Thomas Pynchon’s novel Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) blends fact and fable. At the postmodern tome’s tail end, a fictional, anthropomorphic lightbulb named “Byron” wages war against the Phoebus Cartel: a nonfictional conglomerate of corporations—General Electric, Philips, Tokyo Electric, Osram, Siemens, and Tungsram—that monopolized the global lightbulb industry from 1925 to 1939.

Named after Phoebus, the Greco-Roman Sun god otherwise known as Apollo, the real cartel becomes Byron’s bête noire in a section of Gravity’s Rainbow. The epic fictional showdown first begins when the bulb realizes he is immortal and can speak. Byron’s survival beyond his predetermined expiration date threatens the Cartel’s fragile system, which (both in the novel and real-life) relies on all manufacturers to comply with a shared agreement that no lightbulb they sold would live longer than 1000 hours. (Standard bulbs up to that point could last up to 2,000 hours.) Byron goes on the lam from Berlin to Hamburg after the clandestine coterie assigns a hitman to kill him. He then tries to organize every lightbulb in the world against the Cartel: “Phoebus fixes the prices and determines the operational lives of all the bulbs in the world.” Pynchon continues, “So Byron dreams of his Guerilla Strike Force, gonna get Herbert Hoover, Stanley Baldwin, all of them, right in the face with one coordinated blast.”

Planned obsolescence has lent itself to renditions in books such as Gravity’s Rainbow, songs, exhibitions, and films over the last half-century. Those of us—especially artists and writers—who engage with this topic reflect to the viewer an abysmal manufacturing system that depletes planetary resources at mind-boggling speed, accelerates ecological devastation, and seems too comically evil to be real. Meditations on planned obsolescence in a myriad of media forms, from Pynchon to punk, occupy the middle space of the Venn Diagram between conspiracy theory and evidence-based fact. The line is blurred, which makes the work that much more potent, bewildering, and intoxicating. Today there are still debates about whether planned obsolescence is a real thing. In 1951, the United Kingdom’s Monopolies and Restrictive Practices Commission issued a report stating that planned obsolescence was a myth and that allegations against the Phoebus Cartel were “misconceived.”

It wasn’t until the 1970s that pundits started talking about this history openly. A watershed moment came in 1986 when Jeremy Bulow, a Stanford economics professor, acknowledged planned obsolescence as a staple of modern manufacturing in an academic paper, An Economic Theory of Planned Obsolescence, making what was once a fringe conspiracy theory mainstream. More papers followed. In the 2010s, France and other countries began passing laws restricting planned obsolescence and cracking down on corporations such as Apple (after “batterygate”) and Samsung that deployed it. Still, libertarian think tanks, like the Mises Institute in Austria, continue to write off planned obsolescence as a canard.

Art production about planned obsolescence has evolved with its incremental acceptance as the status quo. In 1985, Tracy Chapman’s college roommate in Somerville, Massachusetts, was in a band called Planned Obsolescence.

Screamo, cybergoth, and folk singers like Stan Freberg, Existentia, Gojira, The Halo Benders, Flesh World, PlanLeft, and 10,000 Maniacs have all made songs and albums called Planned Obsolescence. These are artists that came of age circa Y2K. You can feel the tech anxiety hovering over their heads in the music, and the chains they wore in their JNCOs suggesting solidarity with the Luddites. Many of us were first subliminally exposed to these ideas as kids. Subplots of children’s movies like The Brave Little Toaster (1987), Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988), WALL-E (2008), Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs (2009), and others are also predicated on planned obsolescence—cautionary tales that warned us when we were young. Like Gravity’s Rainbow, The Brave Little Toaster features household products springing to life: five cartoon characters named Toaster, Blanky (an electric blanket), Radio, Lampy (a lamp), and Kirby (a vacuum cleaner) trek from their home in the forest to the big city only to find themselves threatened by new, more modern domestic goods. The appliances narrowly escape the junkyard when Rob (their owner) takes them to college, positing a subtle critique of consumer capitalism at the zenith of the Reagan era.

Ben Gaulon (Corrupt.Yourself, 2015), Lawrence Abu Hamdan (Planned Obsolescence, 2023), and Hendrickje Schimmel, to name but a few, are contemporary artists who engage with planned obsolescence, albeit in various forms. Schimmel, a Dutch artist born in 1990, has staged sculptures (Receptacles, 1–9, 2025) and exhibitions (Science and Worms, 2025) about fast fashion and the extractive practices of brands like Zara.

Schimmel’s corpus conveys how planned obsolescence is baked into the fashion industry, from material sourcing to design, and how it’s taken on new forms. Many fashion companies, for instance, like Temu, Shein, and Fashion Nova, intentionally don’t stress-test items like zippers so consumers only get a few wears out of their clothes; this is planned obsolescence even if not by name. Today, fast fashion is the world’s second largest polluter (after electricity and heat production) and, as an industry, constitutes 10 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, exploiting millions of workers, mostly women and children in the Global South.

Planned obsolescence manifests in architecture too: Tolia Astakhishvili, at a MoMA PS1 group show in 2025, filled a trash chute laid on its side with junk (wrenches, toy cars, cheap jewelry, and more) she found at flea markets in Berlin and Tbilisi. Wicked plans and dark days, Astakhishvili told me, were “in reaction to this perpetual cycle of projects starting but not completing and then getting torn down” in post-communist Georgia.

The works speak to how “our lives [have] become increasingly shaped by the glut of garbage and information” that is persistently spoon-fed. Astakhishvili’s provocations suggest that even buildings have predetermined lifespans, offering social commentary on how teardown culture and corruption collide in Georgia more broadly. When grouped, all of these works convey how ubiquitously planned obsolescence is hardwired, unbeknownst to most buyers, into the commodities we encounter daily. Clothing, cars, lightbulbs, furniture, toys, and housing are manufactured by corporations to keep the consumer coming back for more as fast as possible.

The term “planned obsolescence” was coined by Bernard London, a real estate broker: “Furniture and clothing and other commodities should have a span of life, just as humans have,” London said in his 1932 essay, Ending the Great Depression Through Planned Obsolescence. “They should be retired,” he continued, “and replaced by fresh merchandise. It should be the duty of the State as the regulator of business to see that the system functions smoothly.”

London got the idea after studying production at General Motors (GM), then under the tutelage of Alfred Sloan, the CEO credited with inventing planned obsolescence to outproduce his nemesis, Henry Ford. London said planned obsolescence could save the national economy during the Great Depression by flooding consumers with goods they don’t need and that break down faster than usual by artificially stimulating demand with aggressive marketing. (Bruce Barton, author of The Man Nobody Knows—a controversial, revisionist best-seller published in 1925 that reframed Jesus Christ as “the father of modern business,” and not a revolutionary socialist—steered GM’s marketing division.) After London’s essay was published, corporations around the world started following GM’s lead and folding planned obsolescence into their product design, similar to the lightbulb manufacturers that made up the Phoebus Cartel. In 1939, DuPont launched a new, almost “indestructible” nylon stocking for women as a more cost-friendly alternative to silk stockings. They were a huge hit. But DuPont quickly realized that selling long-lasting stockings hurt its profit margin, so the corporation started manufacturing a modified version that ripped more easily, not unlike the plotline in The Man in the White Suit, a 1951 British movie starring Alex Guinness and Joan Greenwood. In the film, a chemist––employed at a textile mill––named Sidney Stratton (Guinness) invents a new miracle fiber that never gets dirty or tears; he gets fired by the mill owners, and then an angry mob chases him through the streets.

The National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) was swayed by London’s essay; its members argued that planned obsolescence could be leveraged by industrialists to crush the labor movement’s push for a 3-day work week––a horizon the U.S. was approaching in those days, according to a 1927 interview in Nation’s Business with then-U.S. Labor Secretary James Davis. NAM felt that planned obsolescence could perform a double function: both as a means of capital accumulation and a strategy for dominating the proletariat. Jeffrey Kaplan describes the threat that the 3-day work week posed to industrialists in The Gospel of Consumption (2008).

Business owners like Sloan, said Kaplan, felt that excessive leisure was a catalyst for revolution, recalling the old Protestant maxim about the association of idle time with the Devil. Therefore, it was in Big Capital’s interests to reduce the amount of leisure enjoyed by workers as much as possible through the tools at the disposal of factory owners. One strategy was to keep workers chained to conveyor belts to make a limitless amount of bullshit. It worked. Consumer capitalism was born, and factory workers remained tethered to the assembly lines. Designing objects to fail faster had a spider web effect that spread around the world, obliterating the equilibrium between supply and demand that had theoretically regulated capitalism since the First Industrial Revolution. Demand was no longer determined by the ebbs and flows of the market, but rather the whims of the capitalists. This led to the deskilling of the working class, which led to lower wages; and lower wages led to job insecurity and lower union density. The repair economy was destroyed. This phenomenon was criticized by agrarian theorist Ralph Borsodi in This Ugly Civilization (1929) and later by Black feminist theorist Elise Mason in The Slow Violence of Planned Obsolescence (2022). Planned obsolescence was likewise fictionalized in Gravity’s Rainbow, and Robert Zemeckis’ Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988), as well as by the other artists mentioned throughout this essay.

Both Gravity’s Rainbow and Who Framed Roger Rabbit delve into corporatist subterfuge with a paranoid bent. In the latter half-animated, feature-length film, we follow the damsel in distress, Jessica Rabbit (wife of Roger Rabbit), expose a real estate conspiracy: seedy Pinkertons (thugs for hire) employed by Cloverleaf Industries (a stand-in for GM) lurk throughout Toontown (Hollywood) and destroy the “Red Cars,” Toontown’s public transit network. A mad villain named Judge Doom (Christopher Lloyd) owns Cloverleaf Industries and goes up against a private investigator named Eddie Valiant (Bob Hoskins). Valiant is hired by R. K. Maroon to unearth a love affair between Jessica Rabbit and Marvin Acme, who owns Toontown. However, the plot shifts when Acme is mysteriously murdered, and Valiant clashes with Cloverleaf. Maroon gets killed too. The subplot of the film is in fact based on the GM Streetcar Conspiracy. In 1949, the automotive giant General Motors was charged with violating the Sherman Antitrust Act for allegedly sabotaging service on trolley lines that the corporation had controlled in cities throughout the U.S. to push passengers into cars: “Nobody’s gonna drive the lousy freeway when they can take the Red Car for a nickel,” Valiant tells Doom at the end of the movie, during the climax. “They’ll drive, they’ll have to,” Doom replies. “You see, I bought the Red Cars so I could dismantle it!”

This actually happened. Between 1938 and 1950, GM subsidiaries purchased contracts to operate electric streetcar systems in Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York City, Oakland, Newark, Boston, St. Louis, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, New Orleans, and other cities. These GM subsidiaries included National City Lines, Atlantic City Lines, and Pacific City Lines (a name emblazoned onto Red Cars humming through Toontown). The Department of Justice found GM had sabotaged public transit by intentionally failing to maintain rolling stock and reducing the frequency of service on lines it operated, forcing riders into cars (those who could afford them). To ensure trolley cars didn’t get reactivated, GM employees literally set them on fire, bedlam captured in grainy photographs taken in junkyards where public transit had been put out to pasture. GM’s goons would pour out kerosene, burn the trolleys to a crisp, and invite the public to watch the bonfires before the rolling stock was replaced with diesel buses. The mass burning of trolley cars formed a pseudo-Satanic ritual that countless Americans bore witness to, reminiscent of the incineration of effigies in Pagan, Christian, Hindu, Judaic, Celtic, Orthodox, and other cultures around the world for time immemorial. Trolley cars were subliminally equated with demons that needed purging from the collective subconscious using ceremonial smoldering, like how likenesses of the ancient Slavic goddess Marzana get torched every spring in Eastern Europe.

During the 1974 Senate hearings, Sloan and GM were also accused of abetting the Nazi invasion of Poland.

In 1935, GM built its Opel factory near Berlin; Opel manufactured the “Blitz trucks” that Germany used to invade Poland four years later. The Wehrmacht, Nazi Germany’s air force, also bought synthetic fuel technology from Opel to execute the Blitzkrieg. After charges were filed in 1949, GM employed its marketing and PR departments to refute the claims by litigators and mayors of major cities, and the court case dragged on for decades. In 1974, GM issued a report for mass consumption titled The Truth About American Ground Transport, which dismissed the accusations as slander against corporate America. But the numbers speak for themselves. In her book, Building Suburbia (2003), Dolores Hayden noted that by 1915, Los Angeles had over 1,200 miles of streetcar track. In 1961, the last streetcar in Los Angeles was decommissioned; the city went from 1,200 miles to zero miles in 46 years. By 1920, New York City’s trolley system comprised 1,344 miles of streetcar track. On March 25, 1936, the first of New York City’s trolley lines was replaced with a bus service operated by a GM subsidiary, paralleling what was happening in Los Angeles. On October 31, 1956, New York City’s last trolley in Brooklyn was decommissioned. In just twenty years, the amount of operational streetcar track in New York City went from 1,344 miles to zero miles. GM’s effectiveness was in part thanks to strategic power plays in Washington, D.C. In 1932, Sloan created a special interest coalition that was later dubbed “the most powerful pressure group in Washington.” Called the National Highway Users Conference, the group lobbied for highway construction and public transit disinvestment, culminating in the GM Streetcar Conspiracy. But Sloan didn’t stop there.

In 1933, Sloan, J. P. Morgan, Pierre DuPont, and other CEOs formed a far-right coalition called the American Liberty League to crush the New Deal.

The American Liberty League planned to assassinate President Franklin D. Roosevelt and replace him with Marine Corps Major General Smedley Darlington Butler; the goal was to make Butler into America’s Hitler. Butler was approached by bankers one day in 1933 on Wall Street and offered a $30 million loan ($700 million in 2026) to buy Remington rifles, assemble 500,000 veterans and Ku Klux Klansmen, march into the White House, kill the president, and assert himself as the fascist dictator of the U.S. in league with Hitler, Mussolini, and Hirohito. At first, Butler was open to the idea but then didn’t think the coup d'état would work. So, to save himself, he tipped off the F.B.I. The whole thing is known today as the “Wall Street putsch” and the “Business plot,” although few Americans even know about it. Gerald Maguire, a core member of the American Legion, testified that the group of men responsible for bankrolling the coup— “the royal family of financiers” in Maguire’s words—controlled $40 billion in assets (approximately $800 billion in 2026) and came extremely close to killing Roosevelt before Butler thwarted the plot. After testifying in Congress about the failed coup attempt, Butler said of his military career: “I spent most of my time being a high-class muscle man for big business, for Wall Street and for bankers. In short, I was a racketeer for capitalism.” On June 26, 1940, top executives from GM, Ford, Texaco, and other corporations celebrated Hitler’s victory over France on the 18th floor of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in Manhattan. Sloan ultimately suffered no penalties for his fascist coup attempt, aiding Nazi Germany, destroying public transportation networks around the country, and emitting immeasurable amounts of carbon into the atmosphere. Instead, he was allowed to continue as CEO of GM and help shape the country’s infrastructure thanks to his position, remaining in charge of the National Highway Users Conference for decades to come. And, yes, he sold a fuck ton of cars and made lots of money.

Sloan died in 1966. GM destroyed most of his papers, so we’ll never know the full extent of his dastardly crimes. MIT named its School of Management after Sloan. (To date, the MIT Sloan School of Management has graduated dozens of Fortune 500 CEOs and world leaders, including Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The Sloan Foundation, Sloan’s eponymous philanthropic group, supports cultural programs like radio shows on NPR and films at the Tribeca and Sundance Film Festivals. Today, Sloan is an obvious villain for liberals and the left, but he is also demonized by far-right conspiracy theorists, and even anti-vaxxers. Mike Adams, a self-described “health ranger” reporter for Natural News—a website that promotes anti-vax content and racialized pseudoscience—criticized the Sundance Film Festival in 2016 because Vaxxed: From Cover-Up to Catastrophe, a film directed by disgraced British doctor Andrew Wakefield, was snubbed by jurors and denied entry to the festival. In an article for Natural News, citing Sloan’s Nazi persuasions, Adams argued that the Sundance Film Festival is an instrument of “population control” for the Sloan Foundation because it rejected Wakefield’s submission, a documentary about how COVID-19 and vaccines are, Adams said, fake news. (Adams said too that the “globalists” who run the Sloan Foundation are in part responsible for “chemtrails” falling from airplanes in the sky, poisoning those of us down below.) To support his claim, Adams produced an organization chart—similar to the ones by artist Mark Lombardi—showing how Sloan, Sundance, the Gates Foundation, Bayer, Merck, Robert DeNiro, MIT, the “AIDS vaccine front,” the Rockefellers, Nazis, and the eugenics movement more broadly were, and still are, all connected. In the paranoid, yet admittedly intriguing, drawing by Adams, all arrows point back to Sloan, a master of the universe still running the show from his grave. Adams said in the affirmative: “What we now know is that the Third Reich’s attempts to shape and dominate science in the interests of eugenics continue even today through the independent film community, where money is handed out to filmmakers who agree to follow the science propaganda direction of the Sloan Foundation.”

Some beliefs about Sloan are true, others are false; it’s all contingent on where you stand politically. And this is what interests me most about the niche subject (let’s call it Sloan studies) that I’ve spent the last few years of my life on. A survey released in 2025 by the National Academy of Sciences, polling 124,000 respondents, stated that 79 percent of Americans believe in at least one conspiracy theory.

Of that number, 20 percent believe in at least four conspiracy theories; the most susceptible demographic was men between the ages of 25 and 54. (From hours studying planned obsolescence and Sloan on Reddit—haunted by fringe internet conspiracy theorists claiming to have the answers about “globalists” sprinkling “chemtrails” from airplanes into the stratosphere, why there are tears in women’s nylon stockings, and the eugenicists purportedly in control of the Sundance Film Festival trying to sabotage our reproductive organs—I can testify to the severity of my own affliction.)

In this vein, Ana Gavrilovska, a literary critic writing in Current Affairs, said that 2025 was “the year of Pynchon.”

Similarly, in his 2017-2025 essay A Snake Whistles, art critic Travis Diehl affirmed that if “Modernism was enamored with the psychoanalyst, [and] postmodernism with the detective,” then our era’s “demystifying archetype is the conspiracy theorist.” What, then, can we make of the books, songs, installations, movies, and reports grappling with the vestiges of truth embedded within the conspiracy? If planned obsolescence is outside of the Overton Window (the range of ideas acceptable for public consumption), is an artwork about planned obsolescence a conspiracy theory by default? Or, taking Diehl’s claim to its logical conclusion, is the conspiracy theorist today our arbiter of truth, like Søren Kierkegaard’s “clown at the end of the world,” relentlessly trying to tell the rollicking crowd that the theater is on fire?