I decided to teach myself how to sew a few months ago, after swearing off department stores and malls (many of which, if reports of the imminent collapse of commercial real estate are true, aren’t long for this world anyway). I had attempted to learn a few a few years ago, but was thwarted by a Brother sewing machine I purchased that seemed to make malfunctioning its mission.

So I pitched it like the trash it a priori was and with great reluctance returned to shopping at the likes of Ross, TJ Maxx and Marshalls — or, as a last resort, the teeming, odious Fashion Square Mall in Scottsdale, Arizona.

Before my latest foray into the textilic wilds of home sewing, I did some research by scanning sewing-enthusiast online exchanges and weblogs. “Don’t buy a new sewing machine, or even a sewing machine made during the last twenty years,” one veteran sewer warned, “They just break, or don’t work properly, therefore [sic] making people believe sewing a tedious and absurd pastime. Buy vintage instead.” Those words became a catechism for me. I embarked on a hunt for a Singer 403A, “Buy vintage” tape-looped in my mind’s ear. I found one on ebay — in supposedly mint condition — and, after some deliberation, pulled the trigger on on the purchase. I waited for it to arrive, not knowing what to expect. I had never owned any type of vintage machine and had known only my perfidious Brother. I imagined some creaky monstrosity, weighing somewhere between a Samoan and a ship’s anchor, in a shade of beige popular in the “I like Ike” era that I would only discover once I scraped off all the rust and cobwebs. It was fifty years old, after all. The only things I have that are over fifty years old are my parents.

What arrived was a sleek, tremendous, heavy, beautiful machine that really did run like the day it came off the assembly line in Anderson, South Carolina. I only paid $85.00. It was no showpiece, to be sure. It had scratch marks on its throatplate from a wedding ring, and the bobbin winder was a bit balky from winding hundreds of bobbins over the decades. And when I opened it up to peer into its innards, nothing but cold, hard metal greeted me. Not a trace of plastic. Not an ounce of aluminum. The best part: Should my machine protest, or refuse to cooperate, its workings were easy enough to discern that I could repair most of its problems. But so far it hasn’t had any problems. It sews and embroiders beautifully and will probably continue to do so nigh unto doomsday. It’s elegantly simple, as sturdy as a fishwife, as faithful as an old mutt.

The same can’t be said for the stuff coming out of China these days. Over at Cryptogon, a brilliantly titled bit of commentary, “The Crapification of Everything Is Just Beginning,” appears that recounts the story of someone who was told, when asking what hand blender she should purchase, to “just buy the cheapest one available, expect it to crap out, and when it does, buy another one or use the warranty.” In other words, count on the item being made like sh*t and plan accordingly. How should this be so, particularly when it comes to kitchen appliances, things we expect to use for some time? Planned obsolescence is the obvious answer; if it’s built into automobiles, we can be damn sure its built into hand blenders. It used to be, though, that planned obsolescence, if it wasn’t regarded as the manufacturer’s cheating the customer, abetted by entropy, it was at the very least considered a sort of game or contest between manufacturer and customer. (Just about everyone has a relative who drives some disintegrating heap, one with duct-taped sideview mirrors and coat-hangered bumpers, trying to wring 20,000 more miles out it after it had already gone 220,000.) If the item slouching toward its premature death no longer functioned all that well, or looked the smartest, at least it consoled its owner with the sense that she’d gotten her own back by squeezing a bit more use value from it than the maker intended.

Such cheating death seems an alien concept to today’s consumer, however. This Wired article cited by Cryptogon puts it all down to just wanting things that are “good enough.” We want “quick and dirty over slow and polished,” the article insists; we don’t care that it works well or that it will work for a long time, just that it work now. The so-called “Good Enough Revolution,” as the Wired piece terms it, basically encourages absorption in the present moment, albeit in a spastic, not mystical, way. The apps and devices leading the revolution have as their chief virtue a readiness-to-hand of the sort which even Heidegger never dreamed, all so people too everything for anything can get something done. These devices, designed to accommodate us by their functionality (which, true to its principle, isn’t great, naturally, but good enough) and by their obliging, unencumbering natures wed the worst tendencies of contemporary work — virtually unlimited availability, multitasking, work intensification — and in so doing contribute to cementing them as the natural condition of the age.

Rest in pieces: the Good Enough Revolution's many fallen.

What the the Good Enough Revolution aims for is absolute immediacy via the dissolution of any obstacles, impediments, contrarieties or difficulties that in the friction they create might alert us to our exploitation. In an age of cloud computing, we ourselves become like clouds, drifting from device to device, app to app, each seamlessly and unassumingly integrated into our environment, which they have transformed into a turnkey milieu of worktainment and sweated leisure. If in years past we were encouraged to be good stewards of the things that enhanced our productivity — keeping our cars running, making sure we have internet access at home, regularly upgrading to more powerful laptops — the Good Enough Revolution relieves us of even this responsibility. By recovering minutes and seconds from boot-ups, file accessing, uploads and whatnot, the Good Enough Revolution valorizes prevailing worklife trends, in which constant, frenzied activity replaces deliberate.

As good little Good Enough Revolutionaries, our responsibility is, then, to adjust ourselves to this radically accelerated stint by becoming as good enough as our good enough stuff. We must show ourselves adequately mobile and amenable wetware by which data can get from spreadsheets to scatter graphs, ads from market surveys to magazine pages, on the double and without a hitch or delay; must show ourselves sufficiently responsive to the stochastic nature of work under globalized coolie capitalism, ready to hop to when summoned and then to disappear when commanded.

Only an economic system no longer capable of producing real value would cease to offer it. I can’t help but think of the ending of Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, when Tomas and Tereza, having fled the government oppression and constant surveillance present in the city for the political calm countryside finally believe that they can lead a meaningful, if quiet, life. But they can’t because, one day while driving into town, they die when the wheels of their automobile literally fly off — the tragic consequence of shoddy Soviet workmanship. Sometimes “good enough” can be dangerous.

My Singer 403A cost the equivalent of $2,000.00 when it rolled off the assembly line sometime in 1958. Expensive, I know. But it’s been humming along for fifty years with nary a peep of protest (and don’t get me started on my wonderful vintage Schwinn, which I purchased after my late-model Schwinn gave me a taste of what Kundera’s characters experienced, almost killing me when the brakes came apart mid-ride). Now think of that Chinese blender — yes, it’s nice to just grab it from Walmart for $10.00. But you don’t really own the thing because it’s gonna break. And then you have to run to WalMart again and again and again whilst hundreds of tons of discarded plastic hand blenders float about in that Texas-sized trash island in the South Pacific.

Sometimes I have the strange feeling that we are moving back to … well … the past, especially when I find myself hunting down goods made before the crapification of everything. I now spend my days scouring ebay for pots and pans and blenders. I haunt estate sales like a bird of ill omen. Because, for me, I don’t want thing to be good enough. I want them to be good.