“An object designed to last is, for the market, a failed object.”
I. A question of time
There is a philosophy of time hidden at the heart of modern economies. It is not written in treatises and is rarely taught as such, yet it silently governs our relationship to the material world. Its basic proposition is simple and brutal: the long term is the enemy of profit.
This is not a metaphor. When a capacitor is deliberately chosen to fail after eighteen months rather than ten years, when a battery is glued into a device, when a software update turns a functioning terminal into a slow and unusable brick, what is being attacked is duration itself. It is the time of the object — and therefore the time of the user: autonomy, sovereignty, the ability to inhabit the world without being constantly sent back to the counter of replacement.
Hartmut Rosa speaks of social acceleration to describe the compression of time that does not liberate us but alienates us, because it destroys the stable points around which a life can be built. Planned obsolescence is the industrial and commercial form of that acceleration. It does not create value; it captures it by methodically producing a scarcity of duration.
This article treats planned obsolescence not as an isolated scandal or a consumer-law issue, but as the revealing symptom of an economic system that has turned destruction into doctrine.
II. Genealogy of a criminal idea
Planned obsolescence has a birth date that economic history would rather forget: 1932. In the middle of the Great Depression, Bernard London published Ending the Depression Through Planned Obsolescence. His thesis was straightforward: people kept products for too long, so demand collapsed. The proposed remedy was to impose a legal life span on goods and force their replacement in order to restart the economic machine.
London’s proposal never became law. But it gave a precise formulation to an idea that would seep into twentieth-century industrial capitalism: durability is an economic problem.
Twenty years later, industrial designer Brooks Stevens theorized aesthetic obsolescence with disarming frankness. The point was no longer merely to make objects break, but to instill in consumers the desire to own something a little newer, a little better, a little sooner than necessary. The target was no longer the product, but desire itself. One no longer destroys the object; one destroys the user’s satisfaction with it.
Alfred Sloan at General Motors industrialized this intuition through annual model changes, artificial product ranges and innovations held back for future releases. The purpose was not technical progress, but visible aging: making last year’s perfectly functional car look socially obsolete.
What these figures understood is what orthodox economics often refuses to see: in a growth system, the enemy is not scarcity but durable abundance. A world of objects that last is a world in which demand stabilizes, growth slows and the machine threatens to stop. Planned obsolescence is therefore a capitalist answer to the specter of sufficiency.
III. The taxonomy of destruction
Today, obsolescence has become far more sophisticated. It is not limited to a spring that breaks or a cheap component that burns out. It operates on several levels at once, forming a coherent system of capture through destruction.
Technical or structural obsolescence remains the most visible form. It relies on weaker materials, permanent assemblies, glued batteries, proprietary screws and integrated parts. The goal is simple: make repair more expensive, slower and more uncertain than replacement.
Software obsolescence is more insidious because it is immaterial. The lock is not in the metal but in the code. Resource-heavy updates make three-year-old devices stutter; the end of security support forces users to accept risk or buy again; parts pairing ties each component to a unique software identity, so that a technically identical replacement part may be rejected because it was not sold by the manufacturer.
Marketing or psychological obsolescence targets not the object but the subject. Advertising, influencers and social distinction make the latest model an identity marker. The object is no longer obsolete because it no longer works; it becomes obsolete because desire has been moved elsewhere.
These three forms are not isolated dysfunctions. They form an integrated system for destroying use value in order to preserve exchange value. The object is no longer made to last, or even to satisfy. It is made to be replaced.
IV. The cult of performance: organized fragility
Behind planned obsolescence lies an ideology so normalized that we hardly see it anymore: the cult of performance.
Within this paradigm, every system — a machine, a company, a farm soil, even a human being — must be optimized to produce the maximum with the minimum. Efficiency becomes the cardinal value. What is robust but not optimal is treated as archaic. Redundancy is waste. Anything that lasts longer than strictly necessary becomes an unjustified cost.
Yet this logic contains a contradiction that ecosystems have never forgotten: a maximally efficient system is a maximally fragile system. It has no margin of maneuver and no redundancy with which to absorb shocks. It functions at the edge of rupture.
In industry, shifting toward robustness means designing objects that can be transmitted: perhaps heavier, less optimized for just-in-time logistics, but capable of crossing decades. This model has existed and still exists at the margins: sewing machines passed down through families, Shaker furniture that lasts for centuries, old refrigerators still working long after the market expected them to disappear.
Such a model directly contradicts the yield requirements of financial markets. That is where the core of the problem lies.
V. Financialization: the deep mechanism
To understand why planned obsolescence is so difficult to fight, one must look at the transformation of capitalism since the 1980s: the shift from industrial capitalism to financial capitalism.
In the industrial model, the firm is a place of production. Its purpose is to make useful goods or services, employ people and innovate over the long term. Profitability is a means of continuity.
In the financialized model, the firm becomes a vehicle for transferring wealth to shareholders. Its purpose is to maximize shareholder value, ideally every quarter. Production is a means, not an end.
Share buybacks, dividends and quarterly targets divert resources that could finance durability, repairability, long-cycle research, robust materials and local productive capacity. The more capital is absorbed by financial returns, the less remains available for long-term industrial intelligence.
When firms do not innovate to make things last, they innovate to make people buy again. Planned obsolescence is therefore not just the vice of a few executives; it is the rational consequence of an incentive system entirely oriented toward the short term.
VI. Techno-feudalism and digital predation
In the digital economy, industrial financialization is doubled by an even more sophisticated form of extraction: what Cédric Durand calls techno-feudalism.
Major platforms do not merely sell products or services. They collect rent through control over data, algorithms, operating systems, marketplaces and network effects. They dominate infrastructure, capture dependencies and dictate the conditions of access.
Users are no longer simply consumers; they become subjects tied to a digital estate. Like the medieval serf who did not own the land he cultivated, the smartphone owner no longer fully owns the object purchased. He holds a precarious license to use a device whose conditions can be changed unilaterally through software.
Parts pairing is the clearest expression of this dispossession. It turns ownership into a legal fiction: you possess the object, but you cannot repair or modify it without the seller’s permission. This is no longer a simple commercial transaction; it is a relationship of subjection.
VII. The silent scandal: real costs and denied externalities
The obscenity of this system is not only economic. It is written in bodies and soils.
Electronic waste, rare metals, toxic smoke and distant dumping grounds reveal what balance sheets hide. A small share is properly recycled. The rest moves toward open-air waste sites where the poor absorb the lead, mercury and cadmium that do not appear in the profits of technology firms.
These are the system’s denied externalities. They are not visible in GDP. They do not enter the income statement of the brands that sell the devices. They are displaced onto the bodies of the poor and onto the most fragile ecosystems.
Joseph Stiglitz formulated the point clearly: rent does not call for innovation; it calls for the reinforcement of inequality. It creates value for a few while destroying the conditions of existence for many. That is the definition of a predatory system.
VIII. Resistances: fragments of a possible world
Resistances exist. They remain insufficient, but they point in a direction.
France made planned obsolescence a criminal offence in 2015. The repairability index, introduced in 2021, forces manufacturers to display how easy a product is to repair. It is now evolving toward a broader durability index that includes reliability and software-life criteria.
These measures matter because they change incentives. They show that regulation, when serious, can alter design choices. Fairphone, though marginal, proves that a modular, repairable and ethically traceable smartphone is technically possible. The real obstacle is therefore political, not technical.
The functional economy offers another structural lever. Instead of selling a tire, one sells kilometers travelled; instead of selling a lamp, one sells hours of light. When the manufacturer retains ownership of the product, durability becomes a source of margin. Profit and robustness are no longer opposed.
These alternatives show that another relationship to material time is possible. An economy that makes things to last is not an economy that stagnates. It is an economy that deepens.
IX. Toward an economy of equilibrium
The fight against planned obsolescence is ultimately a struggle to reclaim long time: the right to inhabit objects that do not escape us, to transmit goods across generations, and to retain material sovereignty over our own lives.
Such a fight must address causes rather than symptoms: the dictatorship of shareholder value, the short-term logic of financial markets and the extractive regime of digital intellectual property.
This is where money enters the discussion. The money we use is not neutral. It is created through bank credit in a dynamic of perpetual expansion that structurally requires growth in order to service interest. A monetary system based on debt and expansion encodes short-term pressure and extraction at its very base.
Proposals such as NEMO IMS (NEgentropic MOney International Monetary System), which I explore in The Economy of Equilibrium, start from this diagnosis. They imagine a monetary architecture in which money creation would be anchored not in debt, but in the regeneration of living systems and the restoration of natural commons.
In such a system, building to last would no longer be an economic sacrifice. It would become a condition of value creation. Planned obsolescence would become literally counterproductive.
Conclusion: material common sense against devouring abstraction
There was a time when making things well was a source of pride, when the durability of a tool testified to the care of its maker, and when economy meant the concrete management of a household, a community and a territory.
Decades of financialization have built a system that is frighteningly efficient at generating short-term profit and critically fragile in the face of the crises ahead. It destroys deliberately in order to sell again. It turns creation into predation.
Resistance to planned obsolescence is not merely a consumer struggle. It is a civilizational struggle for the rehabilitation of long time, material common sense and the robustness of human and natural ecosystems.
To move from going toward — infinite growth, perpetual renewal — to living with — duration, sufficiency, repairability — is to recover a philosophy of time that financial capitalism tried to erase.
It survives in repair workshops, second-hand markets, saved seeds and cooperatives that produce to serve rather than to compel. From those fragments, the world after begins to take shape.
Jean-Christophe Duval