Your phone slows down right before the new model drops. You noticed. You told yourself it was a coincidence. It wasn't.
Planned obsolescence is not a conspiracy theory — it's a design spec. In 1924 the Phoebus cartel, a real agreement between Osram, Philips, and General Electric, capped the lifespan of a light bulb at 1,000 hours. Bulbs that lasted 2,500 hours existed. They were engineered down. That's the whole game in one sentence: they can make it last, and they choose not to.
A hundred years later the bulb became your laptop. Glued-in batteries. Serialized parts that refuse to work unless a corporate server blesses the swap. Screws you can't buy. Software that bricks the device the moment you install a screen you didn't buy from them. The object is yours on the receipt and theirs in the firmware.
This isn't about being cheap. It's about who holds the keys to the thing you paid for.
The trick has a name
Call it what it is and it loses half its power. The industry calls it "product lifecycle management." On the Scales of Maat it has a plainer name: manufactured scarcity. Isfet — the parasite — does not create. It intercepts. It takes a thing that could serve for ten years and rations it out in two, then sells you the missing eight back one purchase at a time.
Look at the numbers. The world throws away more than 60 million tonnes of electronic waste a year, and the pile grows faster than any recycling program can shrink it. Less than a quarter of it is properly recovered. The rest is gold, copper, cobalt, and lithium — dug out of the earth at enormous cost — buried again in a landfill because a $3 battery was glued instead of clipped.
Our record: a device that could last is a small vault of Sekhem — stored energy, human labor, raw earth. When it's designed to die, that energy is deliberately drained back into the ledger of the ones who sold it. Repair is not thrift. Repair is refusing to let your Sekhem be harvested on schedule.
Right to repair is winning
Here's the part they don't advertise: you're not fighting alone, and the fight is already turning.
The European Union passed a Right to Repair directive that forces manufacturers to make spare parts and repair information available, and to repair devices even after the warranty ends. France runs a repairability index — a score, printed on the box, telling you how fixable the thing is before you buy it. In the United States, states like New York, Minnesota, California, and Colorado have passed their own repair laws. Apple — the company that spent years fighting this — now runs a Self Service Repair program and sells parts and manuals directly. They didn't have a change of heart. They lost the argument.
That's the shape of every real win against a closed system: pressure, law, and enough people simply refusing to play. The black box gets cracked open not by permission but by weight.
What you actually do
Awareness is where most people stop. "Yeah, planned obsolescence, terrible." Then they buy the new model. Don't be that. Turn the knowing into a hand movement.
Fix one thing this week. Not everything. One. The bar is embarrassingly low and that's the point — the first repair breaks the spell that repair is for other people.
- Battery first. It's the part that dies first and the repair with the highest payoff. A phone or laptop battery is often a 20-minute job with a $30 kit. iFixit publishes free, step-by-step guides with photos for thousands of devices. You don't need to be an engineer. You need a pentalobe screwdriver and 20 minutes of patience.
- Search before you bin. Whatever's broken — "[your device] + repair guide." Someone has already filmed it. The knowledge is open-source now, whether the manufacturer likes it or not. Consider it the community forking the repair manual they refused to publish.
- Find your local repair café. These are real, volunteer-run spaces — thousands of them worldwide — where people fix each other's toasters, bikes, and laptops for free on a Saturday. You bring the broken thing. Someone who knows shows you how. You leave knowing too. That's the artel of equals, running in your own neighborhood.
- Vote with the receipt. Next purchase, check the repairability score. Buy the Framework laptop, the Fairphone, the brand that ships spare parts. Every one of those sales is a signal that closed hardware is losing customers.
The deeper win
There's a reason they'd rather you replace than repair, and it goes past the extra sale. A person who can fix things is harder to manage. Repair rebuilds something the throwaway economy quietly took from you — the felt sense that the objects around you are knowable. That a device is not a magic slab from the gods but a box of parts a human made and a human can mend.
That confidence doesn't stay in the toolkit. The hand that replaces a battery starts asking who wrote the software, who owns the platform, who profits from the churn. Repair is a gateway. It's the first place you notice that "you can't do that yourself" was always a business model, never a law of physics.
The temples of Egypt were built to last five thousand years. Not because the builders had better glue — because they built for permanence on purpose, stone laid on stone by an artel that intended their work to outlive them. That was a value, encoded in granite. The disposable phone is the opposite value, encoded in adhesive. You get to choose which tradition your hands belong to.
Today
Pick the one device that annoys you most — the phone that won't hold a charge, the laptop fan that screams, the headphones with the dying cable. Right now, open iFixit or search "[that device] repair guide." Read it. Order the part or the kit if you need one. Put a 30-minute repair on your calendar this week.
One fixed thing. That's the whole assignment. The bulb was always meant to last longer — and so were you.