Modernity’s endless self-obsoletion has collapsed into mere product upgrades

Evidence

MF: I agree. If you think about it, nowadays we don’t have “the future”: we have upgrades. And in a way it’s a pre-postmodernist thing. The whole experience of modernity was this double perception that whatever your current experience is, it’s already obsolete; because modernity is a process which never reaches an end: there’s no resting, no point of equilibrium, only this endless upgrading. And then today you have corporations such as Apple, whose business model is entirely based on this: obsolescence. You don’t expect to own an iPod for very long, if only because they don’t last that much… I’ve had five or six already! — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 2304

Categorization

• CANDY: “We don’t have the future, we have upgrades” is a tweetable distillation.
• XREF: connects to: Modernity’s endless self-obsolescence persists as corporate upgrades — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 2304; Bourgeois ascendancy turned novelty from by-product into an end pursued for its own sake — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 61; Modernity is the permanent urge to modernize, not a destination (+5 more)

Broader Connections

• Modernity’s endless self-obsolescence persists as corporate upgrades #expands (0.97) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 2304
• Capitalist realism reduces historical time to technological upgrades #corroborates (0.88) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1906
• Bourgeois ascendancy turned novelty from by-product into an end pursued for its own sake #expands (0.82) — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 61
• The 21st century’s signature is the collapse of cultural invention into entertainment and profit #exemplifies (0.80) — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 12
• Contemporary art exhausted stylistic innovation and collapsed into speculation and irony #exemplifies (0.79) — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 725
• Modernity is the permanent urge to modernize, not a destination #qualifies (0.78)
• Modernity is a universal maelstrom of perpetual disintegration and renewal #qualifies (0.76) — Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration, 157
• Modernity is defined by an permanently unfinished, self-transcending orientation toward the unrealized #complicates (0.74) — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 430