Made to Break: Technology and Obsolescence in America
by Giles Slade · 14 Apr 2006 · 384pp · 89,250 words
onset of the Depression, and in desperation manufacturers used inferior materials to deliberately shorten the life spans of products and force consumers to purchase replacements. Planned obsolescence is the catch-all phrase used to describe the assortment of techniques used to artificia ly limit the durability of a manufactured good in order
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their need to save a dollar by waiting several weeks for a free replacement to arrive by return mail. Before very long, the venture into planned obsolescence by these two innovative American watchmakers ended with the unplanned obsolescence of their own dollar pocket watch. As wristwatches came into fashion near the end
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products which, like the bottle cap, were used only once and then tossed in the trash. Painter himself never used the terms repetitive consumption or planned obsolescence, but the implications of his advice are unmistakable.“Think of something like the Crown Cork,” he told Gillette one evening in the extravagant parlor of
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other disposables, not only habituated women to increasing levels of repetitive consumption but broadened the cultural acceptance of the throwaway ethic, a necessary accompaniment to planned obsolescence. Not only were tampons and sanitary napkins tossed in the trash after one use, but such products also gave more afflu nt women one less
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as a Depression-era movement, but after January 1933 its momentum was lost, and it became a fringe movement. THE BUSINESSMAN’S UTOPIA Like technocracy, “planned obsolescence” was conceived during the desperate year of 1932. And in its early incarnation, it too focused on restructuring society around a body of experts whose
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mandate was to achieve an equilibrium of supply and demand that would eliminate technological unemployment. Unlike technocracy, however, planned obsolescence was not a movement. It was the idea of one man, a successful Manhattan real estate broker by the name of Bernard London. London lived
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1932, giving it—to whatever limited extent—exposure during the Depression. Over twenty years later, the Milwaukee designer Brooks Stevens would claim to have invented planned obsolescence himself (see Chapter 6), but Stevens’s claim does not stand up to scrutiny. In his firs pamphlet,London outlined a scheme that combined features
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Depression gave manufacturers a new incentive to systematize their strategies of adulteration and to apply scientifi research methods to the practice of death dating or planned obsolescence in order to encourage repetitive consumption. At firs these practices had no name,and even in internal corporate documents manufacturers were reluctant to refer to
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, product. But monopolies and cartels were illegal by the 1930s, owing to a series of antitrust laws that were increasingly enforced. Moreover, the meaning of “planned obsolescence”had not yet crossed over from its external technocratic use to become an internal industrial substitute for adulteration; and the alternative phrase, “death dating,” would
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1934 Lewis Mumford described practices that would later be called “death dating,” but he did not use that term nor the phrase “planned obsolescence.” So, despite Bernard London’s pamphlets, planned obsolescence probably did not achieve currency among industrial designers until after the 1936 publication of an article on “product durability” in Printers’ Ink
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consumption is a tax on production; and it tends to wipe out the gains the machine makes in that department.”49 Because the practice of planned obsolescence had monopolistic ramifica ions,the earliest scientifi tests to deliberately limit product life spans have left few traces in the public record. General Electric seems
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imagine. However, the remarkable innovations that eventually solved this problem brought deliberate product obsolescence into the world of radio manufacturing and broadcasting. And from there, planned obsolescence would spread to an entire industry of consumer electronics. In the early 1930s David Sarnoff, the unstoppable head of RCA who had made a fortune
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Stevens requires ethical yoga. Like Cousins, Stevens left school and started to work in 1933, one year after Bernard London issued Ending the Depression through Planned Obsolescence. Unlike Cousins, however, Stevens was the unapologetic child of corporate culture who never turned down a paying assignment over small matters like tastelessness. If he
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was recognized as America’s controversial “crown prince of obsolescence.”5 Stevens claimed—publicly and often—that it was he who actually invented the phrase “planned obsolescence,” and he was certainly the term’s most vocal champion. Due to his efforts at self-promotion, many people today still believe the phrase was
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they are resold and redistributed.9 After his Paris Auto Show success, Stevens began to step up his speaking engagements, interviews, and position pieces on planned obsolescence.10 He enjoyed his new reputation as the bad boy of industrial design, and he used this carefully constructed image to garner more publicity for
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part had been happy to participate in consumerism because they had a vested interest in believing what they had been told: that the wastefulness of planned obsolescence fueled a competitive research economy which guaranteed them a position on the cutting edge of technology. American planes and bombs, science and technology, kept the
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-doubt and readied the country for a period of genuine self-criticism. While the early retirement of the Edsel was not itself an example of planned obsolescence (indeed, it was very much unplanned), this rejection marked a turning point in the American consumer’s previously uncritical acceptance of the ethic of
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editor, and editor-in-chief of several major design and business publications, including Architectural Forum, Fortune Magazine, and Design Journal. While clearly in favor of planned obsolescence, Nelson’s writing lacked Stevens’s cynical opportunism. Also, he did not pander to the corporate elite. Nelson was equally comfortable in American and European
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design circles, and he held highly developed and informed opinions about planned obsolescence. These would come to fruition decades later in Milan, through an anti-establishment avant-garde design movement called Memphis, led by his young friend and
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the conservative pages of the Harvard Business Review created a surge of renewed interest in Packard’s firs book, which had contained numerous observations about planned obsolescence. With the topic now achieving national prominence, Packard wanted to return to it in a book-length study focused specifica ly on waste. Packard firs
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,The Waste Makers helped Americans turn a corner in their examination of American business practices. It explained complex ideas, like those embedded in the term “planned obsolescence” itself. But also, where the Hidden Persuaders had implicated only advertisers, manufacturers, and marketers, The Waste Makers placed responsibility for waste on the consuming public
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Huron Statement read: “The tendency to over-production . . . of surplus commodities encourages ‘market research’ techniques to deliberately create pseudo-needs in consumers . . . and introduces wasteful ‘planned obsolescence’ as a permanent feature of business strategy.While real social needs accumulate as rapidly as profits it becomes evident that Money, instead of dignity of
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main points, Stafford seemed less willing than Brooks Stevens to draw fi e. Like GM executives, he clearly avoided the negative connotations of the term “planned obsolescence.” Many of the awkward phrases of Stafford’s Design News piece result from this decision. Maneuvering around the phrase with some difficul y, Stafford inelegantly
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overwhelmingly unfavorable responses from the professional engineers who made up the majority of its readership, Design News itself came down on the management side, favoring planned obsolescence. The January 19, 1959, issue contained a further editorial by Ernest Cunningham, its executive editor and Stafford’s boss. Cunningham wrote antagonistically, suggesting that many
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editorial in a February 1959 issue by Jack Waldheim, senior partner at a design and engineering fi m in Milwaukee. Although Brooks Stevens had understood planned obsolescence to mean psychological obsolescence (making consumer goods appear dated through the use of design), Waldheim’s piece, by a committed former teacher of industrial design
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become a very unpopular business strategy. “Believe me,” Jack Waldheim wrote with considerable conviction, your life may be endangered by the spreading infection of planned obsolescence. Planned obsolescence is the deliberate attempt to have something break down or become outdated long before it has lost its usefulness—its utility—or its value! . . . Its
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Brooks Stevens. But it was getting harder and harder for him to fin a venue that would run an unmediated piece favoring planned obsolescence. Outside the business world, thanks to Packard, planned obsolescence was generally condemned, having become something of a catchphrase for all that was wrong with America. Never at the forefront of
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academic discussions of industrial design, Stevens had placed his occasional pieces on planned obsolescence in more popular publications like True magazine and Milwaukee’s own dailies. The last of these appeared in The Rotarian in February 1960. While lacking
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stands for several months. The feature contains very little that is new from Brooks Stevens. Much more important in terms of the social reception of planned obsolescence is Teague’s longer and unequivocal condemnation: “When design is prostituted in this way,” he wrote, “its own logic vanishes and queer results appear.” One
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cofounder of the American Association of Industrial Designers in 1944. Although not best known for his written work, Teague cared passionately about the subject of planned obsolescence, which he saw as a threat to the integrity of his profession: “This practice of making previous models look outmoded when the new models have
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no better service to offer is known as ‘planned obsolescence’ or ‘artificia obsolescence,’ the latter is the more accurate term but still not as accurate as just plain ‘gypping.’” Teague’s article went on
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Henry Ford used to say, ‘We aim to make better things for less money.’” Teague’s Rotarian article placed a great deal of blame for planned obsolescence squarely on the shoulders of automakers and their designers. Without specifica ly mentioning Harley Earl, Teague referred to a “hurtful instance of public reaction [to
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prostituted in this way, its own logic vanishes.” FROM TAILFINS TO BEETLEMANIA In looking forward to a new design era based on something other than planned obsolescence, Teague observed that during the 1957 buyers’ strike that sank the Edsel, Americans who had “cash and credit both went on buying other things.”
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noteworthy happened inside the car. Gradually, by opposing the idealization and absurdity of Madison Avenue’s consumer paradise (and especially the self-serving strategy of planned obsolescence), DDB put forward its own style of advertising as an antidote to the American establishment. Following the Volkswagen campaign, for a while, Americans bought fewer
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, once American manufacturers noticed that clothing was being sold by using the language of the counterculture, consumer products in many other field followed suit. Anti– planned obsolescence advertising became a standard of the late 1960s. Even the corporate giants fell into step. Perhaps because of this cooptation, the counterculture lasted well beyond
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nce of John Kenneth Galbraith and had joined the faculty of Harvard’s Graduate School of Business Administration. An internationally respected economist, Galbraith brought the planned obsolescence controversy into academia by observing that a society which sets for itself the goal of increasing its supply of goods will tend, inevitably, to identify
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discovering changes that can be advertised. The research program will be built around the need to devise “selling points” and “advertising pegs” or to accelerate “planned obsolescence.”57 Galbraith’s Afflu nt Society was already leaving its mark on people who would soon become active in the young Kennedy administration. In 1960
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the blue prints . . . It was a blow to Soviet military buildup. NORMAN A. BAILEY, THE STRATEGIC PLAN THAT WON THE COLD WAR (1999) 8 Weaponizing Planned Obsolescence The development of the integrated circuit provided American manufacturers with a substantial and threatening lead over the Soviet Union in a technology vital to defense
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disposable like Kleenex.”1 But 1970 was notable for another event underappreciated at the time.In that year the brilliant cold warrior responsible for turning planned obsolescence into a weapon against the Soviet Union joined Richard Nixon’s staff as an economist. Although Gus Weiss fulfi led his economic duties meticulously at
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systematically and with care, fully recognizing that obsolescence compels the neverending replacement of older weapons with new ones.”9 This is how repetitive consumption and planned obsolescence became one of the mainstays of America’s geopolitical strategy. Ironically, this strategy engaged the Soviet Union in the purist kind of capitalist venture—a
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of American e-waste will jump radically, when the FCC-mandated shift to high-defini ion television goes into effect—a one-time instance of planned obsolescence with unprecedented negative consequences. Because the toxins contained in most electronics are indestructible, the European Union has banned their use by manufacturers and consumers. This
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at The Sixties Project webpage: http://lists.village.virginia.edu/ sixties/HTML_docs/Resources/Primary/Manifestos/SDS_Port_Huron .html. 34. Packard writes about the planned obsolescence debate in Design News in The Waste Makers, pp. 63–67. 35. E. S. Stafford, “Product Death Dates—A Desirable Concept?” Design News, 13,
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,” Design News, 14, no. 2 (January 19, 1959): 149. 41. Jack Waldheim, “Lollipops and Faucets,”Design News, 4, no. 3 (February 2, 1959): 3. 42. “Planned Obsolescence—Is It Fair? Yes! Says Brooks Stevens; No! Says Walter Dorwin Teague,”Rotarian, February 1960. 43. Thomas Frank,The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture
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. Ibid. Larry Downes and Chunka Mui, Unleashing the Killer App: Digital Strategies for Market Dominance (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1998), p. 158. 8. Weaponizing Planned Obsolescence 1. Victor J. Papanek, Design for the Real World (New York: Bantam, 1971), p. 97. 2. Told by Jane Greenbaum Eskind to Harris A. Gilbert
A Life Less Throwaway: The Lost Art of Buying for Life
by Tara Button · 8 Feb 2018 · 315pp · 81,433 words
you just go into your back garden or a public park. Nature documentaries can also be a lovely way to escape from seeing ‘stuff’. * * * 2 Planned Obsolescence or Why they don’t make ’em like they used to ‘Obsolescence’ is a horrible mouthful of a word that essentially means ‘when something becomes
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, is when people plan for products to become useless. Deliberately. Let that sink in for a second. There are two main ways planned obsolescence happens. The first is physical, where companies design products to break before they need to. That is the subject of this chapter. The other is
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’ll look at that in the next chapter. But first I’m going to take you back to the Twenties and Thirties to discover how planned obsolescence came about. I’ll also share with you some of the shocking evidence of companies who have conspired against us to change the way we
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buy forever. WHO PLANNED IT? Planned obsolescence was born and brought up (to be very naughty) in America. ‘Obsolescence is the American way,’ boasted industrial designers Roy Sheldon and Egmont Arens in
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around half of all children without decent shelter or food to eat. In these conditions we can’t blame people for clutching at ideas like planned obsolescence to solve the issues, even if we are now left to deal with the fallout. In 1932 a Russian-American called Bernard London published a
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grand plan entitled ‘Ending the Depression Through Planned Obsolescence’. After noticing that people held onto their products longer in a depression and this meant less money being spent on goods, he suggested that every
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, but we and our planet end up paying the price. So here we are. The calls for longer-lasting products have been ignored for decades, planned obsolescence reigns supreme and the commercial world is steaming us blindfold into an iceberg of trash. QUALITY STRIPPING We’ve all experienced quality stripping, and I
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’m not talking about particularly adept G-string jiggling. If ‘building it to break’ is the famous poster child of planned obsolescence, ‘quality stripping’ is probably the most common tactic used. It’s being done to products all over the world, all of the time, and it
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’ve been trained to expect poor longevity. •Look out for petitions to change the law in your country. France already has a law to prevent planned obsolescence, and a director of any company caught in ‘built to break’ tactics can now go to jail for two years and face a fine of
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over time. Please join us on this mission by signing the #makeitlast petition at change.org or reaching out to us at BuyMeOnce.com. Clearly, planned obsolescence isn’t as simple as mysterious people in white coats putting mythical ‘kill chips’ in our blenders to stop them from working the day after
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can do to combat it. THE MOTHER OF PSYCHOLOGICAL OBSOLESCENCE Several men have been given the rather dubious honour of being titled ‘the father of planned obsolescence’, including King Gillette, inventor of the disposable razor, J. Gordon Lippincott, who praised the economic benefits of obsolescence in his book Design for Business, and
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years; now it is two years. When it is one year, we will have the perfect score.’2 All these men played their part. However, planned obsolescence also has a mother, and she’s rather intriguing. When Christine Frederick was born in 1883, her father apparently cried, ‘Horrors! Why, it’s only
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pre-teen tote bag had it right all along. We are ‘born to shop’. As if we didn’t have enough to contend with, with planned obsolescence and advertising, our very nature is stacked against us. But in this chapter I’ll be showing you how we can counter our inner consumer
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radical act’, and it is! Certainly, it now goes against what most companies want us to do. Repair is one of our best defences against planned obsolescence, and whole communities have sprung up around the idea of mending something rather than replacing it, so find the fixer-uppers in your local community
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, ‘Influencing value priorities and increasing well-being: The effects of reflecting on intrinsic values’, Journal of Positive Psychology, 7: 3 (2012), 249–61. CHAPTER 2: PLANNED OBSOLESCENCE 1.Roy Sheldon and Egmont Arens, Consumer Engineering: A new technique for prosperity (Harper & Bros., 1932), 65. 2.Bernard London, ‘Ending the Depression through
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Planned Obsolescence’ (1932), 5, https.catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/006829435. 3.The Light Bulb Conspiracy, Cosima Dannoritzer, Steve Michelson (directors), RTVE, Televisión Española, 2010. 4.Cited in
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exercise 66–7; symbolism, the seduction of 44–6 see also marketing appliances: buying guide 176–7, 182–4, 186; care and repair 255–9; planned obsolescence and 17–18, 20, 22, 26 babies, buying for 192–7 bedrooms and living areas: buying guide 164–70 Bombeck, Erma 148 Boyer, G. Bruce
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? 227–9 native advertising 64–5 necessities into luxuries, turning 95–7; exercise 96–7 passion: discovering your passions exercise 110–11; purpose and 224 planned obsolescence 12–26; history of 12–17; Lightbulb Conspiracy, The 14–16; #makeitlast campaign 24–6; making it unfixable 20–2; quality stripping 17–20; what
The Story of Stuff: The Impact of Overconsumption on the Planet, Our Communities, and Our Health-And How We Can Make It Better
by Annie Leonard · 22 Feb 2011 · 538pp · 138,544 words
on governmental regulations. And another thing: why are electronics breaking so fast and why are they cheaper to replace than repair? So I learned about planned obsolescence, advertising, and other tools for promoting consumerism. On the surface, each of these topics seemed separate from the next, unconnected, and a long way from
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about each of these tools, so I’m going to review just the two most insidious of them here. Two Tricks of the Trade 1. Planned Obsolescence As the production of Stuff ratcheted up, one of the first messages broadcast to consumers was that it was better to have more than one
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a glut would be very bad for business indeed. So the architects of the system came up with a strategy to keep consumers buying: planned obsolescence. Another name for planned obsolescence is “designed for the dump.” Brooks Stevens, an American industrial designer who is widely credited with popularizing the term in the 1950s, defined
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it as “instilling in the buyer the desire to own something a little newer, a little better, a little sooner than is necessary.”55 In planned obsolescence, products are intended to be thrown away as quickly as possible and then replaced. (That’s called “shortening the replacement cycle.”) Now, this is different
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about a year, are pretty much never technologically obsolete when we throw them away and replace them with new ones. That’s planned obsolescence at work. The idea of planned obsolescence gained currency in the 1920s and 30s as government and businesspeople realized that our industries were making more Stuff than people cared to
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estate broker named Bernard London who wanted to play his part in stimulating the economy distributed his now infamous pamphlet called Ending the Depression through Planned Obsolescence. In it London argued for creating a government agency tasked with assigning death dates to specific consumer products, at which time consumers would be required
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that industry has done was intentional and manipulative, but this one was. Corporate decision makers, industrial designers, economic planners, and advertising men actively, strategically promoted planned obsolescence as a way to keep the engine of the economy running. In his 1960 book The Waste Makers (one of my all time favorite reads
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), social critic Vance Packard documents the early debates about planned obsolescence in consumer products in the 1950s and 60s. While some individuals opposed the idea, worrying that it was unethical and jeopardized their professional credibility, others
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waste. It’s a sound contribution to the American economy.”57 The strategy has worked beyond the wildest dreams of the people who instituted it. Planned obsolescence continues to dominate and define consumer culture today, and we dispose of (often perfectly good) products at an ever-increasing rate. In the service of
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having the old one break midcontract, when replacement phones are much pricier. Out goes the old one! 2. Digital TV conversion: In the largest government-planned obsolescence ever, 2009 witnessed the end of analog TV broadcasts, which were replaced with digital. This rendered millions of perfectly fine televisions useless without a special
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Strength Design: How Brooks Stevens Shaped Your World,” Milwaukee Art Museum (mam.org/collection/archives/brooks/index.asp). 56. Bernard London, Ending the Depression Through Planned Obsolescence, originally published in 1932. Text of this pamphlet is posted at adbusters.org/blogs/blackspot _blog/consumer_society_made_break.htm. 57. Packard, The Waste
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–159, 181 Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act of 1986, 93, 98 Endangered Species Act (ESA) of 1973, 98 Ending the Depression through Planned Obsolescence (London), 161–162 Envirogenetics, 75 Environmental Health News, 260 Environmental justice (EJ) movement, 87–88 Environmental Justice Networking Forum, 222 Environmental Paper Network (EPN), 9
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, 55, 230 PFCs (perfluorocarbons), 65, 79 PFOA (perfluorooctanoic acid), 73 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 224–227 Phosphoric acid, 60 Phosphorus, 59 Phthalates, 69, 71–72, 76, 124 Planned obsolescence, 160, 161–163 Plant-derived pharmaceuticals, 2–3 Plastics, 44, 194–195, 230–232 PVC (polyvinyl chloride), 42, 51, 61–63, 68–72, 124, 170
Future Shock
by Alvin Toffler · 1 Jun 1984 · 286pp · 94,017 words
. The very idea of obsolescence is disturbing to people bred on the ideal of permanence, and it is particularly upsetting when thought to be planned. Planned obsolescence has been the target of so much recent social criticism that the unwary reader might be led to regard it as the primary or even
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consumer change, when the functions to be performed by the product are themselves altered. These needs are not as simply described as the critics of planned obsolescence sometimes assume. An object, whether a car or a can opener, may be evaluated along many different parameters. A car, for example, is more than
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credited with having created it single-handedly. The tendency toward shorter relational durations is thus built more deeply into the social structure than arguments over planned obsolescence or the manipulative effectiveness of Madison Avenue would suggest. The rapidity with which consumers' needs shift is reflected in the alacrity with which buyers abandon
Wasteland: The Dirty Truth About What We Throw Away, Where It Goes, and Why It Matters
by Oliver Franklin-Wallis · 21 Jun 2023 · 309pp · 121,279 words
the consequences would fall not on their bottom line, but on the consumer. Along the way, the booming marketing industry gave us the concept of ‘planned obsolescence’, in which new products were designed to fail and thus need replacing – culminating in our modern world, where technology from smartphones to tractors can in
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comes to e-waste, that sense is often followed by another, more serious allegation: that of ‘planned obsolescence’, by which industries design products with artificially short lives, so that they need to be replaced more quickly. Planned obsolescence is often treated as some kind of conspiracy, when in reality it is just a historical
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article before its natural life of usefulness is completed, in order to make way for the new and better thing.’17 Rather than something negative, planned obsolescence was pitched as a progressive force; during the Great Depression, obsolescence was touted as a way to restart the flagging economy. One early advocate, a
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car ownership span was 5 years: now it is 2 years. When it is one year, we will have a perfect score.’23 Today, overtly planned obsolescence of the kind practised by the light bulb cartel would be seen as unethical, not to mention illegal. But the fundamental tenets of obsolescence that
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from magic’ he might have been describing the iPhone.) Even so, the electronics industry in recent years has faced allegations that a modern version of planned obsolescence is contributing to our rising tide of e-waste. The assertion is less one of fact than of feeling, but nonetheless has slowly but steadily
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Want (New York: Henry Holt and Company), 1999, p. 197. 18 Bernard London, Ending the Depression Through Planned Obsolescence (1932): https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/27/London_%281932%29_Ending_the_depression_through_planned_obsolescence.pdf 19 Giles Slade, Made to Break: Technology and Obsolescence in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press
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–20 phthalates 69, 242 Picher 278, 279, 288–90 Pink Elephant Recycling 113–20, 123 Planet Food 179–82, 194 planetary threshold, chemical pollutants 229 planned obsolescence 10, 255–9 Plastic China (documentary film) 78–9 plastics: bags 37, 46, 48n, 54, 55, 66, 71, 75, 114, 132, 156, 169, 180, 208
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-shred contracts 254; national recycling rate, official 70–1; Packaging Export Recycling Notes (PERNs) 86; Packaging Recycling Notes (PRNs) scheme 86; paper/fibre 42–6; planned obsolescence and 255–9; plastic 1, 2, 3, 10–12, 26–7, 37, 51–60, 64–73, 74–92, 134–5, 261, 323, 326, 330; process
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) 34, 76–7, 89, 104, 247–72; data and 253–4; deadstock 254–5; Electronics Recyclers International, Inc (ERI) 247–54; export of 261–72; planned obsolescence and 255–9; recycling of 247–72; repair and 259–61; size of market 248–9; urban mining 249 waste influencers 320–3, 339 Waste
The Day the World Stops Shopping
by J. B. MacKinnon · 14 May 2021 · 368pp · 109,432 words
the cleaners, T-shirts that get those tiny, mysterious holes that are a staple of internet threads. (Do I have moths? Bugs? No, you have planned obsolescence. The holes are caused by today’s thin fabrics rubbing at the belt line, against countertops, and what have you.) The ultimate in clothing turnover
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a global profile. They increasingly target a deconsumer market, which they also actively strive to expand by encouraging people to deconsume. In a world of planned obsolescence, or products deliberately designed to stop working, fall apart, or go out of fashion quickly, Patagonia markets its gear as built to last. Besides being
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Phoebus agreed to depress lamp life to a thousand-hour standard. More than three decades later, in 1960, muckraking journalist Vance Packard popularized the term “planned obsolescence” to describe manufacturers’ deliberate efforts to design products so that they are quickly used up, stop working, fall apart, cannot be fixed, or otherwise become
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stale-dated. The Phoebus cartel’s decision to shorten bulb lifespans is considered one of the earliest examples of planned obsolescence at an industrial scale. Phoebus is easily cast as a conspiracy of big-business evil-doers. It even makes an appearance as such in Thomas
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conformity. “You can imagine what it would do to the market if that started happening.” At the time the thousand-hour bulb was established, however, planned obsolescence was not a secret. Instead, it was openly discussed as a solution to an increasingly serious problem. The Industrial Revolution was making it possible to
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found across the political spectrum. Giles Slade, in his book Made to Break, traces the term “planned obsolescence” to its roots. The earliest reference he found was in a 1932 pamphlet, “Ending the Depression through Planned Obsolescence,” that promoted short-lived products as beneficial to the working class. In 1936, a similarly themed essay
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, and obsolescence has become, as Slade puts it, “a touchstone of the American consciousness.” Thirty years ago, a new technology emerged that threatened to challenge planned obsolescence. It was the kind of product we would want in a deconsumer society: long-lasting, energy efficient, better in every way than what it was
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the benefits of their durability. Even so, another way to sell more bulbs emerged, and that was to build LEDs into goods still subject to planned obsolescence. A “smart” lighting industry emerged, with products that, for example, gradually brighten your bedroom when it’s time to wake up or set off explosions
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didn’t happen. It was only as 2020 approached that Cooper saw action being taken on durability at the national level. In 2015, France made planned obsolescence illegal, defining the practice as the deliberate reduction of a product’s lifespan in order to increase its replacement rate, with steep fines and even
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were specifically designed to withstand the constant wear and tear of sharing, they broke down faster. Even the simplest forms of sharing are undermined by planned obsolescence, said Julie Smith, who for years headed America’s oldest tool-lending library, in Columbus, Ohio. “We don’t feel that anything we’re buying
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power of industry to produce extraordinary wealth—more goods than we could possibly use. The answer we found was to make products that destroy themselves: planned obsolescence. Consumerism itself can be compared to an endless festival that quickly and constantly turns abundance into waste. We have, in fact, turned the destruction of
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. In virtual reality, Keynes’s “economic problem” has decisively been solved. It is a world of total abundance, in which endless novelty, passing fads and planned obsolescence are rendered nearly harmless. “You can accelerate consumption. You can throw away stuff. The fashion cycle can go faster and faster without increasing material requirements
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, 39, 40 Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC), 254–55 “elite consumption,” 233–34 Elkhart, Indiana, 23 Ellen MacArthur Foundation, 156 “Ending the Depression through Planned Obsolescence” (pamphlet), 146 “endless gadgeteering,” 238 endless growth, 113, 175, 258 energy efficiency, 64–65, 70, 76, 148, 197, 207, 213, 215, 254–55 Enos, David
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adapting to, 119–30 Nyae Nyae, 276, 280–81 Nyhtökaura, 106 O’Hara, Tetsuya, 175 Obata, Rumiko, 259–63, 268 obsolescence, 146–47. See also planned obsolescence “occasional geniuses,” 238 Oe, Kenzaburo, 260 one-planet level, 35–36 one-planet lifestyle, 35 one-planet living, 33, 37 Oppenheim, Leonora, 115–18 “ordeal
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, 251 Piketty, Thomas, 86, 89 Pilling, David, 86 ping-pong balls, 61, 66 Planet America, 32 Planet Germany, 32 Planet Italy, 32 Planet Netherlands, 32 planned obsolescence, 29, 112, 145–48, 150, 220, 252 plastic, 1–2, 6, 10, Polar Furniture Enterprise, 131–133 Pollyannaism, 187 positional consumption, 101–2, 287 poverty
Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers, From the Fifteenth Century to the Twenty-First
by Frank Trentmann · 1 Dec 2015 · 1,213pp · 376,284 words
you were not a member of the herd but a critical, responsible driver who was not fooled by changing tail-fins and other gimmicks of planned obsolescence. Anti-advertising converted a bad conscience about ‘consumerism’ into a reason for buying more. Self-expression also provided a bridge between the arts and commerce
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minute styles changed. Packard did not have a problem with change as such, as long as it was related to functional improvements. His target was planned obsolescence dictated by fashion and the pursuit of change for change’s sake. Packard touched a nerve. Things no longer seemed to last as long as
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. Their purchase presumes that such goods can be resold later. The changing life span of things matters here. Packard, in The Waste Makers, singled out planned obsolescence and warned of ever faster product cycles. The introduction, in the 1950s, of ‘printed circuits’, for example, made transistor radios all but unrepairable. Since then
Stuffocation
by James Wallman · 6 Dec 2013 · 296pp · 82,501 words
we can make.” In the same year, a real estate agent in New York called Bernard London, in a pamphlet called Ending the Depression Through Planned Obsolescence, suggested that the government stimulate demand by defining the time any product was allowed to be used. It would work like the use-by date
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. Consumer: Christine Frederick and the Rise of Household Efficiency (Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 2003). Bernard London Find Bernard London, Ending the Depression Through Planned Obsolescence (1932) on Wikimedia.org. Henry Ford’s resistance to obsolescence. “We want the man who buys one of our cars never to have to buy
The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics
by Christopher Lasch · 16 Sep 1991 · 669pp · 226,737 words
attempt to build up the family as a counterweight to the acquisitive spirit. The more closely capitalism came to be identified with immediate gratification and planned obsolescence, the more relentlessly it wore away the moral foundations of family life. The rising divorce rate, already a source of alarm in the last quarter
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consumerism. The modern capitalist economy rests on the techniques of mass production pioneered by Henry Ford but also, no less solidly, on the principle of planned obsolescence introduced by Alfred Sloane when he instituted the annual model change. Relentless "improvement" of the product and upgrading of consumer tastes are the heart of
Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World
by Jason Hickel · 12 Aug 2020 · 286pp · 87,168 words
SUVs). We can also scale down the parts of the economy that are designed purely to maximise profits rather than to meet human needs, like planned obsolescence, where products are made to break down after a short time, or advertising strategies intended to manipulate our emotions and make us feel that what
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that are actively and intentionally wasteful, and which do not serve any recognisable human purpose. Step 1. End planned obsolescence Nowhere is this tendency clearer than when it comes to the practice of planned obsolescence. Companies desperate to increase sales seek to create products that are intended to break down and require replacement after
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or even less.3 It worked like a charm. Sales shot up and profits soared. The idea quickly caught on in other industries, and today planned obsolescence is a widespread feature of capitalist production. Take household appliances, for example – things like refrigerators, washing machines, dishwashers and microwaves. Manufacturers admit that the average
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discarded over the past decade. Add desktops, laptops and tablets and we’re talking about mountains of needless e-waste – most of it generated by planned obsolescence. Every year, 150 million discarded computers are shipped to countries like Nigeria, where they end up in sprawling open-air dumps that leak mercury, arsenic
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designed to tear after a few wears, devices with new ports that render old dongles and chargers useless – everyone has stories about the absurdities of planned obsolescence. IKEA became a multi-billion-dollar empire in large part by inventing furniture that is effectively disposable. Whole swathes of Scandinavia’s forests have been
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paradox here. We like to think of capitalism as a system that’s built on rational efficiency, but in reality it is exactly the opposite. Planned obsolescence is a form of intentional inefficiency. The inefficiency is (bizarrely) rational in terms of maximising profits, but from the perspective of human need, and from
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you consider the millions of hours that are poured into producing smartphones and washing machines and furniture simply to fill the void created, intentionally, by planned obsolescence. It’s like shovelling ecosystems and human lives into a bottomless pit of demand. And the void will never be filled. In a genuinely rational
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improve quality of life, as people wouldn’t have to deal with the frustration and expense of constantly replacing their equipment. Step 2. Cut advertising Planned obsolescence is only one of the strategies that growth-oriented firms use to speed up turnover. Advertising is another. The advertising industry has seen wild changes
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: from $400 billion in 2010, to $560 billion in 2019, making it one of the biggest industries in the world.9 Sometimes advertising unites with planned obsolescence in a toxic cocktail. Take the fashion industry, for example. Clothing retailers desperate to increase sales in an over-saturated market have turned to designing
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become an antidote to the growth imperative. A theory of radical abundance This brings us to the real heart of a post-capitalist economy. Ending planned obsolescence, capping resource use, shortening the working week, reducing inequality and expanding public goods – these are all essential steps to reducing energy demand and enabling a
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economists and politicians. The British Prime Minister Boris Johnson once stated that ‘inequality is essential for the spirit of envy’ that keeps capitalism chugging along. Planned obsolescence is another strategy of artificial scarcity. Retailers seek to create new needs by making products artificially short-lived, to keep the juggernaut of consumption from
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appliances to only last a few years’. In the ‘Study of Life Expectancy of Home Components’, the National Association of Home Builders indicates that without planned obsolescence major appliances can last two to five times longer. 5 Data on global smartphone sales and global smartphone penetration comes from statista.com. 6 Alain
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