From the Phoebus cartel to AI: planned obsolescence needs no broken part
maier_ak · x · 2026-10-01
Andreas Maier's Substack essay parallels the 1925 Phoebus lightbulb cartel with today's AI industry.
The real Phoebus lesson
- Osram, Philips, GE and others fixed incandescent bulb life at 1,000 hours, fining members whose lamps lasted too long — durability itself was penalized.
- The trade-off (hotter filament = more light, shorter life) was legitimate engineering; the scandal was that sellers decided it centrally and never told buyers a choice had been made.
Applied to AI
- A change in software the author uses daily, plus one sentence from the vendor, prompted months of reflection (excerpt cut off).
- Core argument: vendors hold a knob upstream of every benchmark outsiders can run, so "unchanged" and "turned-down" produce identical tables. Absence of degradation on public benchmarks is not evidence of absence — Volkswagen passed every official test too.
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