The Three Lives of Things in a Post-modern Economy
This is a study of the material aspect of modern and post-modern Western civilization. After first laying out the problem and perspective this chapter goes on to discuss the relation between commerce and industry; the measurement of innovation as a cycle over time; social facts or the sociological phenomena of military–industrial scientific progress, innovation and diffusion worldwide; methods of estimating the life-cycle of innovation, manufacture, use and obsolescence in a world of production, development and progress; innovation and armaments; the underlying structure of the post–Second World War global system and its arms race; self and the world: prospects for the future and finally, the technology of obsolescence and the science of vivisection.