User Reviews

Very nice Spanish/French documentary on consumerism and the history of 'Planned Obsolescence' - companies make products last less, so that customers will have to buy them again and again.

The documentary is very well done and strict in its point of view. I think it is nice that the movie is not from US, as US ones tend to show their opinions on solving the issue a bit too much. You don't need any specific knowledge to go with the movie.

Also it is very good that at some point the movie makes a comparison between western capitalist industry and eastern socialist industry during the cold war. It makes a huge point on what actually happened.

I totally recommend it to everyone.

9/10

The program concentrates NOT on the Phoebus Cartel (as stated in an earlier review), but on the story behind "Planned Obsolescence" and how it has affected consumerism and innovation in modern times.

The title "The light bulb conspiracy" relates to the FIRST known case of planning to make something worse (than they currently were) in order to sell more and make higher profits, and the global conspiracy behind it. However this is only one small part of the story.

By creating a world-wide MAXIMUM limit of 1000 hours (not minimum as stated in an earlier review) on the life of incandescent globes (when they were making 2500 hour globes at that time) they stifled all innovation in that field. (They had FINES for companies whose bulbs lasted longer than 1050 hours, and the more they exceeded this by, the higher the fine)

But Planned Obsolescence was not just limited to Light Bulbs, but to nearly every consumer item manufactured in the western world (and the EASTERN world as well, as so many western companies have their products manufactured in Asia), and has done so until very recent times. Even today obsolescence is achieved, not through planned failure, but through innovation. (Who wants to own and use a Mobile phone that ONLY makes calls and sends text messages, when a newer phone also lets you take photos, surf the internet, play games, etc?) But where does all the OLD, USED, and BROKEN equipment go? Watch the documentary, and you'll see just how irresponsible some companies are with their cast-off equipment.

I liked the story enough to recommend it to my lecturer on ICT Sustainability for my current IT course. He's looking to include it in future classes.

As for being an informative and well made documentary, The Light Bulb Conspiracy suffers a bit from the choice the creators made when naming it something that includes the word conspiracy.

The documentary itself does not focus only on light bulbs, but exemplifies how manufacturers of products make products wear out faster, so that the demand in consumer society increases - making profit for their own company.

Other products that have been adjusted from being long-lasting to wear out within a given time or after a number of uses include printers (which is portrayed in an amusing way in the documentary) and nylon stockings. Products that could last long, are made short-lasting, to keep a high demand, thus keeping up high production.

A number of people who a critical to this way of thinking tells how they think production should be based around sustainability.

Anyone that has been annoyed by things that stop working for no good reason will find this documentary informative.

I love these kinds of documentaries! Those which tells you something new or tells you something you didn't know about something you've been suspecting or thinking, but get confirmed.

This brilliantly made documentary tells about a dark secret which had gone so far that we now accept it. But even worse. The whole concept of "things bing too expensive to fix, buy a new one" is a false. It's fake! Not so that it is produced to fail. No, it can last longer if you know how to do it! A printer is made for lasting 200.000 copies. Then it tells you it's life is over. It's just programmed to stop. You can download a program on your PC install it, to make your printer last another 200.000 copies.

Nasty business, you say! Well, it's in your house! See this, and get enlightened!

The documentary is about the planned obsolescence lined throghout the light bulb. The fact that the bulb's life invented by Thomas Edison in 1878 lasted about 1500 hours and the current bulbs's life are 1000 hours shows us the whole problem. 140 years passed and the bulbs's lifetime shortened by 500 hours. There was time when it was 2500 hours before the planned obselescence. Or who really knows when did this thing come to our world. The narrator says inventors were doing researches and they did a light bulb lasted 100,000 hours but it didn't reach the general market. Some may say it is because of that might was too dark or not environment friendly, but I don't think it was the reason for not letting them to the market. On the other hand, if the bulb would be much more lighter or environment friendly I might say it's more acceptable, but bulbs aren't much more effective than it was back in the 19th century. And this is just an example. Or we might say a sample for other goods. There are a lot of things (or we could say every goods) that consciously built for early obsolescence like mobiles, TVs, furnitures(?), houses(?), vacuums and so on. I think this is a problem of our society. People on Earth became too gold diggers. We (or not we but the gold diggers (I think approximately 90% of people)) put money to the 1st place on our value system (prioritize money too much). There are so many things happening in the world that we can't, or don't want to realize that are for making more and more money. Almost everything infected and invented by money, like religion, wars and so on. Just think about it someone borns to Congo (poorest country in the world), and someone to Dubai and that will impact them lifes like one of them will 30% die from hunger, does anything, and one of them will have a beautiful house by doing nothing. And they can't do anything about it because they born to that country.

So the planned obsolescence is about "quantity over quality". As an engineer wants to sale their products it's a enormous invention, but as a human... Multinational companies product more goods with less money and they sell them at the same prize like it would be the best quality they could do. Moreover, the products's lifetime is shorter, so people will buy more often them, which comes with more money. So poor people spend their money, got by hard work, and companies get more rich by these people's money. But it's the 21st century and that's how life's going.

Hmm ... 'planned obsolescence' is a two-edged sword: one the one hand it is a redundant waste of resources and a creator of environmental damage both in extraction and disposal, yet it serves the economic growth paradigm that has allowed the historic economic growth of west (capitalism), now under attack under the aegis of the environmental movement, i.e. Global warming, that insists we must cut carbon emissions (decarbonization) to save the natural planet from its human enemies (depopulation).

I wonder: could it be that our privately owned fractional reserve banking system, its inherent debt-based, serial sector boom-to-bust, hyper-inflated nation-state and currency destruction be caused by the accelerated growth made manifest in 'planned obsolescence'; and a simple change in ownership of our banking system (public banking), using a fiat currency that is not debt-based, be a solution leading sustainable growth and product resiliency? Growth must be accelerated to meet the demands of debt that can never be paid off.

You must watch this documentary exactly. That was very good.

This film criticises the way manufacturers deliberately make short lasting products that continually have to be re-bought, increasing their profit.

A main focus is on how light bulbs were deliberately limited to 1000 hr lifespans in the Phoebus cartel arrangement between GE, Philips, Osram/Sylvania and others. A favorable comparison is made with long lasting Socialist Narva bulbs, during the cold war era.

This is a little too facile, kicking in open doors: The easy conclusion is that "Hey it's good to have Minimum lifespan standards"

Not true! Brightness and lifespan tend to be trade-offs. Ironically, USA minimum 1000 hr standard - from the Phoebus Cartel in the film - therefore still denies the use of short lasting bright bulbs. It is not Socialist Government standards that makes good life bulbs. Nor is it Capitalist Light Bulb Manufacturer cartels. It is Competition on the market - by helping new manufacturers and inventors (like mentioned Billinger, behind a long lasting bulb) launch their products, for people to choose.

All light bulb types have advantages, and energy saving and lifespan mandates compromise other advantages that light bulbs - or indeed other products mentioned in the film - may have.

"The Light Bulb Conspiracy" is, as my title states, quite possibly, the stupidest film ever made.

I don't write this to be insulting. I mean this very literally.

Specifically, it baffles me how anybody would create or finance a film that is so ignorant of history, ignorant of economics, and ignorant of basic engineering that anybody with a college freshman understanding of any of these can trivially and conclusively debunk its core thesis.

Basically, this film has it in for "planned obsolescence", the idea that modern products have been designed to fail.

Virtually every example they use to illustrate this "grand conspiracy" of planned obsolescence is nonsense. However, the one that they use as the tying-together core thread for all of this is the humble light bulb.

Basically, they argue that a long time ago, a light bulb with a much longer lifespan was invented and then suppressed in favor of shorter life bulbs in order to sell more light bulbs over time. To prove this, they show off an old light bulb that has been in service for over 100 years.

now here's the thing: if you want to light a room, there's almost no limit to the material that you can use in order to do so. Heck, you can put a strong enough current through two ends of an iron girder and it will glow and give off light. Nobody does this because the energy involved would be tremendously expensive and wasteful and for all sorts of technical reasons the light given off would be poor (too dim).

As it turns out, relative to the every other technology available at the time, the tungsten filament that for a long time was in use produced a superior quality light for a relative minimum of energy use and could be mass manufactured at a price people were willing to pay even though such light bulbs needed replacing from time to time. The movie suggests that this was caused not by market forces, but by some grand conspiracy of light bulb manufacturers.

Hogwash.

I've been to north Korea. Guess what - their light bulb factories make the same type of light bulbs. Were they, and the rest of the communist world, which did likewise, in on the conspiracy too? Oh sorry, not all of the communist world - the movie harps on an example of a supposed East German light long life bulb that was rejected, apparently by everybody in the western world, because of some 'grand conspiracy.' Or, maybe, just maybe, because it used a hell of a lot of power and didn't give off worthwhile light for all that power use (remember: in east Germany, power markets were skewed to make domestic energy artificially cheap through subsidy, leading to wasteful usage).

Engineers have a concept of "mean time between failure." It's the average length of time that you can expect some item to stay in service before it fails. If a product consists of several pieces, the MTBF of the product can be calculated based on the MTBF (and distribution) of the components. Let's say you're making a product with two parts. If for technical reasons the MTBF of one part is 5 years, if you have a choice for the other part of a MTBF of 20 years or 100 years, it makes little to no sense to pass on to the consumer the costs associated with the more expensive 100 year version since the weak link in the chain is almost certainly going to be the 5 year component anyway. Calculating and understanding MTBF therefore is what good engineers do. Totally misunderstand it and spin it into some conspiracy is what the guys who made this movie do.

Now, in the capitalist system, you CAN argue that at times companies have hobbled products to make other ones more attractive. Such forces price discrimination is a legitimate criticism of capitalism. However, it only exists by definition where the producer has what's called 'market power.' For the makers of this film to suggest a parallel between that and everyday goods, where there is huge market competition (including in light bulbs) is just daft. I don't see people clamoring for the irons of the 1920s for their "better quality." Instead, I see a range of irons from under $10 to over $300 on amazon corresponding to the budget and expectations of various users from students and mobile people to upscale snobs and dry cleaning professionals. What's more, I see capitalist economics having brought irons (and even light bulbs) the hands of peoples throughout the world who even a few decades ago had to do with primitive, inefficient, time consuming tools and darkness.

Quite literally, every example presented in the movie is trivially debunk-able by anybody with half a brain for basic engineering or economics. The movie implies conspiracy where none exists, and of course the implications are vague since they have no actual evidence. But, you know, the entire movie does have a near continuous x-files type conspiracy soundtrack going. So there's that.

As I said - quite possibly the stupidest movie (by which I mean "dumb" as in "uneducated") movie ever made. The movie doesn't contain any actual data or numbers or anything that could be construed as quantitative analysis. Just conspiracy theory after conspiracy theory that only a fool would believe.

If this movie at least addressed obvious objections that people with engineering, design, economics, and other backgrounds might have to this, this movie might be worth two stars instead of one. It doesn't do that, because to do so would cast this movie's deep deep logical and empirical failings into inescapably sharp relief.

Not worth watching. The writers should be ashamed of themselves.