They don’t want to make a cellphone that lasts, and they don’t want it to be just a phone. It can’t simply serve a purpose, it has to create a need. It has to enter our lives from moment to moment, to reorganize our lives according to what it needs, what its object is. Unnecessary functions: games, pictures, text messages are new ways to parcel out time, new things that need to be checked and checked again. We live in a world of updates. A restless world never content to have what is has. No moment then is complete without checking in, confirming, updating, replying, editing. We jones for change. Somewhere in it all is communication, supposedly. These are all supposed to be vehicles for communication, but aren’t they just further mediations of communications, more things to come between us? Of course everything is just a tool, nothing possesses a moral or immoral nature, a positive or negative being. We apply that to anything we do – but how involved in the business of seduction are we? Do we trade away our self-determination in the pursuit of excitement, and the allure of the new. It is our habit to seek out the original, to pursue authentic explorations of ourselves, be they manifest in design, technology, the world of ideas etc. – because the original is always new. But we forget to easily that the reverse is not true. And in the end obsolescence is planned, it necessitates new purchases, new consumption. Something is always better, what we have is never good enough.