial system, part of me was cautiously hopeful that football still had a little maneuverability left in it, where the system was truly dynamic and we were not subject to it. But it looks like yet another another system which on one hand is proclaimed as being in a position of unprecedented strength while on the other everybody is warned any slight change (or perhaps dissent?) could rapidly bring it tumbling down.

Bag of shite.