Contemporary life has become an endless parade of technological advancements. Yesterday’s futuristic devices suddenly appear to be artifacts of the past. The idea that things, jobs, and languages become obsolete—that the old must continuously make way for the new—is a seemingly indisputable tenet of modernity. The churn is relentless, with effects that ripple across industries, labor markets, and our everyday lives.

Obsolescence is often considered the endpoint of a developmental trajectory—a necessary side effect of progress. The term evokes history’s also-rans. Out-of-date. Antiquated. Useless. It indexes the hardscrabble realities of postindustrial zones and animates fears about what artificial intelligence will mean for a variety of livelihoods. Obsolescence can also be more than a label, description, or threat. It materializes in mountains of e-waste rising across the world, and in that box of retired gadgets lurking in your attic. But what if we approached obsolescence as more than an endpoint? Could it turn out to be something different, even hopeful?

The Obsolescence Issue marks Limn’s return after a six-year hiatus. Since its founding in 2010, the journal has brought together eclectic groups of thinkers to reframe contemporary problems.¹ As we worked to resuscitate a scholar-led, design-forward print publication in 2024, obsolescence emerged as a provocative concept, both for Limn as an intellectual project, and for a world at once fixated on and anxious about innovation. Many magazines have published an “innovation issue.” To our knowledge, Limn is the first to flip the script with an obsolescence issue.

The problem of obsolescence is not new. Derived from Latin, the English term obsolete has connoted out-of-date things and practices since the sixteenth century.² Although the twin processes of innovation and obsolescence have appeared across human history, the cycle intensified with the rise of industrial capitalism.³ Since the nineteenth century, analysts have highlighted how the active process of making commodities, processes, and livelihoods obsolete is integral to economic growth. The production of obsolescence grew increasingly sophisticated, and by the 1920s, thinkers were arguing for “investing in obsolescence,” reframing the replacement of old mechanical equipment not as undesirable or as a loss, but as a part of progress.⁴ From the worker’s vantage point, however, this progress often meant displacement, as skilled trades like woodworking and dressmaking gave way to the mass manufacturing systems of Fordism, and as revolutionary technologies like the automobile replaced the horse-drawn carriage.⁵

By the 1940s and 1950s, “planned obsolescence” had emerged as a purposeful design imperative—a business strategy to increase profits by manufacturing goods with shorter lifespans, rather than producing high-quality items that last.⁶ The arrival of the digital age has prompted new iterations. Tech companies refuse to offer software updates for aging models; plugs and cables no longer fit the latest ports; parts-pairing codes prevent repairers from using salvaged parts to fix broken devices. As this short history shows, obsolescence—planned and otherwise—has profoundly shaped today’s culture of consumption and disposability. This is an important story, but it’s far from the only one. Obsolescence is still mutating and on the move.

With that in mind, Limn invited scholars, artists, and activists to grapple with the concept of obsolescence. On closer examination, the objects in innovation’s rearview mirror prove livelier than they first appear. Locked out of their tractors by proprietary operating systems, farmers hack their way to the fore of the Right to Repair movement. An old drug cures a new disease. A once-forgotten art form births a new vintage of cool. From state efforts to plan for a circular economy, to communities of activists and artists that organize around the recovery and use of old things, there is more to obsolescence than meets the eye.

This collection of essays, art, and interviews illuminates the problem from multiple angles: some oblique, others head-on. Our contributors present a nuanced understanding of obsolescence and its stakes. To call something obsolete is to devalue it—to deem it anachronistic. As a label or a claim, obsolescence sticks to both things and people, making it a matter of pressing environmental, social, and ethical concern. The good news is that not all of its effects are dire. It may be OK to desire obsolescence; after all, many of us would like to do away with racism, violence, and fossil fuel dependency. For a world in peril, these shifting meanings and usages should be a source of concern and curiosity. Here, then, are five provocations for the encounters to come:

These provocations hit close to home for Limn. For decades, commentators have argued that print media is on its way out. And yet, Limn, a hybrid digital and print publication since its inception, thrived in this shifting media landscape. But then, its first run came to an end. In the afterword to this issue, Limn’s founders—Christopher Kelty, Stephen Collier and Andrew Lakoff—reflect on their vision for a publication that would respond to the puzzles of obsolescence emerging in scholarship and publishing in the 2010s. In 2023, a new team of editors took up the challenge and asked whether we might make Limn new again. This has required a careful balancing of what the publication was, and what it could be.

In beginning again with Limn 11, one thing is clear: obsolescence is not obsolete. How we understand the problem and what we make of so-called obsolete things will do much to determine our shared futures. Accordingly, we invite you to rummage around in the dustbin of history with us as we explore the possibilities of obsolescence.

1. Stephen J. Collier, Martin Høyem, Christopher Kelty, and Andrew Lakoff, “Experimenting with Collaboration,” in Collaborative Anthropology Today, eds. Dominic Boyer and George E. Marcus (Cornell University Press, 2020), 102–114. ↩︎
2. Oxford English Dictionary, 2024, “Obsolete.” ↩︎
3. Obsolescence has long been a shadow concept in critiques of capitalism. In 1848, for instance, Marx and Engels wrote of the cycles through which old things and fixed relations “with their venerable ideas and views are swept away, all new ones becom[ing] obsolete before they can ossify.” See “Manifesto of the Communist Party,” in The Marx–Engels Reader, 2nd edition, ed. Robert C. Tucker (W. W. Norton, 1978). Marx later addressed capitalism’s quickening yet deleterious cycles of production and consumption in his 1857 Grundrisse (first published in 1939 and also available in Tucker’s Marx-Engels Reader).
   
   The idea that obsolescence is innovation’s twin comes from Joel Burges’s essay, “Obsolescence/Innovation,” in Time: A Vocabulary of the Present, eds. Joel Burges and Amy Elias (New York University Press, 2016). Though it is innovation’s lesser-known counterpart, obsolescence nevertheless has been central to capitalism’s ever-evolving forms of “creative destruction”; see Joseph A. Schumpeter’s Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, Third Edition, Ch. 7(Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2008). No surprise then that its wasteful qualities have featured in books ranging from Vance Packard’s 1960s bestseller The Waste Makers (Ig Publishing, 2011) to John Scanlan’s more recent On Garbage (Reaktion Books, 2005).
   
   Daniel Abramson and Mark Goble have tracked obsolescence’s central place in the fields of architecture, urban design, and modernism more broadly. See Abramson’s Obsolescence: An Architectural History (University of Chicago Press, 2016), and Goble’s “Obsolescence,” in A New Vocabulary for Global Modernism, eds. Eric Hayot and Rebecca L. Walkowitz (Columbia University Press, 2016).
   
   Perhaps the most well-known treatment of obsolescence comes from Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan, who framed it as one of media and technology’s four-fold (“tetrad”) effects. See McLuhan’s Laws of Media, ed. Eric McLuhan (University of Toronto Press, 1988). ↩︎
4. Joel Burges, “Obsolescence/Innovation,” in Time: A Vocabulary of the Present, eds. Joel Burges and Amy Elias (New York University Press, 2016), 85. ↩︎
5. Costas Cavounidis, Qingyuan Chai, Kevin Lang, and Raghav Malhotra provide compelling case studies in Obsolescence Rents: Teamsters, Truckers, and Impending Innovations (Cambridge National Bureau of Economic Research, 2023). ↩︎
6. For more on purposeful and planned obsolescence, see Paul Gregory’s “A Theory of Purposeful Obsolescence,” Southern Economic Journal 14, no. 1 (1947): 24; and Giles Slade’s Made to Break: Technology and Obsolescence in America (Harvard University Press, 2006). ↩︎