The Engineered Expiration – Part 1: How Designed Decay Became the Core Business Model

The Cartel that Codified the Concept of Consumption

In December 1924, a clandestine agreement was reached by the world’s largest light bulb manufacturers, including Philips, General Electric, Osram, and Compagnie des Lampes. This group, known historically as the Phoebus Cartel, moved deliberately to limit the lifespan of their products. Before the cartel, the incandescent light bulbs invented by Thomas Edison and Adolphe Chaillet were intended to last multiple decades. The established market standard of 2,500 burning hours was systematically reduced to just 1,000 hours by 1940. This calculated decision marked the emergence of what would become known as planned obsolescence.

Planned obsolescence involves the practice of intentionally designing products to limit their life span, thereby encouraging premature replacement. This strategy fundamentally aims to increase product turnover and profitability for corporations. The light bulb producers instituted a system requiring products to be regularly tested in a lab in Switzerland, complete with fines imposed on manufacturers who failed to adhere to the mutually predetermined obsolescence agreements. Although the cartel eventually dissolved due to new competitors and the Second World War, it remains a striking early example of how manufacturers blocked innovation and improved product quality to boost sales volume.

Defining the Intentional Shortening of Product Life

Planned obsolescence entails the deliberate design of goods to artificially limit their lifespan, whether in terms of actual function or perceived utility, forcing consumers to replace items prematurely. This practice generates long-term sales volume by shortening the replacement cycle. The goal is to ensure a product or service will become outdated due to intentional product design choices, guaranteeing a steady future demand for replacements. While the concept carries intrinsic ambiguities and moral ambivalence, it ultimately serves short-term corporate profit.

The spectrum of obsolescence is broad, but it generally refers to an intentional production of goods with limited lifespans to stimulate frequent consumer purchases. In legal contexts, planned obsolescence has been defined as the use of techniques by which the person responsible for placing a product on the market aims to deliberately reduce its lifespan to increase its replacement rate. This strategy deliberately manipulates the period during which a product can function at its anticipated performance level under expected conditions. Robust products became economic liabilities in certain times, such as during the Depression economy, suggesting a shift in economic priorities away from durability.

The Analytical Core: Mechanisms of Physical and Psychological Decay

The Foundation of Contrived Durability

One fundamental mechanism of planned obsolescence is contrived durability, which is the strategy of shortening a product’s expected lifetime before it is released to the market by designing it to deteriorate quickly. The design of all personal-use products incorporates an anticipated average lifetime, and limited lifespan signifies planned obsolescence only if the limit is artificially short. This technique involves engineering a product’s premature aging directly into the design phase. For instance, a product might initially work excellently, being best in class, but then predictably renders itself useless after a predetermined date, often due to the failure of just one component.

This strategy can manifest through the use of inferior materials in critical areas or suboptimal component layouts that accelerate wear. Using cheap plastic instead of metal in stress-bearing parts, or soft metal in screws, increases the speed at which a product becomes inoperable through normal usage. Historically, this strategy was applied to portable radios in the 1950s and 1960s, where a premature lifespan of three years was deliberately set. This intentional design of products to fail reliably after a specific time effectively limits the usable lifespan. Planned obsolescence often occurs because the hardware itself fails, such as the use of suboptimal ribbon cables in Samsung AMOLED displays, which can deteriorate over time and render the screen useless. These failures require the user to purchase a new device or replace the display sooner than necessary.

Economics and the Psychology of the “Throw-Away Society”

The concept of planned obsolescence was expanded upon significantly by New York real estate magnate Bernard London in 1932, who proposed a national policy of planned obsolescence to restore the US economy after the Wall Street crash. London suggested declaring products “legally dead” after a predetermined period, after which the state would collect and destroy them. In exchange, consumers would receive the original sales tax value as a voucher for a new purchase, thereby stimulating consumption and creating manufacturing jobs.

Although London’s proposal was initially seen as controversial, the concept gained widespread acceptance in the “Throw-Away Society” campaign, which aimed to counter post-war economic crises in the United States and Europe. This approach focused on decoupling obsolescence from actual usefulness by linking it instead to consumer perception. The strategy was championed by industrial designers like Brooks Stevens, who defined planned obsolescence as “Instilling in the buyer the desire to own something a little newer, a little better, a little sooner than is necessary”.

This leads to the second major variant: perceived obsolescence, also known as style or psychological obsolescence. This occurs when consumers are encouraged to replace perfectly functional products based on fashion, aesthetics, or status concerns. Producers create a treadmill of desirability by launching new products rapidly, often with only slight, sometimes cosmetic, improvements. This combined strategy of material design failure and psychological encouragement is a powerful driver of consumption. Psychological obsolescence compels consumers to buy new items because using fashionable products has become an important indicator of social status.

The Cascade of Effects in Consumer Electronics

The interplay between contrived durability and perceived obsolescence is particularly visible in consumer electronics. Manufacturers employ a tried-and-true business strategy of frequently updating the style of products to promote perceived aging, leading to the premature discarding of functional devices. Examples include the serial changes to charging and data ports requiring new cables, rendering the old ones obsolete.

However, the consequences of this business strategy are far-reaching. Planned obsolescence poses a major barrier to environmental sustainability and undermines consumer confidence. It results in excessive consumption and leads to negative externalities, which are elusive, hard to quantify, and routinely ignored in corporate strategy. In the narrow definition of Gross National Product, which excludes various costs, planned obsolescence can appear lucrative for corporations or countries because it stimulates consumption. Yet, this short-term focus creates harmful financial-economic and ecological consequences, including overspending by consumers on products designed to break. This deliberate practice of shortening lifespans has increasingly come under scrutiny as a driver of global ecological challenges.

Weaving Intentional Limits into the Global Economy

Planned obsolescence, born from the collusion of light bulb manufacturers a century ago, evolved into a core business strategy that deliberately limits product life to boost private profit. The economic system encourages continuous, rapid product turnover through both material obsolescence (designing for fragility) and psychological obsolescence (marketing for perceived outdatedness). This approach has transformed consumer goods, particularly electronics, into items “designed to break” rather than to endure. The widespread adoption of planned obsolescence highlights a systemic tension: while it fuels consumption and short-term economic metrics, it simultaneously generates substantial waste and exploits consumers, setting the stage for global challenges addressed in subsequent analyses.