Yet another essay on Planned Obsolescence

In our imperfect economy, market forces don’t strive for longer and more useful products, but instead, they incentivize artificial, fragile, and unnecessary designs, as encouraged by factors such as government regulations, consumer demand, and supply chains. This results in planned obsolescence.

Planned Obsolescence is a business policy to make products artificially limited bad design and useful life or unfashionable to incentive new sales; thereby businesses generate a constant constant flow of revenue and keep the economy going on since the consumers have got to buy another one each year, month, day, or such-and-such event and the government keeps the population happy. Another kind of similar behavior is the bullshit job where the market needs people even though be a pointless job.

Sure, most business people don’t say wickedly “design the products poorly” to engineers or scientists, but the market forces incentivize the creation of new products, cheaper versions, and questionable improvements every year with strict deadlines. Although we know the new iPhone or Ford model is similar to last year’s model, we feel compelled to buy it.

What do you think of Planned Obsolescence? One can say “X is wrong” or “X is good,” but we need a deep understanding of human and economic factors to make a strong argument, avoiding fatal arrogance, thereof I will not express a position on the morality of consumer culture or its intended consequences for reactivating the economy.

Nobody can do things perfectly. Would we marry someone in a relationship who we think would fail? People still do. Products can’t be perfect, last forever, or anticipate future legal constraints. Science and technology change what is possible or true, while consumers influence what they want and governments determine what is legal. Because the world is a complex system, predicting human behavior is difficult, making it challenging to build for future needs, actions, and other factors.

“The best way to predict the future is to invent it” — Alan Kay.

Since you are not aware of the unknown, your work cannot be categorized as Planned Obsolescence if it is not based on new or future knowledge. It is a natural, not artificial, phenomenon. However, it is unethical to produce low-quality products or services without informing customers or providing alternative choices. On the other hand, producing new products every year that meet customer demand is ethical in a free economy, as long as consumers have the choice and ability to purchase them.

German was the language of science in the 19th and early 20th centuries, but today it is English. If you wish to preserve the past, should you build a computer based on the German language as the “German Standard Code for Information Interchange”?

Should we use the same Apollo II assembly code in current spaceflights, even though using technology available today would result in a lower probability of failure?

Everybody builds their stuff based on the principle that “everything changes.”