Here's something most people have never heard of: in December 1924, executives from the world's largest light bulb companies met in secret in Geneva, Switzerland. Their goal wasn't innovation — it was to make products worse on purpose. Derek Muller tells this story with the kind of detail that makes you realize how long we've been getting fleeced.
The evidence is right there in California. Outside Livermore Fire Station Number Six sits a light bulb that has run continuously since 1901 — over a million hours. "It was manufactured by hand, not long after commercial light bulbs were first invented," Muller writes, "and it has been running for over a million hours, way longer than any light bulb today is meant to last." That fire station bulb isn't some accident of engineering. It's a relic from before the industry learned to game itself.
The Phoebus Cartel
The story takes root in 1924 when the big players — Philips, General Electric, Osram, and others — formed what became known as the Phoebus Cartel. "In Geneva, Switzerland, just before Christmas 1924, there was a secret meeting of top executives from the world's leading light bulb companies," Muller recounts. The premise sounds almost comedic to modern ears: these competitors agreed to work together to make their products worse.
The reasoning was brutally simple. "The biggest threat they all faced was from longer lasting light bulbs." In 1923, Osram sold 63 million bulbs. The following year, they sold only 28 million. Bulbs were lasting too long — and that was eating into sales. So the cartel agreed to reduce average lifespan to 1,000 hours, cutting existing averages nearly in half.
They formed what became known as the Phoebus cartel — named after Phoebus, the Greek god of light.
How did they enforce this? Each manufacturer sent sample bulbs to be tested on large test stands. If a bulb lasted significantly longer than 1,000 hours, the company was fined. If it lasted longer than 3,000 hours, the fine was 200 Swiss francs for every thousand bulbs sold. There are actual records of these fines being issued.
The Economics of Deliberate Failure
The results were exactly as planned. "By 1934, the average lifespan was just 1,205 hours," Muller writes, "and just as they had planned, sales increased for cartel members by 25 percent in the four years after 1926." Even as component costs dropped, the companies kept prices virtually unchanged — pocketing the difference as profit.
This is where the piece gets genuinely unsettling. The cartel claimed standardization was its purpose — a reasonable cover. But "all evidence points to the cartels being motivated by profits and increased sales, not by what was best for consumers." That's the thing about business models built on planned obsolescence: they work beautifully until someone notices.
The Pattern Spreads
Muller traces this tactic forward through history like a pattern that couldn't be contained. When nylon stockings proved too durable, "the manufacturers realized they had made the product too good — they didn't destroy the fiber, but they did follow the example of the Phoebus cartel: they instructed their engineers and scientists to find ways to weaken the product to shorten its lifespan."
The automotive industry picked up the playbook with particular gusto. GM's head of design, Harley Earl, was candid: "Our big job is to hasten obsolescence." In 1934, average car ownership spanned five years. By 1955, it was two years. When he said this, "General Motors was the most valuable company in the world and it sold half of all vehicles purchased in the U.S. every year."
Apple later copied what Muller calls "directly out of this playbook": new styles every year, new colors every year, marginal technological improvements that feel like gimmicks. The cycle of deliberate imperfection has become so normalized we barely notice it.
Is There Hope?
The piece's most hopeful note comes at the end — not from industry reform, but from actual technological improvement. "In the last 20 years, light bulbs have gone from incandescent, which was basically unchanged for 100 years, to compact fluorescent and now to LED," Muller writes. "These use just a tenth the energy and can last anywhere from 10 to 50 times longer." The LED bulb isn't a cartel trick — it's genuinely better.
We've finally reached the point of what is essentially an everlasting light bulb.
The right-to-repair movement in Europe and over 25 U.S. states offers real promise: forcing manufacturers to make products easier to fix, providing parts so third-party repair shops can work without voiding warranties.
Counterarguments
Critics might note that Muller conflates several different examples — light bulbs, cars, nylon stockings, iPhones — under the umbrella of planned obsolescence. These markets behave differently, and not every case is a deliberate conspiracy. Some product limitations are about physics, not profit. The battery degradation example on older iPhones is real, but it's also more complicated than Muller presents: throttling was done to protect hardware from sudden voltage drops, not just to sell new phones.
Bottom Line
The strongest thread running through this piece is the historical pattern itself — once you see that companies have been deliberately making worse products for nearly a century, suddenly those "Style" updates and "limited edition" colors feel less like innovation and more like what they always were. Muller's biggest vulnerability is that he doesn't fully distinguish between deliberate manipulation and genuine engineering constraints. But he's absolutely right that we've been told to rush out and keep buying the same thing over and over — and that's the part worth pushing back on.