The Light Bulb Conspiracy

The untold story of Planned Obsolescence

An investigative documentary that exposes the deliberate engineering of product failure as a profit-driven conspiracy, blending archival evidence with expert analysis to critique capitalism's environmental and ethical costs.

Once upon a time... consumer goods were built to last. Then, in the 1920’s, a group of businessmen realized that the longer their product lasted, the less money they made, thus Planned Obsolescence was born, and manufacturers have been engineering products to fail ever since. Combining investigative research and rare archive footage with analysis by those working on ways to save both the economy and the environment, this documentary charts the creation of ‘engineering to fail’, its rise to prominence and its recent fall from grace.