Welcome back to the weekly parade of planned obsolescence, where global conglomerates dangle new plastic trinkets in front of a population too distracted by their own impending irrelevance to notice they are being fleeced. We begin our descent into the vacuum of late-stage capitalism with Kia, a company that has spent years convincing the masses that soul-crushing mediocrity is actually a 'lifestyle choice.' Their latest offering, the EV2, is being touted as an affordable entry point into the electric vehicle market. In reality, it is a compact toaster on wheels designed for the aspirational peasant who wants to pretend they are saving the planet while stuck in a two-hour commute to a job they despise. The 'affordable' EV is the ultimate carrot on a stick; it is a vehicle for those who can’t afford the luxury of the EV9 but still want to signal their virtue to the neighbors. It is a cynical play for market share in a world where the infrastructure to support these vehicles remains as fragile as the human ego.

Then we have Fujifilm, the masters of selling nostalgia to a generation that has no memory of the past. They’ve debuted new Instax cameras, because apparently, the high-resolution supercomputers in our pockets aren’t quite disappointing enough. We now require physical, blurry, poorly lit artifacts of our vacuous existence to feel 'authentic.' The Instax is the perfect tool for the modern hipster: a device that deliberately produces low-quality results at a high per-photo cost, satisfying that deep-seated urge to pay more for less. It’s not art; it’s a tactile coping mechanism for the digital void. We are so desperate to feel something—anything—real that we are willing to pay for chemically induced memories of brunch, captured in a format that will inevitably end up in a landfill alongside our discarded dreams of a meaningful life.

Not to be outdone in the realm of pretension, Ricoh has unveiled a new monochrome camera. In a world of vibrant color, Ricoh has decided that what the discerning 'artist' really needs is a device that strips away the spectrum, leaving only the grim reality of gray on gray. It is the peak of photographic elitism—a camera that costs thousands of dollars to do less than a budget smartphone. The monochrome-only sensor is marketed as a way to focus on 'form and light,' which is just industry-speak for 'making your boring street photography look like it was taken in 1940s Berlin.' It is a fetishization of limitation, sold to people who believe that a lack of color equates to a depth of soul. If you can’t make a compelling image in color, stripping it away won’t make you Cartier-Bresson; it just makes your mediocrity more expensive to develop.

In the world of audio, Fender is busy rebranding its PreSonus music production app. Because that is exactly what the world needs: another corporate shuffle where the same mediocre software gets a new coat of paint and a fresh logo. Fender, a company that used to represent the raw, bleeding edge of rock and roll, is now a lifestyle brand for middle-aged accountants who buy five-thousand-dollar Strats to hang on their office walls. Rebranding an app is the ultimate corporate busy-work—a way for executives to justify their bonuses by moving pixels around while the actual creative world continues its slow, agonizing death by a thousand subscriptions. It’s a software suite for the musician who spends more time watching YouTube tutorials on 'gear acquisition syndrome' than actually writing a chord progression.

Finally, we have Omega and their new Speedmaster. Another watch. Another 'tribute' to the moon landing. Because apparently, we haven’t milked that specific cow dry over the last half-century. The Speedmaster is a masterpiece of engineering, certainly, but in 2024, it is little more than a piece of jewelry for people who want to feel like astronauts while they navigate a spreadsheet. It is a time-telling device for people who are perpetually out of time, a luxury item for a species that is rapidly running out of air. We wear these things as if they grant us the stoicism of Neil Armstrong, ignoring the fact that the only thing we are launching is another angry tweet from the comfort of a climate-controlled bedroom.

This is the gear news of the week: a collection of more efficient ways to waste money, more aesthetic ways to be bored, and more expensive ways to ignore the crumbling world around us. We are monkeys with credit cards, orbiting a dying star, convinced that if we just buy the right camera or the right car, we might finally feel whole. We won’t. But at least the Kia EV2 will look nice in the driveway while we wait for the end.