Productoids

I.

A productoid is what a factory makes. It has been specified, built, named, priced, shipped, and entered on the books as the kind of thing the factory produces, and it answers to that description in every respect but one: it is not necessarily useful. Some productoids are useful. Those we have always called products, and in naming them we made a long mistake about the word.

The mistake is the ordinary one of taking a feature of the specimens you happen to care about and promoting it to the definition. You could define a bird as a thing that flies, if the only birds you had ever met were the ones that flew, and the definition would trouble no one until a penguin walked past — at which point you would be tempted to call it a defective bird rather than admit that flight had never been in the definition at all. Usefulness is the flight of products. It is a property a great many of them have carried, carried so dependably for so long that the word was built around it, so that a useless product reads, against the word, as a contradiction or a failure. It is neither. It is the specimen that corrects the definition. The productoid is the bird; the product is the bird that flies; and use, like flight, turns out to have been a frequent habit of the genus and never its principle.

II.

This is plainest at the factory. There is no productoid-making machine standing opposed to some honest product-making machine, because there was never a product-making machine. Every factory makes productoids, and can do nothing else, because use is not among the things a factory does. Use happens later, somewhere else, to someone the factory will never see, long after the object has left the floor. From inside the factory the useful productoid and the useless one are the same object — same drawings, same line, same launch, same entry in the same ledger — and the machine has never once known which of the two it was making. It still doesn’t. The factories that turned out useful things from time to time were productoid factories that got lucky, and mistook the luck for their purpose.

It is natural to object that some objects plainly owe their standing to being useful: that nobody funds or builds or ships a thing unless it is good for something, so use must be doing the constitutive work after all. But look at what the funding and the building and the shipping actually answered to. They answered to a claim of use — a use anticipated, projected, demonstrated in advance, written into the document that justified the spend. They answered to use represented, which is available at the moment of decision, and never to use itself, which is not, and which arrives, if it arrives, only afterward, to the stranger downstream, far too late to have conferred anything. The represented use travels with the object on the floor, as part of what it is. The actual use does not. So even the hard case resolves the same way: what bears the weight is the appearance of use, which is a productoid feature, and not use, which is not present yet and may never be. A product is a productoid carrying one extra thing, and the extra thing is not its usefulness but the look of it — a look that some productoids eventually make good on and most quietly do not.

III.

None of this is new; only its visibility is. What has changed, in the factories built lately, is that the useful fraction has fallen towards zero while the look of use has become cheap to issue directly, in any quantity, fastened to nothing. The appearance a productoid once had to earn — by being, often enough, actually good for something — is now standard equipment, stamped on at the source. And as the useful fraction approaches zero the definition stands exposed, the way a category survives the loss of a frequent feature only by revealing that the feature was never essential to it. The decline everyone reports is not products decaying into productoids. It is the productoid, always the genus, no longer troubling to throw off the useful specimens that used to disguise it. Nothing has been lost. A costume has been set down.

IV.

What remains, and will not be argued away, is that the useful specimens were the only ones anyone ever wanted. This is the whole of the discomfort, and it is worth stating without resolving, because the two halves are both true and do not meet. Usefulness is not what makes a product a product. Usefulness is the only reason anyone reached for products in the first place. The productoid satisfies the definition entirely and gives no one anything they wanted, and there is no contradiction in its doing so, because the definition and the wanting were never the same thing — only kept, for a long convenient while, in the same place. We are free now to make products without the encumbrance, to turn out at last the pure article, the thing that is fully a product and good for nothing. The single objection to it, that no one wanted it, has nowhere to live in the definition. It lives only in us, who wanted something, and find that the want was never written down anywhere the machine could read.