A closer look
Global lightbulb manufacturers formed a secret alliance in 1924 called the Phoebus Cartel explicitly to engineer products that would intentionally burn out faster. Executives from top lighting brands gathered in Geneva to mandate a strictly enforced 1,000-hour life span for incandescent bulbs, actively fining any company that accidentally built a high-quality product. Before this brazen corporate conspiracy, standard bulbs routinely functioned for well over 2,500 hours, meaning humanity possessed far superior illumination durability a full century ago. The cartel successfully birthed the macroeconomic nightmare known as "planned obsolescence," ensuring consumers would be trapped in a perpetual cycle of repurchasing the exact same fragile garbage. When your pricey smartphone conveniently begins lagging exactly two weeks before the shiny new model drops, you can directly thank those greedy 1920s businessmen who mathematically proved that manufacturing durable goods is a terrible strategy for quarterly profits
