Warning: Tito rant ahead. Read at your own risk.
Our karaoke machine just died. Right on the two-year mark. Last week, a 55-inch OLED TV just stopped working. Week before that it was the fridge. Then the washing machine. And don't even get me started on phones and computers.
I'm so sick of appliances that keep breaking the moment they're out of warranty, and being told "it's cheaper to buy a new one po."
It may be cheaper. But not as cheap as if it lasted as long as the machines built 30 years ago. I would know. I still drive a few of those. They start. They work. They don't ask permission from an app.
Welcome to the age of planned obsolescence. It's how companies create new revenue streams by manufacturing a replacement economy, on purpose, to guarantee a steady stream of customers.
This concept started a hundred years ago, in a boardroom in Geneva, back in December of 1924. The biggest light bulb makers on earth, Osram, Philips, General Electric, Tungsram, sat down and agreed to something the public would never have approved of. Bulbs at the time commonly lasted 1,500 to 2,500 hours. The cartel ordered their own engineers to cut that down to 1,000, because better bulbs were bad for business. They even fined factories whose samples lasted too long. They called it the Phoebus cartel. Historians now call it the first industrial-scale planned obsolescence in modern history.
That's the actual root of the tree we're all still living under.
From light bulbs it spread. Not always as a secret memo with a kill date printed on it. Sometimes it's cheaper boards that die first. Sealed drums you can't open. Parts that vanish the day the warranty ends. Labor that costs more than the machine. Software that bricks a device that still physically works. Different approaches. Same result. You don't own it. You rent it until they decide you're done.
That's how they build appliances, electronics, computers, phones. Now it's how they build cars.
They learned the incentive from the same place a lot of bad business models learn it. Healthcare. In 2018 a Goldman analyst asked, in writing, whether curing patients was a "sustainable business model," because a drug that actually finished the job shrank its own market. Nobody needed Goldman to invent that math. They've always known a cured patient is a lost customer. Goldman was just careless enough to write it down.
So if that's how they talk about your health, what makes you think they would stop at the second biggest investment most people will make in their lives? Look at EVs, since we're being sold those as the future. Most packs come with an eight-year warranty, which is a nice brochure until the eighth year ends. Out-of-warranty battery packs can run you anywhere from about four thousand to twenty-five thousand US dollars, depending on the car and whether you're buying new, refurbished, or used. On plenty of older used EVs, that bill is worth more than the car itself. So what happens? The car gets written off over one part they made expensive, proprietary, and hard to repair. Not every EV, of course, but enough of them for you to see where this is heading.
This is not entirely the companies fault; this is the price we pay for living in a debt-based economy. We've mortgaged our children's future by taking on massive amounts of sovereign debt, and endless consumption is the only thing keeping the whole machine alive. That's why you won't see any serious regulatory reform here. Because a product designed to last threatens the entire Ponzi.
Then there’s the hypocrisy on top of it. Remember when we were guilted into paper straws and eco bags to save the planet one soggy sip at a time? We all went along with it. Now your EV needs a new battery, the quote totals the car, and the same choir that preached the straw sermon says suck it up and buy another one. Just not with a plastic straw.
It's all theatre. And I'm sick of it. Sick of the lies, the gaslighting, the hypocrisy, and the greed. If you feel the same way, do your bit for the environment and recycle this post by hitting share.
