Incandescent Obsolescence
Yes, the ozone is gone and the FauxZone Shield cracked beyond repair, so most of us go out, if we go out at all, only in darkness. And, sure, to see an animal other than a digipet or the occasional, very expensive, boutique domestic, you must venture to either Sub-Saharan Antarctica or the floating enclosures of a CryoZoo.
But our life expectancies hover around 203. More than enough time for an average of four twenty-year marriages with a full gender array of spouses — organic and AI — with the final decades of our lives whiled away on the well-appointed Archipelago of the Old, wrinkle-free and comfortably numb: sedatives administered to blunt the pain of a body and brain finally giving in to their inevitable deterioration; metatives given to keep us focused on anything other than the actual.
Most people can’t remember anything different. Most are happy to take their pleasures — real and more often virtual — where they find them.
“Isn’t real pleasure, though” the soapbox philosophers insist, “in knowing pleasure can’t last?”
But before we can even conjure the words to name them, our devices sense and fulfill even our most latent desires, silencing such questions before they have time to form and fester.
And here you are. 180 years young. Just this afternoon, you waved farewell to your third and so far most beloved spouse as they drifted west on the Ice Floe Ferry, enroute to Elder Isle #5,000. Bereft of the way they’d softly kiss that little cave just behind your ear, of how they felt in your arms, you feel the odd pinch of loneliness. So you zoom into room of your great-great-grandkid. They’re swaddled in their sleepsac, eyes slow-blinking against sleep. You port your form into the sac, and they nestle their head against your virtual chest while you tell their favorite story, the same one about the 21st century your great-great-grandparent told you:
Past the last dry span of the Golden Gate Bridge and its barking ovation of sea lions, over Under-the-Bay Area, and inland beyond hills seared amber by summer then scorched black by wildfires, through the velvet-roped doors of what was once Fire Station #6, hangs the world’s most famous appliance: the Centennial Light, which burned continuously for well over a hundred years.
You’ve seen it, even if you didn’t know what you were seeing: on a length of dusty black cord, a handblown bulb lit by a carbon filament whose curves and coils look like nothing so much as a cartoon hand reaching your way (whether in offering or in need, the sageblogs debate it to this day). It’s on posters hawked in the night markets of Bangkok (the day markets cancelled due to unendurable heat), tagged up and down the northern and southern Great Walls of America. Or take a gondola up Broadway and see how it’s replaced the face of Che Guevara on t-shirts sold the length of Times Square.
In case you missed it in your PanEurAsian Studies or Friendless U.S. History course, this is the symbol of NoB-IO. Or, if you’ve been living under a rock (and why not, it’s likely much cooler under there), No Built-In Obsolescence. This is the calling card of the ecorevolution — the only reason that in the 25th Century C.E. (Climate Era) we’re still here to tell this story — to tell any story at all.
Way back in the 1920s, thick carbon filaments meant consumers could buy a single set of lightbulbs for life. In response, bulb-selling robber barons formed the Phoebus Cartel, which fined any factories that made bulbs that burned for more than 1,000 hours. History’s scribes left unwritten if they knew or cared that Phoebus Apollo was the Greek god of the sun, that star of our stars, which has delivered its radiant goods — whether we want them or not — free to all for as long as we can remember.
So began the junked-up era of DxD (Defective by Design): phones with batteries that stored just a little less juice each time we charged them, car companies using brittle plastic pins in the vital parts of metal motors, and that case of the hip replacements with a creakcode for year-five and beyond. Every piece of tech cost more to repair then to replace and often died when we needed it most — while using a flashlight to scare away the newly aggressive suburban coywolves, or infamous Flight 989 on the world’s longest air route from Singapore to New York from which there were no survivors.
All this, despite the metastasizing population and its insatiable need for more — more shinier faster things and more energy to fuel them. So began the age of rolling blackouts, decimating pandemics, supply-chain shortages, overflowing landfills, and families trapped in smart-homes gone dumb during progressively extended power outages.
But in backyard farms and rooftop gardens, people began to grow their own food. Began to use their hours cycling in place, rowing only air, and treadmilling to nowhere to power generators. In home workshops and rogue precision machineries, they began to build sturdy, long-lasting goods and share the DIY plans on the darknet, where conglomerates could do nothing to stop them.
Soon enough, down the paths these retroradicals painstakingly blazed, celebrities traipsed, outfitting their lifestyle brands with monogrammed hacksaws, pink arc welders, and lavender-scented composting toilets. Where a-listers went, politicians and manufacturers followed. And the NoB-IO movement emerged from garages and basements to become the official platform of the ascendant G.O.P. (Green Orb Party).
With their efforts, global warming was paused at 1.6 degrees Celsius. Not great but enough to stave off the worst of the predicted disasters. California, after territorial disputes with the Pacific, was far more slender but nonetheless still there, funded by fortunate homeowners whose once-landlocked bungalows were now enviable shoreline property. The last nub of Florida also remained aboveground, with just enough dry land to continue housing the country’s penal colony — pun definitely intended, complained the conspiracy theorists, climate-deniers, and anti-vaxxers conveniently kept off the mainland by the towering Panhandle Palisade they themselves had built during the Great Secession.
Backpacks and ballcaps, pants and jackets too were woven with solar panels, wringing something good from all the relentless light. Companies were forced to make things that not only lasted but, when they broke, were fixable. Which meant the garbage that once quilted the majority of the ocean’s surface receded, the floating dumps scavenged for reusable parts, the plastic reconfigured into everything from bathing suits to surfboards (though good luck with the new breeds of electric jellyfish).
Because most people spent little beyond housing, food, and utilities, the average workweek contracted to just three days. In what was once called a “living room” — a place in which homeowners did their screenwatching and entertaining (yes, single families and even individuals once believed they were entitled to all that space for themselves) — work, vacations, dinners “out” with friends, and even entire marriages were experienced within these shimmering metarooms, marvels to take us anywhere we wanted to go, on-world or off-.
With so few new needs, with our real-life goods made to last and the virtual ones instantly available with just a quick voice command or twitch of your fingers, buying for fun wasn’t really all that fun anymore. So we at last turned our attention to ourselves, to our bodies and their quick-wearing parts. Here was the sludgy plumbing of our colons and kidneys, our brains worn and rutted from lives prolonged by medical intervention, the non-user replaceable batteries of our hearts.
BioTailors were created to snip cancer, dementia, and hypertension from our genes like so many pesky threads. And instead of the bulky power banks that once weighted purses and pockets to keep our phones and laptops from dying, NoB-IO manufactured a decorative line of organ chargers for when we start to fail: a bean-shaped one for the stomach, folded wings for our lungs, a wrinkled memory stick for a waning cortex, a lopsided strawberry for the heart (you can pay extra to have that one open into a locket, a nice touch for those with a sweetheart’s holo to carry close). The fashion is to wear them like charms on a necklace. Only the fewer you have, the more charmed you are.
The workweek reexpanded to fund these newly invented needs. Body Glove shifted from manufacturing wetsuits to skinsuits; Muscle Milk, from protein drinks to lab-grown implantable muscle fiber; and our capitalist urges were reinvigorated by the possibility of not just lengthened life but extended youth and vigor (an average of three full dermal replacements per person and countless infusions of MMilk’s patented Physique+).
Doctors register practical complaints (“People are not Centennial Lights; we’re not designed to burn forever.”) and the religious worry we’re trying to reverse engineer ourselves in God’s eternal image. But these people are on the margins, street-corner crackpots, and our culture hurries past them. Once our objects began to outlast us, how could we not envy them, to want such timelessness for ourselves?
You send a virtual kiss to the top of the kid’s warm head and draw your presence back into your room. Your own charm necklace is heavy enough to dig a groove in your neck, but you can jog a treadmill mile in respectable time and have a cadre of friends™ waiting to greet you in your metaroom. You can still remember your mother’s smile.
Yet even with all that, you worry you’ll never love again or be loved in quite the same way you found with beloved #3. You scroll back, through all the wanting and having, the never quite enoughness. The rudderless decades ahead. You think of the kid, but they’ve got five other great-great-grands and two of them are far better storytellers than you.
Maybe you’ll take a stroll. Agenda, zero, you tell yourself, though a stroll requires slathering exposed skin in mountain-high SPF, charging up your charms, and braving the analog world.
The sun is low in the sky, the shadows long and reaching in a way graphics never quite render. The slightly charred scent of the air carries a hint of green. There’s the real weight of your real feet on the real ground, the grit and stick of your soles on hot concrete.
And there, at the corner … you’d wondered if you’d see one. PRO taskforces have been spotted around the world, their green fleets flashing the provocation that serves as their slogan: “ProB-IO: biology has built-in obsolescence for a reason.”
Inside this shuttle, the one hovering just off the curb: two Proctors of Reasonable Obsolescence. Clothed in long white robes designed for ultimate soothing, they’ve been simply parking in the center of a city and opening their door. They never use force, don’t even cajole. Simply open the door and hold out a hand. No one knows exactly what happens to those who enter — only that PROs promise to be gentle yet definitive.
Through your many layers, the sun is filtered enough to feel almost comforting. Here comes a breeze. The soft applause of leaves.
Close your eyes.
The air sings over your memoryport, the one sunk above your left ear: The kid’s sweet laughter at your dumb-thumbed attempt at new tech. The humming of your gone love as they stepped into the shower. The come-hither whisper of possible spouse #4. The still small voice hushed by input through your earbuds. The questions left unasked in the endless quest for more. Or the easy rustle of a robe, a sound like a welcoming hand.
Look around you. There’s still time. How you hear this is all the compass you need.