Johann Johannsson Quotes

Our whole economy is based on planned obsolescence.

There's something quite shocking in this idea that everything is disposable and that people don't care for things anymore.

Magazines and advertising are flogging the idea that you have to keep changing things and get something new. I think that's balls - evil. But obviously that's your livelihood.

Somewhere along the way to free-market capitalism, the United States became the most wasteful society on the planet.

Here is a new car, a new iPhone. We buy. We discard. We buy again. In recent years, we've been doing it faster.

Our whole economy has become a waste economy, in which things must be almost as quickly devoured and discarded as they have appeared in the world, if the process itself is not to come to a sudden catastrophic end..

Young people everywhere have been allowed to choose between love and a garbage disposal unit. Everywhere they have chosen the garbage disposal unit.

Pop culture's gotten much more disposable.

I've felt a little culpable that we entrepreneurs often invent businesses just to drive people to buy more things.

In the '70s and '80s, the mentality of America was that everything was disposable. The notion of quality wasn't important.

The ideology of consumption is so prevalent that it has become invisible: it is the plastic soup in which we swim.

Hot today, forgotten tomorrow. I'm not buying anything.

by operating on the principle of human and material obsolescence, America eats her history alive.

Despite our complicated civilization, so called, or perhaps on account of it, we are all of us a mere set of barbarians, who find it less trouble to provide a new, cheap, and shoddy thing than to get the full use and full pleasure out of a finely-made and carefully-chosen old one.

the metabolism of a consumer society requires it continually to eat and excrete, every day throwing itself away in plastic bags.

I feel humiliated that I live in a country that demands more already. Why do we cling to the notion that not only must we maintain the current level of consumption, but that it must continue to grow by an exponential factor of 2 to 7 percent every year?

The fashion system has killed fashion.

We live in a disposable, 'cast-off and throw-away' society that has largely lost any real sense of permanence. Ours is a world of expiration dates, limited shelf life, and planned obsolescence. Nothing is absolute.

Consumerism is at once the engine of America and simultaneously one of the most revealing indicators of our collective shallowness.

Americans have been conditioned to respect newness, whatever it costs them.

It is the logic of consumerism that undermines the values of loyalty and permanence and promotes a different set of values that is destructive of family life.

Although most products will soon be too costly to purchase, there will be a thriving market in the sale of books on how to fix them.

Modernity means overabundance. We are living in the age of mass-produced objects, things that come without announcing themselves and end up on our tables, on our walls. We use them - most of us don't even notice them - and then they vanish without fanfare.

I think people are sick of trends changing every six months - not because we're tired of them, but just for the sake of change. There is so much junk in the world: junk TV, junk movies, all those junk magazines with the same people on the cover.

But we moderns are impatient and destructive.