If you’re sick of upgrading all your tech gear every time a new product launches, a naked guy halfway across the world is doing a handstand just for you.
“The Naked Handstander” (NSFW photos) is a guy who, for the past five years, has been doing handstands all over the world — without clothes, natch — to raise awareness for planned obsolescence, a fancy term for expensive stuff becoming obsolete, which he describes as “the deliberate shortening of a product’s useful life in order to force the consumer to buy or ‘upgrade’ over and over and over again…in the name of Profit and Greed.”
The first naked handstand took place in Vik, Iceland way back in May 2009. Since then, he’s donned his birthday suit for the cause in Australia, the U.S., China, Sweden, Norway, and Thailand, among many other countries.
“I’m not exactly sure what triggered the first naked handstand, it just came naturally,” he told the Independent.
The Naked Handstander points out on his blog that our clothes are falling apart faster than they used to and that, in general, products aren’t made to last a long time because companies want you to re-purchase the items that break. And that’s how you end up with three outdated, just-broken-enough-so-that-it’s-unusable phones or mp3 players or laptops stuffed at the bottom of your desk drawer.
The Naked Handstander is, as expected, not too happy about the recent iPhone 6 release. “Like any Apple product, it’s classic planned obsolescence,” he told the Independent. “They put paper profits first and everything else comes secondary.”
We totally get it, dude. But unfortunately we also understand this feeling too:
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