YKS The Mag Issue #7
Uh-oh, it’s the YKS Newsletter for a week featuring an episode in which no Kickstarters were discussed or even referenced! Now I’d like to see how them boys are gonna get themselves outta this whatever...
(We’re the guys in the car. The newsletter is the cliff, and you guys are...hay? Tree?)
Well, here’s one problem with that right off the bat. The car has a Confederate flag on the top there, and even though I chose to screenshot a pic where it’s all blurry and you can’t see it, we all know it’s up there, and it has really been weighing on us as a country for the last couple of months. But I think most of the brands have gone back to their normal avatars on Twitter and Instagram so I think we’ve probably got this whole thing just about licked.
As a guy who has lived in Tennessee his whole life, and most of it in fairly rural areas to boot, I’m pretty relieved I didn’t end up developing that weird affinity for the ol’ Stainless Banner (thought it was Stars n Bars but looked it up to make sure -- good save jf) that a lot of people around me did. It would be screen printed on shirts obviously, doodled on books and folders at school, and of course painted on the hoods of trucks like the General Lee up there, and I don’t ever remember thinking it was particularly cool. I also don’t remember vocalizing my disapproval, either, really. I honestly don’t remember doing much of anything but extremely embarrassing shit from birth all the way up to right now, so maybe I did have a bunch of discussions about the Civil War with my dumbass friends. I’m just glad that the dumb shit I ended up liking (Jackass, video games, uhhhh Jackass 2) ended up being less of a societal albatross than a faded pic of me wearing an extremely bent-to-shit confederate flag baseball cap inside a Pizza Hut Buffet or something.
I did see this embarrassing pic of me when I was at my mom’s house today though. Look at this friggin guy...Mister Grow His Hair Long...Mister “in the phase of wearing 2 t-shirts”...Mister “Smiling for some reason”. The t-shirt is, I think, from Junior Classical League, which is the nerdy way of saying Latin Club. That’s brutal! You’re already in Latin Club. Just own that and move on with your life. Save yourself the extra step of explaining what the nerdy thing is after you’ve named it. This goes for “Dungeons and Dragons” guys in the 1970s, too. Just say you’re playing a board game! You probably don’t end up getting name-dropped in Futurama 30 years later but maybe you get more people interested in your hobby if you don’t smash ‘em over the head with your way too precious nomenclature right out of the gate (Latin root nomen, meaning ‘name’) I can’t even read the shirt. Useless.
Still no Kickstarters to talk about here, so maybe I’ll make one up. What if you did one that was like, a group of people got together and said they were gonna start making Macs like they used to in the old days...expensive components, high quality builds, and an idiosyncratic design philosophy that combines a beautiful modern aesthetic with a functional rigidity that borders on obtuse. And then they have a picture of their favorite Mac on there, probably the G3 iMac or the clamshell one we had in the big carts at school, and they go, “Well, hey. We’re gonna be making Macs over here. So check ‘em out. Obviously they won’t be approved by Apple, and we hope they understand we’re doing this out of love,” and then you just close the tab. Cause it’s over.
Apple is a consumer-unfriendly company in the same ways that all other companies are: taking your money is the only goal, other than hiding it overseas it once it’s theirs, and sharing as little of it as possible with the people who make the entire series of transactions possible in the first place. That’s not news, and it’s barely interesting, which qualifies it to be in this newsletter but little else. I guess what I find interesting is that, if you’re a company, you can do all that stuff -- plus change your Twitter bio when politically/commercially expedient (and not a moment before) -- and still, if you want, make a product that people want and which doesn’t suck! Doing all the bad shit, then putting out a shitty computer and gooping all your old phones’ guts together and slapping a new sticker on it is a completely separate and, I would argue, counter-productive choice!
I don’t want to sound like a YouTube Car Rant Guy but I’m really starting to not like companies!
But in the last couple of weeks, my washing machine, my laptop, and my streaming computer have all broken. I’m very fortunate to have these things to begin with of course, and only slightly less so to have them stop working in expensive ways at the exact same time. They are all out of warranty in some way or another. The Samsung front loading washer has a motor problem, and its 10 year motor warranty is negated apparently in full by the specificities of the contract. Sure, the motor itself is covered, but that is little more than a fully self-contained steel box lodged somewhere deep inside the steel blue corpus. Honestly we can’t even be sure the motor is in there. You probably don’t have one. So, no coverage there. However, the wire harness, which connects the motor to the motor clutch (also bad) has reached the end of its useful life, and seems to have taken the Main PCB (electronics, what’re ya gonna do) with it. All told, including the diagnostic fee, it comes to just shy of $700 to repair an 8 year old unit with who knows how many other hidden half-worn cranks and springs ready to pop at a moment’s notice...a proposition even the guy in charge of taking the $700 from me called “stupid”.
So I gotta buy a new one. I’m happy to be able to afford to continue cleaning my clothes, but am pretty resentful at getting dragged into the Planned Obsolescence cycle all over again. You probably already know all about Planned Obsolescence -- the industrial design concept that promotes increased consumerism by virtue of either purposefully constructing products or systems with an aim for critical failure well in advance of a natural life cycle or without concern for the exponentially increasing complexity of said products and systems which by natural occurrence will more often and more rapidly fall into disrepair, the costs of which are, again by design, disproportionately born by the consumer!
I’m really pissed off my shit broke!
But what I didn’t know about was style obsolescence, which is a different flavor of planned obsolescence, in which the perceived aesthetic shortcomings of a product drive its continual replacement rather than its physical shortcomings. I even read a fuckin’ article about it.
“By giving a product a fashionable appearance, the designer was virtually guaranteeing it would look old fashioned in two or three years time, and so was building-in style obsolescence [...] Rather than fearing it a the ‘creeping death to his business’, the manufacturer was beginning to understand that [obsolescence] has also a positive value; that it opens up as many fields as ever it closed; that for every superseded article there must bee a new one which is eagerly accepted. He sees all of us throwing razors away every day instead of using the same one for years. He turns in his motor car for a new one when there is no mechanical reasons for so doing. He realizes many that many things become decrepit in appearance before the work wears out.
The manufacturer had to come to terms with the way consumers behave in order to plan and promote obsolescence or, as the authors somewhat euphemistically described it, ‘progressive waste’ or ‘creative waste’.”[1]
Damn! That shit sucks. But I got the footnote in so that’s pretty cool.
Anyway, Apple can’t repair my keyboard (types the letters e and s 100,000 times instead of just one time when I push the key) and battery (says “it’s fucked, bud” in the toolbar) at the same time and wants me to send it in on two separate occasions. Alright! The company that built my computer won’t honor the 2 year warranty because it took me 6 weeks too long to figure out which part of the thing was fucking up so I could complain to them about it. So now I gotta send it to China to see whether the part manufacturer will agree it doesn’t work or if we will just send each other the same bubble wrap back and forth until this other warranty safely expires. And when that happens…..okie doke! I’ll just keep buying this garbage!
What am I gonna do, stop?
Nope. I think what I will probably do is buy a washing machine that has a knob and then get really mad when they switch over to buttons in 4 years and elbow mine really hard when I walk by it so I can get the button one, then pay some guy $40 to come pick up my stupid knob having piece of shit and dumb it in the lake so it sinks to the bottom and kills a bunch of fish or whatever. That’s what Samsung and Apple said I should do so I’m doing it.
I feel kinda bad not doing a real Kickstarter so here’s one I just found. Some fishing supply company is making Trump and Biden fishing lures.
That’s a lot of fun for some people. Can you believe that? Wild. Alright, see ya next week.
[1] Whiteley, Nigel. “Toward a Throw-Away Culture. Consumerism, 'Style Obsolescence' and Cultural Theory in the 1950s and 1960s.” Oxford Art Journal, vol. 10, no. 2, 1987, pp. 3–27. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1360444. Accessed 9 July 2020.