In 1924, the world’s leading light-bulb manufacturers met in Geneva and signed a contract to make their own light bulbs worse. As strange as it sounds, they agreed in writing that no bulb could last more than 1,000 hours, when the technology of the time was already producing bulbs that lasted 2,500 hours or more. The cartel was called Phoebus. It included Osram, Philips, General Electric and a few others. It ran until the Second World War broke it up, and the archives — which exist, which are held at the Landesarchiv Berlin, and which anyone can consult — show internal fines to factories whose bulbs lasted too long [1].
The goal was clear: this simple way of cutting corners let them sell twice as many bulbs. They needed people to buy more and consume more, and this is where the race toward consumerism really picked up speed.
Idle factories
In the United States in the 1920s, the factories had learned how to mass-produce during the First World War. The war ended, and they were still sitting on a pile of factories capable of turning out absurd quantities of everything. The problem wasn’t production. The problem was that society didn’t need — and couldn’t afford — to consume enough to keep the system running.
So some people sat down to solve that problem.
Paul Mazur, a banker at Lehman Brothers, wrote it out in 1927 in the Harvard Business Review with unusual clarity: the United States had to be shifted from a culture of needs to a culture of desires, training people to want new things even before they had used up the old ones [2]. This isn’t a quote taken out of context. It’s the thesis of the article, published in a magazine that today is read by everyone in the MBA world and that back then was already the instruction manual for American capital.
Mazur was describing a technical problem of his time: the productive apparatus had grown faster than the cultural apparatus that decided what got consumed. The solution was to rewrite that cultural apparatus, to educate people in desire.
Edward Bernays, Sigmund Freud’s nephew, had come back from Europe convinced that his uncle’s ideas about the unconscious could be exploited on an industrial scale. In 1923 he published Crystallizing Public Opinion, and in 1928, Propaganda, where he wrote that the conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses was an important element of democratic society [3]. I don’t know — to me, the words “manipulation of the masses” and “democracy” have never quite fit together, though unfortunately it seems they go hand in hand… The point is that in inventing marketing, Bernays thought he was doing democracy.
Torches of Freedom
His most famous campaign was commissioned by American Tobacco in 1929. Women didn’t smoke in public. It was considered vulgar. Bernays hired a group of elegant young women to march down New York’s Fifth Avenue during the Easter Parade, light up cigarettes at the same time, and call them “torches of freedom”. He tipped off the press in advance. He tied the act to the women’s suffrage movement, which was in its final active phase, and suddenly smoking stopped being vulgar and became fashionable [4].
It worked. Cigarette consumption among women shot up in the following years. It would be unfair to give Bernays all the credit — there were other factors, other campaigns, a social change already under way — but the pattern was established: selling a product isn’t about convincing people they need it. It’s about connecting the product to something bigger than the product. Identity. Freedom. Status. Modernity.
That same year, 1929, Bernays organized another campaign that changed an entire country for a century. The Beech-Nut Packing Company wanted to sell more bacon. Bernays contacted around 5,000 doctors and asked whether a hearty breakfast was healthy, without mentioning bacon or eggs. Most of them said yes, logically enough. He published the results without saying who had commissioned the survey and specifically recommended “bacon and eggs”. The American breakfast had just been manufactured, and it became a tradition that has lasted until today (honestly, bacon and fried eggs sell themselves — how healthy they are is another matter) [5].
Planned obsolescence, the other half of the recipe
In 1932, in the middle of the Great Depression, a New York real estate agent named Bernard London published a pamphlet with a title that said it all: Ending the Depression Through Planned Obsolescence. His proposal: the government should set a legal expiration date on manufactured products. When the date arrived, the product would be legally destroyed, even if it still worked, and replaced [6]. He saw people in the street without jobs, and it seemed obvious to him that the problem was that the economy had stopped because people had stopped buying.
Twenty-two years later, in 1954, the industrial designer Brooks Stevens gave a talk in Minneapolis where he used the term again but in a softer version: don’t destroy the physical product, instill in the buyer the need and the desire to own something a little newer and a little better, a little sooner than necessary [7]. Planned obsolescence shifted from the material level to the psychological level. Your car doesn’t have to break. It’s enough that next year’s model makes yours feel old.
The two types of obsolescence
One is technical obsolescence: deliberately designing products to fail. The Phoebus cartel is the textbook case. Printers with chips that count pages and disable the cartridge even when it still has ink — a much-studied case, documented, with lawsuits in the United States and the European Union — is a modern example [8]. The iPhone battery is a contested case: Apple admitted in 2017 that it deliberately slowed down phones with degraded batteries to prevent shutdowns, and paid $113 million in 2020 to settle lawsuits in 34 states [9]. Apple maintained it was a protective measure, not obsolescence. But if the French authorities didn’t buy it and fined the company, it was for a reason [10].
The other is perceived obsolescence: convincing you that you need the new thing even though the old one works perfectly. This is the Stevens line. More subtle, more legal, arguably more powerful. Your phone doesn’t have to break for you to change it every two years. All it takes is a well-made ad, a slightly bigger screen, a camera with one more megapixel, and the sustained feeling that yours has become dated — social pressure keeps chipping away until you give in.
That said, it’s worth noting that some economists argue that a lot of what we call planned obsolescence is really economic obsolescence: it’s cheaper for companies not to design products to last decades, because that pushes up the price and because technology keeps moving. Jeremy Bulow formalized this in a classic 1986 article in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, showing that under imperfect competition, firms have incentives to produce less durable goods even without coordinating to hurt the consumer [11]. In other words, according to him, design and manufacturing are more expensive, and the pace at which regulations and technologies advance forces companies to release a new model every year anyway.
The other camp, led by people like Giles Slade in his book Made to Break (2006), replies that the documented cases of explicit coordination — Phoebus, the nylon agreements of the 1940s, practices in the electrical industry — show that the conspiracy angle is no myth either [12]. Both camps probably have a piece of the truth, but what is clear is that financial performance tends to be goal number one for corporations.
The iPhone was not the first product to be accused of planned obsolescence with solid arguments — nor the second, nor the tenth. DuPont’s nylon stockings, launched in 1939, were deliberately weakened in later years because the first ones were so tough that women weren’t replacing them. DuPont never officially admitted it, but testimony from company chemists gathered by the historian Susan Strasser in Satisfaction Guaranteed (1989) describes internal meetings where they decided to reduce the denier of the fibers so the product would break sooner [13]. The idea that all this started with Apple is charmingly naïve.
What if they can’t pay for it?
Almost nobody remembers Alfred Sloan, who ran General Motors between 1923 and 1956. Sloan did two things that changed the twentieth century. The first: he introduced the annual model change. Until then, Ford had produced millions of identical Model Ts for nearly twenty years. Henry Ford thought the car was a utilitarian object and that redesigning it every year was a waste. Sloan saw the potential: a new model every year, different enough that last year’s would feel old. But we’ve already covered obsolescence [14].
The second thing Sloan did was invent consumer financing on an industrial scale. He created the General Motors Acceptance Corporation in 1919. Before that, buying a car on credit was a marginal practice. After, it was the norm. And Sloan understood it perfectly: if people had to pay cash, they bought a car every ten years. If they paid in installments, they could switch sooner and were permanently in debt, which forced them to keep their jobs, which stabilized the system. He invented consumer debt [14].
That was the moment when the modern consumer was built — the character who walks into a store with a credit card and leaves loaded with unplanned things they don’t need. Their mind isn’t able to resist — nobody’s mind is — the number of daily advertising impacts we’re exposed to every day: somewhere between 4,000 and 10,000.
If there’s one sector of runaway consumption, it’s fashion. Every season there’s something new that already isn’t the latest thing — imported from French haute couture — combining desire with aggressive pricing and pressure on the female body image, making it one of the sectors with the most unnecessary consumption and, as a result, pollution.
Bernays lived until 1995. He died at 103. In his final interviews, already very old, he said some unsettling things. One of them was that he was worried about the use that had been made of his techniques. He clarified that he had worked for democratic companies and governments, but that he was horrified by how others had applied them: he specifically mentioned Goebbels, the Nazi Minister of Propaganda and Public Enlightenment [16]. Goebbels himself, apparently, had Bernays’s books in his library and cited them as a technical manual for manipulating the masses [17]. It seems that the conscious manipulation of public opinion might not be so democratic after all.
A question: if we removed Bernays, Mazur, Sloan, London and Stevens from the historical line, would we still have a consumer society? My hunch is that yes, we would have a consumerist society anyway, with other names and maybe a little later, because the structural pressure — factories with enormous productive capacity, capital hunting for returns, accumulated household savings — was already there. The real question is whether it would have taken a different shape. Could a slower, more responsible version of consumer society, with more durable products and more sober advertising, have been politically sustainable in a world where the Soviet bloc was promising alternatives? Who knows… The thing is, we’ll never find out — you can’t change the past, but we can still choose the future with our decisions and our common sense.
Can we do anything?
When an app pushes you to watch “one more video” before bed, there is a team of designers behind it who have read papers on dopamine and intermittent reward systems — the same psychological principles Bernays started applying, but with a century of additional research behind them. B. J. Fogg, who directed the Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford until 2020, has trained a good chunk of Silicon Valley’s product designers in techniques he himself calls “persuasive design”, taught in courses whose materials are partly public [18].
Could someone today, armed with the right knowledge, resist the charms of marketing? Neuroscience says our willpower has a limit — it runs out. If we’re constantly surrounded by stimuli from products personalized for us, designed by behavioral experts, sooner or later we’re almost certain to fall for something. Maybe the answer lies in some kind of control over the quantity and quality of advertising and the techniques it uses.
The other front is durability. The European Union approved the Right to Repair Directive in 2024, which requires manufacturers of consumer electronics to make spare parts available for years after a product hits the market, and explicitly bans software or hardware design practices that limit independent repair [19]. It’s the first time in European legislative history that planned obsolescence is recognized not as a consumer suspicion but as a phenomenon that requires regulation. France has had a similar national law since 2015 and has fined both Apple and Epson under it.
This article is an attempt to explain why we keep buying things we don’t need with money we don’t have to impress people who don’t matter to us. The real question is how to push back — and how to shield society from this illogical behavior.
References
[1] Krajewski, M. (2014). “The Great Lightbulb Conspiracy”. IEEE Spectrum, September 2014. Reliable.
[2] Mazur, P. (1927). “American Prosperity and the Business Cycle”. Harvard Business Review, October 1927. Primary source.
[3] Bernays, E. (1928). Propaganda. Horace Liveright, New York. Primary source.
[4] Amos, A. and Haglund, M. (2000). “From social taboo to ‘torch of freedom’: the marketing of cigarettes to women”. Tobacco Control, 9(1): 3-8. Reliable.
[5] Bernays, E. (1965). Biography of an Idea: Memoirs of Public Relations Counsel. Simon and Schuster. Primary source.
[6] London, B. (1932). Ending the Depression Through Planned Obsolescence. Self-published pamphlet, New York. Historical source.
[7] Adamson, G. (2003). Industrial Strength Design: How Brooks Stevens Shaped Your World. MIT Press. Reliable.
[8] Maitre-Ekern, E. and Dalhammar, C. (2019). “Towards a hierarchy of consumption behaviour in the circular economy”. Maastricht Journal of European and Comparative Law, 26(3). Not a study.
[9] Apple Inc. (2020). Multistate settlement agreement with the attorneys general of 34 U.S. states, November 2020. Reliable.
[10] Direction Générale de la Concurrence, de la Consommation et de la Répression des Fraudes (DGCCRF), French Republic (2020). February 2020 decision, €25 million fine against Apple. Reliable.
[11] Bulow, J. (1986). “An Economic Theory of Planned Obsolescence”. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 101(4): 729-749. Reliable.
[12] Slade, G. (2006). Made to Break: Technology and Obsolescence in America. Harvard University Press. Respected book.
[13] Strasser, S. (1989). Satisfaction Guaranteed: The Making of the American Mass Market. Pantheon Books. Respected book.
[14] Sloan, A. P. (1964). My Years with General Motors. Doubleday. With reservations.
[15] Calkins, E. E. and Sheldon, R. (1932). Consumer Engineering: A New Technique for Prosperity. Harper & Brothers, New York. Primary source.
[16] Curtis, A. (2002). The Century of the Self. Documentary, BBC. Documentary.
[17] Bernays, E. (1965). Biography of an Idea, op. cit. Primary source.
[18] Fogg, B. J. (2003). Persuasive Technology: Using Computers to Change What We Think and Do. Morgan Kaufmann. Book.
[19] European Parliament and Council of the European Union (2024). Directive (EU) 2024/1799 on the right to repair. Official Journal of the European Union, June 2024. Reliable.