While our technology and products have become increasingly advanced, any sense of quality and value has started to come apart in the relentless product cycle. This cycle–an insistence on new and better–has infected our media and minds as we…

I love these things because they all were built with unmatched quality, yet somehow each one in our culture is valued monetarily lower than the “latest model” and is considered obsolete.

Some years ago i lived in a seminar center where each participant of a seminar was
given a piece of wood, a knife and a piece of sandpaper to make a spoon, to raise
awareness of what you really need to survive.

If you’ve ever tried to make a complete set of things that you use in everyday life you
will get a feeling about what it takes to make it. And you will better take care of it.

And knowing how to start a fire, make a bowl and spoon, maybe a bow and arrows, collect
fibers to make rope or clothing, a qill and ink …. this will connect us with the history of mankind
and our technology. Children should learn this at school.

Instead of giving everyone a piece of the best technology – let’s give everyone a chance to find
out what it takes to make it!

What if a cellphone could be created that would last for a century? You’d have a long-lasting, very inefficient piece of technology. Think about what cellphones looked like in 1989*. Now imagine using that phone for a century. You’re lugging around half-a-kilo in battery and power-wasting circuits. That half-a-kilo phone in your bag weighs your car down more as you drive (wasted fuel), makes you heavier as you walk around (which equals more food that you ultimately have to eat–energy wasted for its production) and so forth.

Cars are the same. Once upon a time they were built like tanks, and they had the fuel-economy to match.

Refrigerators, light bulbs, computers–basically anything that uses electricity and/or combustion to work shouldn’t be made to last long-term until they’re as efficient in their opperation as the physical laws of the universe allow.

Things which should be built to last–now–are things like buildings**, furniture, watches (more efficient than using a cellphone as a timepiece), pens, shovels, ladders, knives, dishes, wrenches–that sort of thing.

*–What’re cellphones going to look like in another twenty years? Forty? A hundred? At a hundred we might not even have cellphones–perhaps we’ll communicate wirelessly with a mote-sized thing embedded in our brains and have a fractal antenna under the skin across our whole body. They’re powered by ATP, like the cells of our bodies. Who knows?

**–If they’re well designed to save resources and energy–if not, don’t bother. The skyscraper equivalent of an earthship. Something like a monolithic dome made of “Ductal” concrete would last centuries, maybe thousands of years.