The Age of Gadgetry

“I must have it”.  Whenever I hear this, I always wonder what it is that the person has to have and most of the time, it’s some sort of gadget.  Often, it’s a gadget made by Apple.  I saw a great quote today about utility and luxury and that Apple products mostly exist as luxury items (Dell exists for utilitarian purposes!).  I also read that the new Apple iPad is likely going to kill off the Kindle.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with all of this, the Kindle is an e-reading device.  Essentially, you can read hundreds of electronic books on this thing.  On the new Apple iPad, you can also read e-books but it has other uses, like playing games, surfing the web, publishing and more. People automatically assume that Kindle owners and e-book lovers will adopt the iPad as their chosen device for e-books.

From a utilitarian point of view, the person who just wants to read e-books will likely purchase the cheaper Kindle rather than pay more for the iPad.  But from a behavioural point of view, most people won’t do this.  We’re in the age of gadgets.  We’re now creating products that enable us to do a lot of things with one device.  And we’ve made it so that if you have one, you’re hip.  You’re one of the cool kids.  We’ve allowed ourselves to perpetuate our adolescent need to be ‘cool’ even longer and as a result, it has become the dominant standard for how we rank ourselves among our peers.

And the Joneses continue to set the model for who we should all aspire to be.  From a business perspective, this kind of “must-have” attitude benefits everyone.  It makes them profit.  Banks become more profitable as they collect interest on credit card debt and banking fees from transactions made by the gadget-hungry crowd.  Governments collect their share of taxes, too.  The only people who don’t win are the ones buying the gadgets.  Perhaps half of them are in debt and will stay in debt because of this behaviour and their employers will continue to “have them by the balls” as some might say.  It creates a perpetual cycle of unhappiness.

People buy things that give them status.  Thieves also want that status (or the money obtained from selling a desirable item to the gadget-hungry). Poor people want that status.  The rich want to hold on to that status. Gadgets are high on the status list and the world is constantly divided between the ones that must have IT, the ones that want IT but can’t afford IT, and the ones that just don’t care about IT (because they just really aren’t interested or because they have much greater things to worry about – like survival).

I also read an interesting article about a possible solution to world poverty.  In it, the following solution is proposed:

“An American household with an income of $50,000 spends around $30,000 annually on necessities, according to the Conference Board, a nonprofit economic research organization. Therefore, for a household bringing in $50,000 a year, donations to help the world’s poor should be as close as possible to $20,000. The $30,000 required for necessities holds for higher incomes as well. So a household making $100,000 could cut a yearly check for $70,000. Again, the formula is simple: whatever money you’re spending on luxuries, not necessities, should be given away.”

The problem with that proposal is that there are too many Americans who are in debt!  This solution might work in an ideal world where some of the household money would go towards necessities and savings and the rest could go towards charity.  But, as pointed out in this article that makes reference to the Federal Reserve’s report, the amount of revolving debt is rising and is probably even under-reported.

I used to get easily excited by new technological gadgetry.  And it seems like it was reasonable at the time.  The Internet was new, robots were new and computers became cheaper and more accessible.  Along with the Internet came the ability to make something fast, market it quickly, cheaply and easily and pocket some decent cash before setting off to create some other useless thing or retiring early because the suckers bought it!  But, it also made the American Dream accessible to almost anyone around the world.  You can now create your own software and sell it online and if it catches the ‘cool factor’, it’ll sell.

I’ve never bought an Apple product and I doubt that I ever will.  I’m too frugal.  And I have a PSP that allows me to watch tv shows or movies and play games and listen to music.  When I travel, it’s perfect.  It still works and for as long as it still works, I have no idea why I would even want to buy another gadget that would have the same features.  When it breaks down, my plan is to buy a used one that still works.

It doesn’t bother me that today’s iPad release was all over the news.  It’s normal.  And it’s exciting to see what’s new from an innovation standpoint though from what I’ve read and seen, it’s not really anything that will revolutionize the industry.  It’s a gadget that people will rush to buy because it’s now in their nature to do so.  Yet, it comes at a time when the fragility of human life and the fragility of our infrastructures has been brought to our attention through the tragic earthquake in Haiti.  I guess all I hope is that we’ll get to a point where instead of rushing to buy the next best thing, we can ask ourselves “must I really have it”?  As Thoreau would say, the price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.

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