Planned Obsolesence #1: What/Why

What do the following have in common: Lightbulb, Printer, Nylon, iPhone? As you may have guessed by the title of this blog,  they've all been designed to live an artificially short life, and be expensive to 'fix' properly, so you end up just buying more; anyone who's upgraded a smartphone knows what I'm talking about (iPhone 4 -> 4S anyone? Apple's turned it into a business model...)


It's such a ubiquitous practice that there's a name for it - Planned Obsolescence, and there's a lot of things written about it so I won't go too much into the background, but after watching The Lightbulb Conspiracy documentary on the plane about it, and realising it lined up with a few earlier concepts I'd mused over, I thought it relevant to document my thoughts and see what others thought.

There's a 1951 Alec Guiness movie about it: The Man in the White Suit, where as a scientist he invents a fabric that doesn't break or get dirty, but then comes under fire from both employers and employees that selling it will be detrimental to all of them - an interesting split where the usual goals of science/engineering (make the best thing) are at odds with realism/capitalism (employ people, make the best profit).


I think it sums up nicely that, while it's wasteful and has a negative environmental impact (until recylability increases), there are a few benefits - not only for profits (the aforementioned Apple now the #1 business by market cap) and a functioning economy (Kevin Rudd's $1K bonus, anyone?), but more importantly, to the labour force making the product.


You see, and here's the main thing, we have a lot of people in this world, and these people need something to do. In developed countries there's a huge focus of employment and the number of jobs - America's talking a lot about it in an election leadup, and unemplyment is often mentioned as a bad sideeffect of the current European crisis (especially in Spain, where 20% of under-30s have never been employed).  

These people need money/goods to buy/trade for things, and the current best solution we have is to spend a lot of effort creating unneeded stuff, then making sure it's bought. Simply put, without any other solution, if planned obsolescence didn't exist, people wouldn't have enough stuff to do; I think it's ok as a temporary solution, but more on that in part #2.


One thing worth nothing is that not everything is designed this way - sure, consumer electronics is terrible for it, but for example there's a watchmaker with the great tagline "You never really own a Patek Philippe, you merely look after it for the next generation", and the cookware company with "Circulon, guaranteed for life". It'll be interesting to see whether more things like this start appearing.


That's it for part #1, stay tuned for part #2 which'll cover where I think it's heading; plus encorporating any comments from this one - it may be delayed a bit as I'm working from California for the next two weeks however (hence watching the documentary on a plane), though that hopefully means another blog post city topic.


P.S: for posterity, it seems the entire documentary is on youtube. for those interested:
(note: goes for nearly an hour).