In the 1970s, the concept still had enough cultural currency to be thematized in a popular board game, Beat Detroit, put out by Dynamic Games. In the game players move cars around a board while avoiding hidden traps set by the auto industry. The goal is for players to get suficient use value out of their vehicles to justify their purchase price, thereby “beating” the auto industry. The game concept was introduced as being “based on an elemental fact of American life: most automobiles disintegrate before they can be paid for (in economic language that’s known as planned obsolescence).”22 This description was evoking concerns about a practice thought to be widespread in the auto industry. A poll of consumers conducted by the Louis Harris organization in 1972 for Life magazine found that a large majority thought that the auto industry was interested in “planned obsolescence rather than long term use,” with 75 percent registering “a negative rating on the industry’s ability to give a good value for money.”23
The suspicion that planned obsolescence was at play in industrial design extended well beyond the confines of Detroit and the automobile industry. “Nowhere is the curse of American planned obsolescence more infuriating than in the toy department,” we are informed in a review of a guide to shopping by mail.24 The opinion put forth in an article about hi-fi is quite typical in its assessment of the pervasiveness of planned obsolescence: “Planned obsolescence and shoddy workmanship seem to be a fact of life one must learn to live with when buying and using most consumer goods.”25 The accusation of planning obsolescence was even leveled (albeit with a certain amount of levity) at luminaries of the economics profession. In a review of the latest edition of Paul Samuelson’s hugely successful textbook, Economics, Robert F. Mathieson slyly noted that “by keeping his discussion of problems contemporary he can come out with a new text every three years. Planned obsolescence at its best.”26 The term became extended to refer to the social, political, and even biological domains. One natural extension of the concept of planned obsolescence was to describe what happens to workers made unemployed by technological change. Such change efected “the planned obsolescence of a . . . career.”27 In this case, the term was used to evoke a pervasive anxiety about the rate of change in the modern economy and the ability of its workforce to keep up. The term was also used to describe the plight of other categories of person one way or another threatened with being made redundant by change. In 1960, the Los Angeles Times ran a series on the “housewife dilemma,” about the fate of stay-at-home mothers after their children begin school, which begins by posing the question: “Must today’s home-maker be a victim of planned obsolescence?”28 Planned obsolescence was also used to rhetorical efect to characterize attitudes toward the elderly as well as to describe the biological process of aging. An article entitled “Can We Control Aging” begins by noting that “the aging process has been likened to planned obsolescence—in that every cell in the body is programmed to die.”29 The term cropped up everywhere.
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Time for Things