Made to Break

Made to Break — summary

A father, a son, and four thousand years of stone

Giles Slade tells a story that sticks with you. He took his ten-year-old son to a touring exhibit called Eternal Egypt. They walked among objects that had survived four thousand years: jewelry, tools, statues, papyrus scrolls. Egyptians built things to last. They built tombs to last forever. Slade looked around the gallery and felt something tighten in his chest. He thought about his own house, his car, his phone, his television, his son's toys. Almost nothing in his life would still be working in twenty years, let alone four millennia. The thought he could not shake was simple. The ancient Egyptians built monuments meant to outlive whole civilizations. We build things meant to break.

That moment is the seed of this book. Slade is a historian, not an environmental activist, and he is not arguing that the Egyptians had a better economy. He is asking how we got here. How did a country famous for Yankee thrift become the planet's largest garbage producer? Who decided that products should fail? When did we start measuring progress by how quickly we could throw the old version away? In 2003, sixty-three million working personal computers were dumped into American landfills. In 2005, more than one hundred million cell phones, fifty thousand tons of still-useful equipment, were tossed in a single year. Slade believes this is not an accident. He believes it is a hundred-year design decision, and most of us have never been told the story.

What this book actually answers

Slade promises three things, and he delivers all three. He explains how American manufacturers learned to manufacture desire, not just goods. He traces the exact moment when "obsolescence" stopped meaning natural decay and started meaning a corporate strategy. And he asks the question that haunts the whole book: now that we have built a civilization on disposability, can we live with the bill that is coming due?