Light Bulb Conspiracy

Light Bulb Conspiracy is a pretty good documental about how the industries and it's economies works. The film explains something called "Planned Obsolence" which takes part of the purpose of a product when it is created. Planned Obsolence is the fact that almost everything you buy from a company is programmed to be obsolete in a few years. There's the example of the light bulb. When Thomas Edison created it, it's bulb lasted for almost 2500 hours, so companies as Phoebus sold these bulbs back in 1914, but then they realize something which was one of the first planned obsolences things that we saw in our history. Their bulbs were lasting so much which means that was an economic disadvantage since everyone bought bulbs and never had to replace it constantly as we do now days, so the consequence is that they never came back to buy more since their product will last for a long time. So then Phoebus decided to sell bulbs that lasted less these ones and that meant an economic recovery and the solution to our economy. But it was until 1930's that the companies started to realize this after the Great Depression. There was a book named "A New Prosperity" where the solution to the bad economy was the Planned Obsolence. People need to be consumerism, so the only solution for that was to sell products constantly that will force the people to buy always new and constantly. In the 1950's all companies already where making their products to be obsolete in purpose and always get in the market products better than the ones people used to have.

Another example of this was the women's socks that were used. This example is very similar to a movie called "The Man In The White Suit" where a man that created an everlasting machine lead the people in town without jobs because of this machine. So although he got rich for his invention and was able to buy a white suit. People started to demand him to shut down his machine because that was no good for the economy in town and so he was forced to. But the example of the women's socks is that the socks in the past were so strong that you could even used those socks to attach two cars and made one pulled the other car through the sock. But this meant that women would only buy one pair of socks for their whole life (I'm just being exaggerated to prove a point). So then the companies ordered its engineers to start making these socks four times more fragile than the ones they used to sold, that way the socks would tend to get damaged more often and so women had to came back to market and buy more. So more socks were sold in less amount of time. Clever.

The last example is the apple product, the iPod. Turns out that apple products are designed to not be opened, there's no way you can open your apple product and close it without leaving marks that it got opened. So the fact that you can't open your apple device means that you can't replace your battery. These batteries that apple design are programmed to last 18 months, intentionally. Afterwards your iPod won't work, you can't change your battery, there's no way, it is created with that purpose. But since the product is so good you want to have it again, or keep on having it, you have to buy a new one. There's no other solution than buying a new one. No matter how people complain about it and try suing Apple for it, still it is gonna have support from the government because that is the idea of our economy, our new religion. 

The saddest part of this is not that your products are not everlasting, is that all the things you don't use anymore are thrown away by these companies in countries such as Ghana. These companies don't recycle their own trash to create innovative products but to just deposite it in other countries breaking international laws that are not sanctioned buy the organizations in charge of it. The environmental impact from this is that the people in Ghana burn all these electronical devices to extract metal device, and of course there is a smoke that comes from these burns that it is too dangerous to the air since they are too toxic. So Ghana without knowledge is damaging its air because of other countries that just throw away their own residuals in other people's houses.

Light bulb conspiracy is a pretty good documental which I loved and I will highly recommended it to you since it helps you to understand how this world works through economy and what are the impacts of the planned Obsolence in everyone.