You know I have to say before I start, there are two things that ‘m not. I’m not a socialist, and I’m not an engineer. Socialism and engineering, you ask? What the hell is Brad on about? Well, hey, at least I got your attention. There’s a concept that’s been niggling at me as I buy things over the years and as I replace them. It goes by various names, but it’s most commonly known as planned obsolescence. Yes, it’s a real principle of manufacturing, and I’m going to talk about several varieties of it and I’ll give you a ton of examples. The idea goes like this: make a product in such a way that the customer will have to keep pouring money into your business to keep using the product. Take light bulbs, for instance. Light bulbs burn out after a few months or so, depending on how often you use them, and you have to go and by more. Why not make a light bulb that lasts for a long time? Well, it’d be more expensive, some say. Actually, it’d be cheaper. If you’ve got something that you don’t have to replace for a decade, you’re saving God alone knows how much money. In fact, someone did make such a light bulb several decades ago, and guess who doesn’t get to buy it? You and me.
Let’s think about our technology. Software is often written with this idea in mind. Write up an operating system for a computer or some other piece of tech, and then release an, “upgrade,” in such a way as to make what the user has totally useless for anything in the future from your company. Microsoft does it all the time. Windows XP is a perfectly good operating system, for example, but it’s no longer sold or supported by Microsoft. Now don’t tell me it’s because our computers today would be incapable of doing their jobs running XP. I know better, and I’m not a techy. You see it in car parts. Cars wear and tear faster than they ever have now, and they have so many computer chips and microprocessors built into them that often times, repairs can exceed the cost of a car, especially if it’s used and you didn’t spend thirty grand on it. Who does this benefit? Auto manufacturers, of course.
I could find you example after example of this practice. Everything from disposable razors to the blacktop material on our road ways to laptop computers. Laptops are a great example. If a component in a laptop fries, often times you just have to buy a new machine. Same goes for cell phones. The technology is not only so miniaturized as to make repairs expensive and cost prohibitive, there’s no percentage in HP or Samson making computers and phones that you could actually fix when they go bust, because if they did, they’d lose revenue on new purchases. In short, they make more money when you are forced to purchase a whole new unit.
And the most damnable thing here is that it’s planned! These people don’t regret how much you’re out of pocket every time your machine blows a fuse. They love it! I don’t know how many times I’ve heard, “well unfortunately, you’ll just have to replace the unit,” whatever the thing happened to be.
So let’s consider planned obsolescence systematically. The first thing to know about it is that it’s not knew. It’s a longstanding tradition in American manufacturing. The second thing to know is that it comes in several flavors. It impacts just about every area of your life where you use material, and we’ll cover that too. First, let’s deal with the history of it. In his 1840 book, Democracy in America, the French intellectual Alexis de Tocqueville recounts a conversation with an American sailor that centered on why American ships of the day were built to last such a short time: "I accost an American sailor, and I inquire why the ships of his country are built so as to last but for a short time; he answers without hesitation that the art of navigation is every day making such rapid progress, that the finest vessel would become almost useless if it lasted beyond a certain number of years.”
The term, “planned obsolescence,” that describes what de Tocqueville was talking about, was first coined in 1932 by a fellow named Bernard London, but the real pioneer of this philosophy was an American industrial engineer by the name of Brooks Stevens. He used it as the title of his talk at a Minneapolis conference in 1954, and he kept the catchy little phrase, employing it to describe his idea of how customers should be thought of. According to Stevens, planned obsolescence means, “Instilling in the buyer the desire to own something a little newer, a little better, a little sooner than is necessary.” And from that point, the ball got rolling in a big way. Planned obsolescence is a fundamental feature of a larger industrial practice known as “value engineering.” Select the parts that you know are going to have the shortest life expectancy and make the product from those parts. Then, when you’re caught, rationalize it by pointing out that you’re saving the purchaser money when he buys your product. That’s actually a very clever bit of BS there, folks, because what’s really going on is the opposite. So let’s look at several different versions of planned obsolescence (examples included), and if you’re not pissed by the time you finish reading this, you’re probably a product manufacturer.
The most readily apparent form of planned obsolescence is “technical” or “functional obsolescence.” A product is engineered with parts that are guaranteed to wear out or to break after a set number of uses or number of hours of use. Your laptop is an excellent example. The physical materials that are used in, let’s say, the hard drive’s construction or that the screen uses each have life expectancies beyond which they will simply fail. In truth, your laptop could be made of more durable material. Yes, it would cost you more to buy it at the outset, but hell, the thing might last you for 15 years. Who among us wouldn’t jump at that chance! I’ve replaced laptops so many times it’s not even funny. I got four and a half years out of one machine, and I was impressed. Most laptops, if used as frequently as students and business execs use them, will wear out in three to five years. Another version of technical obsolescence is to make the cost of replacement parts equal to the cost of a new unit. Whoever heard of repairing a cell phone? You can’t really do it, because a third strategy is to make the product, “non-serviceable.” That’s a fancy way of saying, “we don’t have replacement parts at any price, because we never meant to fix it.” Another very common form of planned technical obsolescence is for a company to release new products with increased functionality, improved software or some other design feature that, in some way, is utterly incompatible with the old stuff. We saw this when DVD disks replaced VHS cassettes, for example. I’m not sure if blue ray is replacing DVD; I think the jury’s still out on that one. But you take my point. Let’s move on.
Another type of planned obsolescence is known as “notification obsolescence.” Have you ever seen that little notification on your water filter that tells you to replace it? There are products out there which thoughtfully notify the user that a replacement is necessary. These notifications are frequently followed by the breakdown of the product. But even where the product itself doesn’t break down, what do we, as conscientious consumers, do when our products tell us that they’re about to fail? Well, we replace them. So why not, reasons a company, program that failure notice to kick in at point X in the future, regardless of whether or not the product is about to physically break down. Here’s a concrete example. Most inkjet printers have cartridges that you have to replace. Now, how does the printer know when the cartridge has run out of ink? It’s not that smart. I remember old dot matrix printers that would just keep right on humming when the thing was out of ink, for instance. Actually, if you look at your printer, (go ahead and look), what you’ll find is that the cartridge contains a proprietary smart chip installed by the cartridge maker, and that chip tells the cartridge that it’s out of ink. Now, it doesn’t matter that the cartridge may still have ink in it, as they usually do. And it doesn’t matter that the cartridge could probably be refilled, which it could if you had a handy supply of ink. The coding on these proprietary chips is written to make damned sure that that ink cartridge is never usable again, not on that printer anyway, and you’re only option is to buy a new ink cartridge with a new smart chip. This is what is called, “programmed obsolescence.” It’s called, “programmed obsolescence,” because the failure of the product isn’t due to some random component wearing out or breaking down like in our laptop or cell phone examples. It’s a deliberate failure of the product, programmed to occur at a specific point in time during the thing’s life cycle. Neat, isn’t it?? Go look at your tech devices and then tell me I’m wrong. I’m not an alarmist or a conspiracy theorist. I’m just telling you what’s going on. Here’s some more.
One more technical example is worth mentioning. It’s your batteries. Have you noticed how many products you have that use those special lithium-based rechargeable batteries? I can think of three things that use some type of lithium-based battery within two feet of me. The special thing to note about these batteries is how they only last for about 400-500 recharges. My digital book player’s battery, for example, definitely is meant to last about 400 charge cycles. Funny thing is, it’s not the battery itself that’s the problem. Most specialized batteries, like what goes in your cell phone or your laptop or whatever, have an integrated circuit built in to them that regulates the charge and sets the full-charge point of the battery. They have to have these circuits in them. Otherwise the battery becomes very dangerous. The sucky thing here is that the manufacturer sets the circuit’s algorithms in one of two ways. They can program the circuit to do its thing for about as long as the battery itself will last. This is the reasonable or decent thing to do. That way, your battery really does work for you as long as it was meant to. What most of them, including the manufacturers of several of my most frequently-used devices, do instead is to set the circuit to tell the battery that it’s failed out on you after a predetermined number of recharges. It doesn’t matter that the battery you’ve got is physically capable of lasting much longer, the integrated circuit is shortening its life cycle. That’s why they tend to lose charge and run down so much faster after a certain point. Now I’m not a manufacturing engineer, so I can’t tell you in precise detail how that’s done. Yet, it is indeed done.
Let’s consider one final type of planned obsolescence, and this one’s not technical. It’s called by several names, “Style obsolescence,” “psychological obsolescence,” or “obsolescence of desirability.” As you probably picked up, this type of product obsolescence has nothing at all to do with the things you buy. It has everything to do with you and your own mind. If a company can convince you that the gismo you have is out of date, old fashioned, uncool, or somehow undesirable for your personal or professional image, you will, naturally, opt for something that is more desirable. We see it in clothes all the time, with this style being considered classy one day and trashy the next, but the really amazing area where this happens is cars, and as a blind person who doesn’t drive and never will buy a car, I feel uniquely qualified to be the outside observer here, America. There’s nothing wrong with an older car if it’s maintained. But if you want to be cool or seen as having class or status, your car will be the year’s current model. What’s the difference between a 2011 Honda Civic and a 2010 Honda Civic? Or what’s the difference between a 2011 Ford Fusion and a 2008 Ford Fusion? Well, not much. Nothing important, that’s for sure. But the reason that someone trades in their 2009 model Ford for a 2011 model often has to do with some minor gismo that’s been added, or a more stylish-looking interior, or with some other completely superficial change. And the automobile industry makes its bread and butter on this knowledge. They know how important the car is in the American psyche, and so you see them continually updating. It’s old news too. In 1941, Alfred Sloan was retiring as the CEO of General Motors, and he had this to say: "Today the appearance of a motorcar is a most important factor in the selling end of the business—perhaps the most important factor— because everyone knows the car will run.” You, the car-driving public of which I’m not a member, were bought and sold a long time ago by the auto industry. Like I say, it’s a damned car. If it runs, why get a new one? Well, you still do get new ones, and you’re paying for it every single time.
All of this, this planned obsolescence, this value engineering, this mass-produced and disposable stuff that we use, this is as much a part of the American way of life as Old Glory or the hot dog or Yankee Stadium. It’s very much an American thing. We pioneered the concept, and we’re selling it to the world. That is not to say that it is an inevitable result of capitalism. I’m not a socialist, remember? It is perfectly possible to have a capitalist-principled economy without the notion of planned obsolescence. For example, In Britain, it’s considered a violation of the customer’s rights to make products that utilize programmed obsolescence or the types of technical obsolescence we’ve been talking about here. The British Office of Fair Trading and their Trading Standards Institute have the responsibility of seeing to it that companies don’t make products that fall apart just after the warrantee expires. Now I didn’t write this to get you to do anything. You can’t. But I want you to know. Planned obsolescence is a very cynical and dishonest practice that has taken very deep root in our American culture. So remember that next time you by: a disposable razor, a shirt, a laptop, a cell phone, a car, a piece of furniture, … do I need to go on? Have a good one.
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