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Blending architecture, design, and technology, a visual tour through futures past via the objects we have replaced, left behind, and forgotten. So-called extinct objects are those that were imagined but were never in use, or that existed but are now unused—superseded, unfashionable, or simply forgotten. Extinct gathers together an exceptional range of artists, curators, architects, critics, and academics, including Hal Foster, Barry Bergdoll, Deyan Sudjic, Tacita Dean, Emily Orr, Richard Wentworth, and many more. In eighty-five essays, contributors nominate \"extinct\" objects and address them in a series of short, vivid, sometimes personal accounts, speaking not only of obsolete technologies, but of other ways of thinking, making, and interacting with the world. Extinct is filled with curious, half-remembered objects, each one evoking a future that never came to pass. It is also a visual treat, full of interest and delight.

A comprehensive study of ephemera in twentieth-century literature-and its relevance to the twenty-first century \"Nothing ever really disappears from the internet\" has become a common warning of the digital age. But the twentieth century was filled with ephemera-items that were designed to disappear forever-and these objects played crucial roles in some of that century's greatest works of literature. In The Death of Things , author Sarah Wasserman delivers the first comprehensive study addressing the role ephemera played in twentieth-century fiction and its relevance to contemporary digital culture. Representing the experience of perpetual change and loss, ephemera was central to great works by major novelists like Don DeLillo, Ralph Ellison, and Marilynne Robinson. Following the lives and deaths of objects, Wasserman imagines new uses of urban space, new forms of visibility for marginalized groups, and new conceptions of the marginal itself. She also inquires into present-day conundrums: our fascination with the durable, our concerns with the digital, and our curiosity about what new fictional narratives have to say about deletion and preservation. The Death of Things offers readers fascinating, original angles on how objects shape our world. Creating an alternate literary history of the twentieth century, Wasserman delivers an insightful and idiosyncratic journey through objects that were once vital but are now forgotten.

Whilst public criticisms of an increasingly wasteful consumer society emerged already in late nineteenth Century, the specific concept of a “Throwaway Society” was first used in the early 1960s. This short communication sketches the passionate debate around planned obsolescence and oversaturated consumers and offers a short historical glimpse at a persistent, existential problem that still awaits effective solutions.

\"Planned obsolescence,\" broadly defined as conduct by manufacturers to shorten product lifespans and spur consumption, is characteristic of the American economy. Such conduct largely manifests in widely accepted competitive strategies that require consumer participation: The periodic release of products or emergence of a trend, for example. In some instances, planned obsolescence conduct reaches beyond the accepted competitive practices, desired by consumers, to conduct that clearly harms consumers with no countervailing rationale. Such practices effectively cease product function prematurely, either through product failure or poor performance and inefficient repair costs. While this conduct largely evades legal capture, it intersects with many existing legal frameworks. Recognizing both the unlikeliness of a statutory proscription and the conduct's position in our market economy, this Comment explains how existing consumer law infrastructure could limit harmful planned obsolescence. Encompassing both antitrust and consumer protection, consumer law advances consumer welfare by promoting the competitive process and ameliorating consumer harm. The Federal Trade Commission, consumer law's dual enforcer, is uniquely situated to protect consumers from planned obsolescence that goes too far. However, greater research and careful application are necessary.

Made to Break is a history of twentieth-century technology as seen through the prism of obsolescence. Giles Slade explains how disposability was a necessary condition for America's rejection of tradition and our acceptance of change and impermanence. 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.

After genetically engineered Bt cotton lost its effectiveness in central and southern Indian states, pink bollworm infestations have recently returned to farmers’ fields and have substantially shifted their vulnerability context. We conceive Bt cotton as a neoliberal technology that is built to protect farmers only temporarily from Lepidopteran pests while ultimately driving the further concentration of capital. Based on data from a representative survey of the three major cotton-producing districts of the state of Telangana (n = 457), we find that pink bollworm pest infestations are a shock to farmers that lead to severe losses in yield and income. Using the vulnerability concept as a framework, we embed our findings in a political-economic context by drawing on Harvey’s notion of accumulation by dispossession. We argue that Bt cotton includes an inherent sociobiological obsolescence that results in a systematic dispossession of resource-poor households while providing appropriation opportunities for other actors. Finally, reproduced hegemonic structures facilitate the accumulation of capital through a redistribution of assets from the bottom to the top of the agricultural sector. Claims that considered Bt cotton as a pro-poor technology were thus flawed from the outset.

A cultural catalog of everyday things rapidly turning into rarities--from landlines to laugh tracks.  So many things have disappeared from our day-to-day world, or are on the verge of vanishing.Some we may already think of as ancient relics, like typewriters (and their accompanying bottles of correction fluid).

Translated here into English for the first time is a monumental work of literary history and criticism comparable in scope and achievement to Eric Auerbach'sMimesis. Italian critic Francesco Orlando explores Western literature's obsession with outmoded and nonfunctional objects (ruins, obsolete machinery, broken things, trash, etc.). Combining the insights of psychoanalysis and literary-political history, Orlando traces this obsession to a turning point in history, at the end of eighteenth-century industrialization, when the functional becomes the dominant value of Western culture.Roaming through every genre and much of the history of Western literature, the author identifies distinct categories into which obsolete images can be classified and provides myriad examples. The function of literature, he concludes, is to remind us of what we have lost and what we are losing as we rush toward the future.

Fiehn and Butler take a glimpse of the Apple III computer which was launched in the fall of 1980 as an attempt to beat IBM in releasing a business computer. Multiple visions for it such as the two serial ports were included in the product. Such technology, however, did not bode well for long-term use. The computer had no fan, so the metal chassis (with a plastic cover) acted as a heat sink, and then there were problems with chips coming loose. The multitude of operational problems left it with a bad reputation and it was discontinued in 1984.

This article examines systematically the growth of the English language from the year 252 ce through 1985. Using a data set collected from the CD-ROM version of the second edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, we characterize the time series of new words added to the language, by year, calculate rates of growth and obsolescence, and disaggregate the data by parts of speech. Economic models of language growth over a modern period (1830-1969) are then estimated. We report evidence that language is a \"network\" good (the number of new English words is negatively related to population and to gross national product), that additions to the language are retarded by government growth, that the stock of words in use is strongly influenced by foreign trade, and that causality runs from economics to neology but not the reverse. Some suggestive evidence on the relative \"efficiency\" of English also is presented.