Today I decided to celebrate 10-year jubilee of my mobile phone. Why? Because it just so happens that I possess only a few assets that do not seek to appear in a dumpster soon after being purchased. My 11 y.o. son can hardly believe that my Nokia 6300 has been still working since 2006. This is almost a magic for him whose generation has to perceive the outward reality not as solid as we millennials do.
Observing all my possessions I can clearly distinguish the shift of approach appeared in design during the last decade. To be frank, I’ve noticed this phenomenon earlier, but the contemporary rush of consumerism outlined it more glaringly.
I feel how the mere fabric of reality is becoming more ephemeral with those new commodities designed not to outlast the next gen release. The modern short-life things make this world rapidly wearing. The world of thing is losing its stability while objects become less durable and solid. The civilization of the endless updates is arriving obviously.
Someone may consider there’s nothing to worry about. Just another paradigm shift when people take everything easier. That may be so, but look around: we skip the deep sense of affairs jumping from one detail to another. We started taking everything too easy. Proliferating fake news reflects the trend of the epidemic ignoring which occupies the worldwide society. Fake news, fake elections, fake presidents, fake states, fake world, and fake life. Sounds not too inspiring.
It’s fine as long as it means a real paradigm shift in human evolution. The shift from a mundane consumer-driven materialism to a new stage of intellectual level where material possessions are to be less valuable.
Does anybody notice the intellectual rise of the global population?
What can hint at a sudden spiritual conversion of humankind?
The strange and sad mismatch takes place in the material world where the matter is forfeiting its substance.
This is probably why the minimalism movement is gaining popularity among millennials now. The aptitude to hold all your belongings in a 25-liters backpack is rooted not in the convenience to travel light. This is because of the absurdity of owning commodities tending to disposability. Minimalists feel subconsciously that all those modern gizmos are obsolete initially. What is the reason to buy trash?
What can you purchase today to bequeath to your children? Which of the contemporary consumer goods will be able to outlive its last review appearing on the Internet? How can you compare nowadays ephemeras with cars of the 1960s, garments of the 70s, tape recorders of the 80s, and mobile phones of the 2000s?
The actual paradigm shift is occurring in our perception of value. Virtual objects become more valuable than real ones. The most expensive and up-to-date smartphone costs nothing without its virtual amount in the forms of social accounts, cloud repositories, online services, and cashless payments.
This change of value imprints an invisible but indelible pattern of transiency on our mindset. Things, events, relations, and solutions become hybrid and unstable. Virtuality seems to dominate over reality since the value of virtual objects prevails.
You may argue that human relations have nothing to do with the contemporary fragile design of things. However, each material object contains the energy of someone who created it. The more labor hours and mental efforts spent for producing an object, the more innate invisible energy it holds. The things made by robots are empty at some deep psychological level. People can feel it one way or another. If you are immersed in the environment of such empty dead things, the things you not appreciate, you have to perceive everything and everybody around valueless.
Demonetization makes people forget the shape and weight of coins. If you can not feel money in your hands, the value of money (and therefore of labor, work, job, employment, economics,) will be disappearing gradually. The newly advertised Amazon Go sub-payment system advocates nothing but a new level of consumerism and unconsciousness. Take everything you grasp without any pondering, deny yourself nothing! Don’t think at all: smart guys have already figured everything out instead of you…
Everything is interconnected in this strange world. Neglecting material objects leads to disregard in relationships. Rapidly wearing things require similar owners. The value of our self is to be diminishing while everything around depreciates.
Holding that old Nokia 6300 in my hand, I can feel not only the cold metal and shape ergonomics. I feel something beyond the materiality — the substantiality and reliance I may count on. The very values that occur less and less frequently today in the world of the fragile design.