Daniel Alberto Symcha*
Companies producing household goods have developed a business strategy that involves designing products with an intentionally limited useful life, scheduling them to stop working or become obsolete at a scheduled time using fragile materials, integrated batteries that are impossible to change, lack of software updates, technological incompatibility, economic damage to the user due to increased consumption and repair costs, marketing campaigns that generate the feeling of age or lack of effectiveness of the product.
This planning aims to force consumers to replace products by encouraging excessive consumption, generating a serious environmental impact but maintaining production and sales capacity to large companies or corporations. That is, the end of the useful life of a product is established before the moment of its manufacture.
There is a symbiotic relationship between producers, large international corporations and financial banks, both identified in the words of Dr. Marcelo Gullo as Political Units Without a Territorial Seat (UPSAT), based on financing and dependency where the UPSAT have a hierarchical relationship with the producers, exercising power over production, competitiveness, market structure, technology control, regulatory and deregulation changes, creation of public opinion and new markets.
The snake egg
Table of Contents
The concept of planned obsolescence originated as a proposal to get out of the great depression of 1930 in the United States and was authored by Bernard London, the proposal that was reflected in a publication: “Ending the Depression through planned obsolescence” (Ending the Depression Through Planned Obsolescence).
London was a Russian-American real estate broker who claimed that the government should require companies to establish the obsolescence of consumer goods at the time of production. This was going to force citizens to replace functional but “old” products with new ones, which meant keeping factories in operation and sustaining the employment of workers, even at the cost of deliberately discarding functional products.
London’s proposal was not successful in terms of public policies of the American State because it was a direct interference and control over private initiatives, but it did anticipate and legitimize an economic logic: the systematic production of obsolescence as a driver of consumption that was adopted as a business practice starting in 1940 and companies began to deliberately reduce the durability of products mainly through constant design changes and marketing campaigns.
In the London concept: «Furniture, clothing and other goods must have a useful life, just like human beings. Once used during their useful life, they must be removed and replaced with new goods. and like their plan regarding production and consumption, the UPSAT followed to the letter the New York concept but applied to the societies that supplied raw materials to the hegemonic countries from the periphery of power.
Argentina as a regional risk
The Argentine Republic in 1974 had a growth rate of 7% annually, the manufacturing industry grew at 6.5%; The basic metal industry grew at 8.4%, with steel production being another of the pillars with growth at the same percentage. There was an automotive industry that was growing at 3.5%. The construction industry with its high impact on labor grew at 12.5%. Demand for services grew at 7.4% and transportation, storage and communications grew at 6.4%. The production of electricity, gas and water was growing at 7% annually.
Household poverty was 4.6%, the unemployment rate was 2.7%, the level of public external debt in relation to the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) was 10%, gross investment had its highest index 24% of GDP.
Argentina had a solid state structure, it produced merchant and warships, airplanes, military equipment for the three Armed Forces and the Security Forces, it had a solid educational and health structure, top-level industrial development, strong union participation, its own scientific and technological development and a fundamental pillar for national development, nuclear energy. Argentina became a risk for Anglo-American hegemony in Latin America.
The decline of these capabilities began with the civic-military coup d’état of 1976, and subsequently deepened with the first two democratic governments and the dismantling of the State’s capabilities, leading to a social outbreak in the third democratic government that overthrew President De la Rúa, who had asked the Armed Forces to intervene to control the outbreak, but they refused because they were not part of their missions and functions.
The Argentine political organization made it possible to overcome the crisis and maintain democratic continuity, reaching in 2015, according to the words of the president of the Industrial Union of the Argentine Republic, Héctor Méndez, the level of industrial production per capita of 1974.
Dancing in the ruins
Currently, all these indices again fell abruptly in just ten years, plunging the population into poverty, reaching 40.1% in urban centers in 2023, that is, more than 11,756,000 people. In 2026, the official indices do not demonstrate reliability since economic social assistance increased 30 times that provided by the State in 2015, as of December 2025: the Universal Child Allowance reached 4,114,513 holders in January 2026, including 93,453 beneficiaries due to disabilities, while the Alimentar Card reaches 2,546,130 families and covers more than 4,500,000 million children.
In mid-2025, according to the report from the Argentine Institute for Social Development (Idesa), of the 18,000,000 million Argentines in urban areas of working age (men between 15 and 64 years old, and women between 15 and 59), 5 million do not have a job nor are they actively looking for one. This represents 27% of the working-age population in urban areas.
Of a total of 21,000,000 people of productive age, the number of unemployed in the second quarter of 2025 was 2.3 million. The number of informal jobs, commonly known as “black work”, covered 43.2% of the total number of jobs, while the number of underemployed workers (people who have a job but work less than 35 hours per week for involuntary reasons) was 11.6%.
As with household appliances, there is a criterion of programmed social obsolescence on our population as a result of public policies directed by international organizations that have a direct and sedimentary impact on our capabilities as a Nation.
Degrading the quality and living conditions through a set of programmed economic actions inexorably results in the destruction of the productive ecosystem, the instability and labor uncertainty of the population, the destruction of the social fabric, the loss of the capacities for progress and the denigration of the living conditions of our people who take refuge in an economy of daily sustenance through the sale of products in their homes, American fairs, production of baked goods, grills on the go.
This denigration in the quality of life implies a limitation in the conditions of survival and growth through improvement in the young population, which will imply a strong cognitive deterioration due to lack of nutrients, an absence of the sense of order and authority due to the destruction of the family nucleus, which results in processes of violence, tension and social disintegration.
The validity of Umberto Eco
«The relationship between our enthusiasm for technological conveniences and our inclination for magical thinking is very close, and is deeply linked to the religious hope that we place in the lightning action of miracles»stated Umberto Eco in one of his columns in L’Expresso in 2015.
Multimedia engineering through the use of persuasive technologies, which studies how devices, apps and platforms can be designed to influence our behaviors and the network of religious sects spread throughout large urban centers favor the appearance in the population of a criterion of magical thinking where reality is simply an unimportant space-time obstacle. In both cases, multimedia and sects, based on magical thinking, have an anesthetic function, that is, temporarily blocking sensitivity and consciousness to allow invasive actions to be carried out safely and comfortably.
The bombardment of stimuli, the need to belong to something and the belief that there will be a solution to the problems in due time, acts on the nervous system, reducing brain connectivity or numbing specific areas, distracting us from pain, the formation of memories or the motor response that could prevent the continuity of actions that degrade our quality of life.
Programmed social obsolescence is the harvest of a sowing carried out through continuous, systematic and sustained economic confusion, multimedia development based on persuasive technologies and the territorial work of thousands of sects with a discourse of salvation adaptable to each anguish to generate a sense of belonging and empathy that prevents the breaking of a cycle of oppression.
* Journalist. Arturo Jauretche National University. Master in National Strategic Intelligence, National University of La Plata. Researcher at the Argentine Society for Strategic and Global Studies (SAEEG).
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date: 2026-02-12 03:02:00
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