Some months ago I was contacted by a journalist. Despite the interview, the story seems to have never run. Here’s what I was asked and how I responded.
Journalist: Are products really designed to die sooner — or are we discarding them faster than necessary?
Response: Whether electronic products are “really” designed to die sooner is a difficult question to answer. From a legal standpoint one has to establish intent on the part of a company who is accused of planned obsolescence (see below). Establishing intent can be a very high bar to meet.
There are a lot of factors that go into decisions to discard devices. We can talk about average use times in different jurisdictions or circumstances, but there are so many variables that create nuances here. For example, people tend to have much more personal decision-making power over their own devices compared to the devices that are provided to them as workers. A company’s IT refresh policy will have much more influence over length of device use than worker’s personal opinions.
Is discarding happening faster than necessary? From a strictly technical point of view, most classes of devices – phones, laptops, etc – can be used much longer than the use-lives that are typical (see this example: https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2020/12/how-and-why-i-stopped-buying-new-laptops).
From an environmental perspective, the most ‘sustainable’ device is the one you already have.
Journalist: Do you see planned obsolescence more as a design issue or a socio-economic one?
Response: With planned obsolescence there is that issue of intent, which can be very difficult to establish. There’s no question that many brand’s business models are premised on people purchasing new versions of devices even if from a technical perspective their existing device is just fine. From an environmental perspective, the most ‘sustainable’ device is the one you already have. The longer you can use it, the more you are conserving the energy and materials that went into making it in the first place. When the underlying business model of a company is growth, shortening the useful life of a device is incentivized, leading to increased energy and material demands to manufacture new models to sell.
In the world of consumer tech making a clear distinction between planned obsolescence as an economic tactic and other imperatives is, I would say, murky. Part of this issue is how hardware and software interrelate with each other. Hardware is often quite robust. Instead of hardware breaking, the issues that might lead to someone deciding to replace a device are often software related. And, given the business models of major brands software can be used by them to push device upgrades whether by driving need (a phone stops working) or stimulating emotional responses, such as desire, anxiety, and fear (nice phone you have there…be a shame if you couldn’t upgrade to the new operating system with the new security features….).
Software is an area where tech companies maintain an inordinate amount of market power that extends to shaping their customer’s control over their own devices. This issue of software driven market power is definitely an area that needs reform if the useful life of devices is going to be enhanced.
Journalist: How do supply chains and material choices factor into the shortened lifespan of modern goods?
Response: I wouldn’t say there is any necessary relationship between supply chains (e.g., their relative complexity or simplicity) or material choices and the useful lives of electronics. Instead, useful lifespan of devices is more a question of hardware and software design decisions. One could imagine, for example, status quo supply chain and material complexity but substantially different design choices leading to devices that have longer useful lives and are more repairable. There are examples of this situation. Efforts like this printer at Crowd Supply (https://www.crowdsupply.com/open-tools/open-printer). Companies such as Fairphone (https://www.fairphone.com/nl), Shift (https://www.shift.eco/en/), and Framework (https://frame.work/ca/en) are all making devices that are not radically different in terms of supply chain or material complexity from status quo devices. These companies are, however, making deliberate design choices that mean their devices are (more) easily upgradable, repairable, or both.
Journalist: What kinds of policy or cultural shifts are needed to normalize repair in high-income countries again?
Response: I would point to policy options that could help normalize repair in high-income countries. The declining repairability of consumer tech is largely a consequence of deliberate design decisions and decisions about business models. The business models have, overtime, increasingly become about building oligopolies at best and monopolies at worst. Robust enforcement of existing anti-trust policies would be an important step toward reinvigorating competition in the market. More competition is a way to discipline tech companies that otherwise develop business models that diminish owner’s control over their own devices and also force those owners into rent-based models to use the devices they own. Rent extraction is an extremely profitable business model. Apple, for example, takes something like a 30% cut from a software developer who sells an app on Apple’s app store. Why is there only one App Store for Apple devices? Imagine creating a legislative landscape in which multiple app stores could exist. Then app developers could choose the store that takes the lowest cut. Developers would see higher returns on their efforts and app purchasers would see lower prices.
These rent-based business models have been enabled by quite specific policy decisions made largely, although not exclusively, in the United States and then subsequently folded into international trade agreements related to intellectual property. These issues get very technical very quickly, but to summarize: profit desires of mostly American companies to control what they deem to be their intellectual property, led to legislation passed in the 1990s in the US that was subsequently incorporated into international trade agreements with other countries that wanted to trade with the US. One important provision of those laws is the use of software-based ‘digital locks’. Breaking those locks, which is something that often has to be done in order to actually perform a repair, is a felony under US law. There has been a lot of writing and analysis on this related to the ‘right to repair’ pointing to examples such as multi-million dollar farm equipment being made unrepairable except by high price technicians from the brand manufacturer (e.g., https://www.vice.com/en/article/farmers-right-to-repair/ ). These issues extend to pretty much anywhere or anything that has a modicum of software embedded in it (e.g., https://gizmodo.com/how-a-group-of-train-hackers-exposed-a-right-to-repair-1851128745 ).
So, from a policy perspective there are good arguments to be made that the use of digital locks, at least in their current legal form, should be abolished. Some have argued that given how the current US administration is essentially tearing up previously signed trade agreements through the invocation of tariffs, countries that have incorporated US-style IP law around digital locks should give them up since one of the main reasons countries took those IP laws on was so as to have free trade access to the US (https://www.policyalternatives.ca/news-research/what-if-canada-stopped-upholding-u-s-tech-companies-intellectual-property/). That trade regime seems to be over now, so why bother adhering to US style IP law given how it gets in the way of other country’s rights to digital sovereignty and hinders their economic innovation?
Journalist: If you could redesign how society thinks about ownership or repair, where would you start?
Response: I think public libraries offer a really inspiring model for thinking and living differently about ownership, access, and things like repair. Currently, more devices are made than can be sold. An EU study, for example, found that online retailers literally destroy somewhere between €600 million and €3.1 billion worth in brand new electronics annually (https://eeb.org/library/prohibiting-the-destruction-of-unsold-goods/). This is the status quo system working to deliberately create scarcity rather than redistribute abundance. One place to start could be to require that surplus devices be distributed to public institutions like libraries. Traditional libraries have long since figured out technical issues like how to handle diverse inventories of things so that the right thing gets to the right person at the right time.
A library model can, potentially at least, change the playing field from one premised on efficiency to sufficiency. This is a subtle, but important shift. Technical engineers tend to think in terms of efficiency e.g., less material and/or energy used per device manufactured. But efficiency has a trap built into it: making improvements on a per device basis typically does not lead to an overall reduction in demand for materials and energy (this sometimes gets called the rebound effect or the Jevons paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox). The trap works like this: let’s say you make a device, such as a phone, 10% more efficient in terms of energy and materials used, but then you sell 20% more phones. When that happens the per-unit efficiencies are wiped out by the increased aggregate demand. Sufficiency, on the other hand, can mean something like having access to devices that enable someone to flourish and self-actualize on their own terms, but without being forced to purchase a new device to do so (I’ve written bit about this idea here: https://electronicplanet.xyz/2024/11/21/for-a-library-system-of-electronics/ ).
Electronic Planet Research Lab 
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