A Luddite's Rant


I bought a new pair of Panasonic headphones off ebay nice and cheap recently, I knew they were new old stock (NOS) beforehand based off the photos in the listing, with the packaging being that turn of the millenium style with the bold gold lettering and gradient background. The documentation that came with them dates them to 2005. This got me thinking, why the heck are factories in China still churning out headphones when there are thousands of these NOS ones for sale on ebay? (The answer is capitalism, but let me rant anyway).

This doesn't just apply to headphones, but basically any consumer product. In an age of climate crisis and pollution, we seem to produce first and think about selling it later. Remember when they dumped all those Funko Pops in landfill? (Where they belong to be honest). If it has taken 19 years for my headphones to leave the factory, be sold to a salesperson, and finally reach me, the consumer, how long could humanity survive if we just turned off the production lines for every kind of household product until we run out of all the NOS sat in warehouses across the globe? I've a 20 something year old TV that still works fine, my parents have a 14 year old TV that is only just coming to the end of its life, why are perfectly good flatscreen 50"+ tellies being sold second hand or binned? Perhaps as a society we need to stop chasing super duper 4K HD instantly and just make do with what we have till it breaks, then move on to newer technologies. Advertising, consumerism, it's killing the planet and it's also killing us. Not to mention these new 'smart' tellies are crap anyway but I'll save that for another rant...

It's almost as though mankind is not stopping even just for a moment to appreciate what we have achieved until now, I'm sure it won't be soon before 4K whatever is old hat, and people will start binning their 4K tellies. Why do we not try and get our money's worth and run these products we've invested so much in till they break or burn out. Why don't we use up all the perfectly good pairs of headphones manufactured in 2005, then 2006, then 2007 and so on before we switch on the production lines once more? I've plenty of old phones lying around that'll hopefully mean I don't have to buy a new one until they shut off 2G networks in 2033, why do I need a new phone when the one I've already got makes calls and texts like any other? My 23 year old car gets me from A to B, no it doesn't have smart touchscreen nonsense but it does what a car is meant to. I don't mean for this to come off as some sort of environmental virtue-signalling on my part, I use all this old stuff because it was either given to me, it was cheap to buy, and simply because some of it is just cool. I really don't get why nobody else I've met apart from my family seems to run their stuff into the ground before buying a replacement. My hand-me-down phone was made in 2007 and has cool rainbow lights on it! Show me a single phone on the market today that has those!

As I stated earlier, the reason for this mindless consumerism is, no prizes for guessing, capitalism. The solution is obvious and I need not state it here on my happy, family friendly web site, but I hope that perhaps this rant makes somebody reconsider binning their perfectly good video game console for the latest one or something like that, because think about it, a game doesn't stop being fun just because a new one has come out :-)

19/12/2024