Video Blog C- The lightbulb conspiracy

The Light Bulb Conspiracy

The documentary, ‘The light bulb conspiracy- the untold story of planned obsolescence’ gives us insight as to what planned obsolescence is and how it came about in the 1920s.
Planned obsolescence has been a crucial factor in the world’s economy, by giving products a set life span, this helped to keep the world’s economy running because consumers would often have to replace products that have come to the end of their life span, the regulated need to manufacture and sell these products also kept unemployment rates down.
In the 1950s, planned obsolescence came back around, but in another form. The idea was that by promoting the concept to consumers they should keep renewing their products just to keep up with times and styles even when the previous product was still fully functioning, this created an economy based more upon ‘desires’ rather than ‘necessities’.
At the origin of planned obsolescence, in theory it made sense in order to keep the economy running and unemployment down, but also at the origin of planned obsolescence, people lived in a world where they thought the resources used both in the products and the processes making the products were abundant. Almost a century later, we find out that people in the 1920s were terribly mistaken, we live in a finite world and it is astonishing that it took this long for anyone to realise it and speak up. In this present day, we now have to inform the rest of the world about terrible consumer habits and pay attention to our future waste and existing waste.
A new idea called cradle to cradle could possibly be the key to saving our planet from the past century of damage, this idea is what humans now have to try and adopt when manufacturing new products, this cradle to cradle idea imitates nature itself and how nature does not create any waste, matter in nature just changes forms from nutrients to seed to sprout to plant to tree to leaves to leaves on the ground and then to nutrients again.
Warner Philips raises a very interesting point as well, about factoring in not only the profit margins of companies and how if they sell more products that that automatically means they’ve earned more money, but that isn’t the case, with an increase in products being manufactured and sold, there is also an increase in expenses, and so factoring in all these expenses alongside these profits, there would be a fairly similar result in profits for that particular business, so in conclusion, if companies just made planned obsolescence obsolete itself, and create products that were made to last as long as possible, this would reduce costs, but most importantly, reduce the amount of waste in the world.