Upgrade Culture and Technological Change: The Business of the Future

Upgrade Culture is available in hard copy, paperback, ebook, and Chinese language editions!

Book Description: This book explores the origin and future of "upgrade culture," a collection of cultural habits and orientations based on the assumption that new technologies will rapidly, perpetually, and inevitably emerge.

By analyzing discourses of technological change and the practices of marketing workers inside the consumer technology industry between the early 1980s and the late 2010s, the book describes the genesis, maintenance, and future of upgrade culture. Based on archival and popular sources, first-hand interviews with a range of industry professionals, and participant observations at industry-only events, the book attends to issues both intimate to the culture of marketing work and structural to the organization of the consumer technology industry.

This book will have a broad appeal to social/cultural theorists of technology, marketing, and consumerism, as well as to scholars in business history, communication, cultural studies, media studies, sociology, and anthropology.

Read a book review in the Journal of Cultural Economy.

Excerpt from the Introduction
As I stood amidst a bewildered and confused crowd of a few dozen attendees at the 2014 Consumer Electronics Show (CES), I asked a booth exhibitor, “Is the monitor broken?” He replied, “No, the company doesn’t want to give away any of its proprietary technology, so they are preventing the cameras from showing you how the robot is actually folding the laundry.” I had just spent the last 15 minutes or so watching a presentation for “The World’s First Laundry Folding Robot.” This supposed technological marvel was developed by the Japanese company Seven Dreamers and branded “Laundroid.” Housed in a sleek minimalist wardrobe and retailing for $16,000, Laundroid was designed to automate the tedious domestic chore by folding and sorting laundry for an entire household. Like so many other emerging technologies I had seen at my first CES, Laundroid promised to revolutionize some aspect of everyday life. The reality was that it took several hours to complete a single load of laundry and had trouble folding dark-colored clothes (Lee 2019). A common strategy for new technologies in which there are few, if any, competitors is to rush the product to market in hopes of establishing a branded “first-to-market” position. Laundroid was hoping to be the Band-Aid, Kleenex, or Uber of laundry folding robots.

Throughout the presentation, we had been staring at a motionless piece of bedroom furniture unable to see the robot inside. Laundroid was designed to fit into the aesthetics of the home, so the outside of the wardrobe entirely masked its internal operations. In a poorly conceived attempt to resolve this visual problem for promoting the product, Seven Dreamers had placed a camera inside the Laundroid to show audiences how it worked. Yet, out of an abundance of caution over intellectual property, the decision was made to obscure the machine’s operation on the monitor by bitmapping the video feed. So instead of seeing the robot arms nealty tucking and folding the demo t-shirt, the audience saw a black screen with grey squares jostling around. While the audience strained to get a sense of what was actually happening, an under-practiced spokesperson stumbled through a script touting how this upgraded wardrobe was a revolution in domestic life. Midway through the lackluster promotion, the Laundroid broke. The audience knew the Laundroid was broken just before the maintenance team emerged from backstage when the grey squares on the monitors stopped jostling. As the crowd dispersed, the Laundroid booth exhibitor who had explained the reason for the bitmapped video feed looked at me and shrugged. What is remarkable about Laundroid’s marketing at CES was not its lack of transparency, its stumbling spokesperson, or its broken robotic furniture, but rather the way it—even in its failure—reinforced a ubiquitous set of assumptions that technology will rapidly, perpetually, and inevitably change. 

Once a hobbyist subculture for radios, the consumer technology industry has grown into a powerful force transforming how people understand the process of technological change in cultural imagination. It has done so by reconfiguring a key set of assumptions regarding the relationship between technology and the future. During the 20th century, as consumer goods increasingly saturated the market, companies devised strategies like planned obsolescence to sell new or more versions of products to consumers who already owned them. Whether stylistic through design changes, technical through re-engineering, or psychological through advertising, planned obsolescence has become a standard practice in consumer cultures (Slade 2006). The industry’s discourse of an endless stream of new gadgets, buttressed by the material obsolescence of their products, has created a self-evident experience shaping how people understand the process of technological change. Because of this, marketing any new technology today—regardless of the effectiveness of any specific promotion, like the Laundroid—cumulatively reinforces the assumptions that technological change is rapid, perpetual, and inevitable and that the future will be characterized by more emerging technologies.

Upgrade Culture tells the story of how these assumptions about technological change became embedded in the cultural imagination and created what I call “upgrade culture.” ... The full Introduction is available to read or download for free here.