I suspect we’re about to see a zeitgeist-level design ethos swing from “ideas worth spreading” (TED, media lab etc) to “jankiness worth fixing”
The specific sordid reasons the trend is reversing now are actually not that important. It would have happened even without scandals.
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been wondering for a while:
millennials/gen-z were handed a bunch of technical debt as our overarching generational causes — is there precedent for a whole generation primarily fixing jankiness, instead of just making the janky stuf obsolete via their “ideas worth spreading”?
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And yes, there are precedents. I’d say interwar years (1920-40) were like that.
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It's called "planned obsolescence", starting in the 30s but really embraced in 1950s. Need to keep people buying or else...


