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The Light Bulb Conspiracy
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2010 · Film · documentary · 75 min
Directed by Cosima Dannoritzer
Once upon a time... consumer goods were built to last. Then, in the 1920’s, a group of businessmen realized that the longer their product lasted, the less money they made, thus Planned Obsolescence was born, and manufacturers have been engineering products to fail ever since. Combining investigative research and rare archive footage with analysis by those working on ways to save both the economy and the environment, this documentary charts the creation of ‘engineering to fail’, its rise to prominence and its recent fall from grace.
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8 comments on Hacker News
This seems to have been reverted only moments ago. Perhaps a disgruntled person from HN trying to force learned false history on Wikipedia?
Please watch the video from Technology Connections linked above to understand why a) Phoebus was indeed a cartel but b) which did not have as nefarious purposes as has been later claimed by e.g. populist TV documentaries such as "The Light Bulb Conspiracy".
The first citation on the page[1] mentions researcher Markus Krajewski who reviewed Phoebus records and concluded "It was the explicit aim of the cartel to reduce the life span of the lamps in order to increase sales [...] Economics, not physics."
Cursory searches of Markus Krajewski yield an IEEE Spectrum article[2] with further references to his work:
> The 2010 documentary The Light Bulb Conspiracy explores the Phoebus cartel as an early example of planned obsolescence and includes interviews with Markus Krajewski. For more on the cartel and planned obsolescence, see the author’s "Fehler-Planungen. Zur Geschichte und Theorie der industriellen Obsoleszenz," in Technikgeschichte, vol. 81, No. 1, p. 91–114, 2014, and "Vom Krieg des Lichtes zur Geschichte von Glühlampenkartellen," in Das Glühbirnenbuch, edited by Peter Berz, Helmut Höge, and Krajewski (Braumüller Verlag, 2011).
Hope this helps!
[1]https://outline.com/JYvASt [2]https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-history/dawn-of-electronics/the-great-lightbulb-conspiracy
https://topdocumentaryfilms.com/light-bulb-conspiracy/ is my favorite documentary on this subject.
In relation with the topic of programmed obsolescence, I highly recommend the documentary "The Light Bulb Conspiracy" by Cosima Dannoritzer: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1825163
The light bulb conspiracy is a movie about the subject of planned obsolescence.
Currently, the incentive is to be build not to last. There is an interesting documentary on this subject called "The light bulb conspiracy" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vfbbF3oxf-E
The Light Bulb Conspiracy is a great documentary about planned obsolescence. It starts with a printer programmed to fail (at the end of the movie Marcus downloads a homemade Russian driver which mysteriously repairs it). It deals with many more subjects and products, including titular lightbulbs (one of them is working for over 100 years already), ipads with irreplaceable batteries lasting 3 years, macs and other PC waste dumped in Africa as "used computers", degrowth, Bernard London, Phoebus, wooing consumers with short-lived products instead of forcing them (reminds me of STEAM). Unfortunately, only fragments of it are on youtube (except for Polish version, in full).
The site reminded me from a TV documentary which stated that there was a light bulb cartel which enforced the manufacturers to build bulbs that lasted only about 1000-2000 hours to get more sales. I'd like to link to the video, but I saw it from finnish national television.
Edit: Oh yes it was linked on that site. http://www.catalanfilmsdb.cat/en/productions/documentary-television/the-light-bulb-conspiracy-ndash-the-untold-story-of-planned-obsolescence/2749/