I’m on the hunt for an iron. I want my shirts pressed and it’s not like I’m going through some sort of crisis or anything. No, I just want my shirts pressed. My wife bought a steamer last year and within a couple of weeks it started to spit water all over our clothes and not one wrinkle was visibly uncreased. We agreed that it was a waste of money. My search for something better brought me to a part of the internet where people review kitchen appliances with fierce and brutal honesty. The consensus? Iron’s in this day and age are shit. Over and over I read as people complained that the water from their tap calcified in their irons and caused the steam mechanism to clog and break. So many reviews lamented that half way through a stack of clothes water would randomly leak from the iron soaking their clothes and the ironing board. The further down this internet hole I ventured, the longer the list of shit kitchen appliances grew. Washing machines, kettles, toasters (we’ve gone through 3 in 3 years), fridges and ovens.
We’ve bought four clothes horses and countless octopus clothes peg hangers. All of which are broken. One clothes horse is holding up the other and only one hanger has the hanger bit still intact. We bought these things for ‘cheap’ but the more research that I’ve done the more I see that even expensive things break months after buying them. New furniture is the most expensive it’s ever been yet the structure is made, more often than not, from compressed sawdust. For the last 15 years, we’ve been so bombarded with disposable products that we’re no longer surprised when they break, we actually expect it. We can just got to poundland or temu and replace them, adding to the landfills rotting on the outskirts of town. On top of their poor quality, most modern goods look horrific, see above. Fast fashion has destroyed our belief that clothes should last more than a few washes. Polyester has taken over and it’s here to stay. Nothing that we touch and use on a daily basis is the same. I've always had a deep love for old things, the charm of antiques and the history they carry. Lately, my attraction to these things has become even more apparent. This winter I've found a sense of peace wandering through antique malls and thrift shops, slowly replacing plastic utensils with ones built to last a lifetime. See below.
Writer Cory Doctorow coined the term ‘Enshittification’ to describe the pattern in which online products and services decline in quality over time. He wrote in a blog post in 2022,
‘Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a "two-sided market", where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.’
Most of us have experienced this degradation in real time. Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, all betraying the ‘customer’ by selling our data and bombarding us with ads to make the user experience as infuriating as possible. Shareholders demand greater return on investment and the user loses more of their privacy with each new update. The phones in our pockets keep us constantly tethered to the online world, and when we seek a moment of reprieve, like doing the washing up, we're met with new anxieties: Will the plastic scrubbing brush survive the wash? Is the water we're using slowly killing us? Enshittification no longer just applies to the decline of online platforms, it now defines every aspect of life.
I said at the beginning of this post that I wasn’t going through some sort of crisis. I suppose that’s not entirely true. I haven’t posted in a couple of months but not for the lack of trying. Every week since New Year’s Day, I’ve sat down to write a post, only to delete it. As time passed I considered sharing a monthly recap of global and political events, but each new day brought something even more absurd than the last. I have been overwhelmed by the news, by the misery that is still being inflicted on the Palestinian people. Overwhelmed by the ferocious speed at which the global world order is changing. Infuriated when watching complete losers like Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Donald Trump and arse licker J.D Vance decide the fate of millions. The race to artificial intelligence is being fought by billionaires. Nazism is on the rise but this time it’s in bed with Israel. Not a day goes by without some new horror, and to be honest, even something as simple as writing a blog has felt impossible.
So, maybe my search for an iron that won’t break in a few months is a sign of something bigger. Maybe I feel that I’m no longer in control of any aspect of my life. That no matter where I go, whether outside or inside, I am surrounded by planned obsolescence. That life, more so than ever, is about working to earn money to pay for shit that will break so I can line the pockets of the 1% that are destroying our planet and committing genocide out in the open while facing no repercussions. Maybe I want authenticity and real life interactions. Maybe I want to create and see beautiful things with my own eyeballs.
It’s that, or maybe I just want my shirts pressed.