The Lightbulb Conspiracy and the Death of “If It Works, Keep Using It”

There is an economic light-bulb story. How light-bulbs were used to sell people on electricity by GE and when that was done how the industry that began to sell light-bulbs shorten the bulbs lifespan so that light-bulbs would be economically viable (to the industry). Planned obsolescence is scientifically proven to work economically but I sometimes wonder, is there a better approach where if it works keep using it while still viable. The idea for the right to repair is fastly diminishing. Landfills continue to grow.

This quiet observation, shared almost in passing, contains one of the most damning indictments of 20th- and 21st-century capitalism ever put into words. It is the entire history of planned obsolescence in a single paragraph—and it begins with the lightbulb.

From Wonder to Weapon

In the beginning, the incandescent bulb was a miracle. Thomas Edison’s 1879 lamp didn’t just light rooms; it sold an entire infrastructure. General Electric and its predecessors gave bulbs away almost for free, because every glowing filament was an advertisement for the real product: electricity itself. Wire your house, pay the meter, and keep paying forever.

Mission accomplished. By the 1920s electricity was no longer a novelty—it was a utility. And that’s when the miracle became a problem. Early bulbs lasted 1,500, 2,000, even 2,500 hours. Some, like the Centennial Light in Livermore, California, are still burning today—over 120 years later. For consumers that was wonderful. For manufacturers it was a crisis. If bulbs lasted “forever,” who would ever buy another one?

So in 1924 the leading manufacturers—Osram, Philips, General Electric, and their subsidiaries—formed the Phoebus cartel in Geneva. Their stated goal was “standardization.” Their real agreement was simple: no bulb would last longer than 1,000 hours. Engineers who exceeded the limit were fined. Factories were inspected. Longer-lasting prototypes were destroyed. The cartel fixed prices, divided markets, and turned a durable good into a consumable one. The modern disposable economy was born.

The cartel collapsed in the late 1930s under antitrust pressure, but the precedent was set. A product no longer had to fail because of bad engineering—it could be designed to fail on schedule.

The Science of Making Things Break

Planned obsolescence is not a conspiracy theory; it is a business model with spreadsheets. Economists have modeled it, executives have celebrated it, and entire industries now depend on it. Shorten the lifespan, increase the replacement rate, and GDP ticks upward. Bernard London literally proposed mandatory obsolescence in 1932 as a way out of the Great Depression. It worked so well that we never stopped.

Today the same logic governs everything with a plug or a battery:

• Smartphone batteries glued shut and throttled by software after two years.
• Printers that refuse to print because a chip says the ink is “expired.”
• Washing machines whose bearings are engineered to seize just after the warranty ends.
• Tractors that won’t start unless a dealer scans an RFID tag.

Each is a descendant of the 1,000-hour lightbulb.

The Vanishing Right to Repair

There was a time when “if it works, keep using it while still viable” was common sense. You fixed the radio, resoled the shoes, patched the kettle. That world is dying. Manufacturers now serialize parts so only “authorized” replacements function. They withhold schematics, password-protect firmware, and lobby against state right-to-repair laws with the same fervor the Phoebus cartel once used to police filament thickness.

The results speak for themselves. In 2024 the world generated 62 million tons of electronic waste—enough to fill a line of trucks stretching one-and-a-half times around the equator. Less than 20 % was properly recycled. The rest leaches heavy metals into groundwater or is burned in open pits by children in the Global South.

Is There Another Way?

Yes. We have proof.

Fairphone builds modular smartphones you can repair with a screwdriver. Framework sells laptops whose parts are upgradable for a decade. In the 1970s Toyota and Honda humiliated Detroit by making cars that simply refused to die—and forced American manufacturers to get better.

Durability is not incompatible with profit; it is incompatible with endless 15 % year-over-year growth. That is the real tension.

Until we decide that a stable, sufficient economy is preferable to an ever-accelerating one, the 1,000-hour lightbulb will remain the true symbol of progress: a technology that works perfectly—until the moment it is engineered not to.

The landfills keep growing. Somewhere in California, a single bulb from 1901 flickers on, quietly exposing the conspiracy every second it refuses to burn out.