# Ending Planned Obsolescence in Tech by Brandon Ramirez (Devcon5)

- Channel: [Devcon](https://streameth.org/devcon)
- Date: 2020-10-09
- Duration: 19:06
- Topics: blockchain, smart contracts, distributed ledger, ethereum, Science & Technology
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-QOuOfU8f4I0
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOuOfU8f4I0

## Description

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https://archive.devcon.org/archive/watch/5/ending-planned-obsolescence-in-tech

The apps we love are built to die. Planned obsolescence, a term most people associate with cheap physical goods, is just as problematic in the software industry, where it hurts users and stifles innovation. It should seem counterintuitive that a product consisting primarily of ones and zeros could have a built-in expiration date, and yet the applications we rely upon shut down or become defunct all the time. Just this year already two applications that our team relied upon and were willing to pay for, shut down, despite having large active user bases.
How is it that products and services with almost zero marginal cost of distribution, can shut down amidst the protests of loyal users?
In contrast to the manifestations of obsolescence were used to, the flaws here are subtle economic and technological shortcomings, rather than obvious physical defects. In this talk I will explore the history of planned obsolescence, the root causes for it in the information technology sphere, and how a long term shift in how we think about building software is poised to deliver something in the world of bits that we could never imagine in the physical world: permanent products.

Speaker(s): Brandon Ramirez
Skill level: Beginner
Track: Society and Systems


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Devcon 5 was held in Osaka, Japan on Oct 8 - 11, 2019.
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## Transcript

[Applause] minutes research lead at the graph today I'm talking about any planned obsolescence in tech one thing that I know beating people all these conferences and meetups is that it what kind of has their own vision for what makes blockchain decentralisation exciting and for me what really counts of my imagination for the first time what's this quote from the original theorem our website this idea building unstoppable applications not as fascinated me because this is not something that we were used to thinking about the real world right this is kind of the stuff of fantasy right like so that the world scored you know that you read about that you know lasts forever but in the physical world we deal with the second law of thermodynamics right that entropy is always increasing and you kind of come to expect that physical products will you know fail and degrade over time but actually put to you that we do have some prize today that the last forever specifically their information products so things like books music movies and their physical form right pages on the book will be great but there is no pure essence you know these things are just information information doesn't have any intrinsic expiration date right like maybe the hard time of that sometimes on will fail but you know the information itself you know just requires that you know medium you play through it should last forever now the type of information product that without that we don't come to a site this property for our software right but software really is access it's still just information so you know why is it that the ops that we love that we use all the plan and kind of just come to accept that these things fail right when these things are you know either poor just information I was contended that your software is just like music except that like the boombox man you play it through is just way more complex and we haven't figured out how to give it the same properties that's why I think you can trace this all the way back to the Great Depression this is one that you know planned obsolescence was first produced and at the time I was seen as this breakthrough the my economic thinking right people were kind of desperate there was this sense that the economy was feeling because there was enough purchasing power and consumer scans this is the same time the Tommy nerve King said that it would be better to burry a bunch of money glass jars to drive implement than do nothing these ideas actually stuck with us and to become part of the zeitgeist of you know what we expect from consumer products over the last century so shortly after those ideas were put to the test a cartel of like what manufacturers were realizing that the light bulbs that would produce equal nasty way too long and she's a form a cartel about Phoebus cartel where they decided to collectively limit amount however then you get a light bulb with a be designed to last on the right this is actually a picture it was called the Centennial light bulb this is a before that era that silver mean in a fire station of Livermore California than today so it can give you a sense of like what these products could have been like there's no some forms of paying obsolescence today I mean maybe policy like contrived durability I think this is the one that we tend to identify with the most with that term but it's no longer time to identify with software products so let me explain what I mean when I say contractor ability for for software and specifically it's that the apps that we use or designed to help live the companies that built them and this would've been a problem maybe 100 years ago you know the average lifespan of a company was you know closer than 60 years at least on the S&P no today it's closer to 20 years its projected to keep decreasing so you know something that's real companies are going to last you know that's the best time and we can start thinking about what that means for the price that they create so there's a lot of reasons for this you know these are just like a couple ones that you still up which is had for a long time that playbook is kind of a to go in your home for you know specially consumer applications right like even big you know successful rates like Instagram or snapchat and they start thinking about monetization until years into their growth plan and those are kind of the success stories but many companies are sort of that and they get you know maybe tens of thousands of users and they decide that's not enough skill to drive a business model and so they shut down or they become strategic acquisitions for like March people on rights that then shut them down or something you don't migrate their user sensitive other products now so ever may be that this is a formal to obsolescence because these businesses are basically planning for this this world relate only than the cases like massive success will they need to be to be taken care rather than planning for their products out with you know the companies themselves was just lots of reasons that we should care about this it's not like them you know kind of most happy for you know the people that you know that are affected content is everyone in this room so you know a few teammates you know here just just to see or a couple products that would be used in a lot of my work of shut down the next door bill one of those are products that you know get spent hundreds of dollars and tweaking it tuning it and in our data to it we were happy to pay for it and not with striking right so you're talking you know thousands and thousands of dollars worth of engineers time that you know it's kind of stolen from us against our will you can go to this website in La Jolla google.com and you can see like 150 plus products a over the years and so I think about the users that kind of gave those products a shot you know spent their time getting excited about it playing with it and then you know later also punished for kind of taking that chance and think about this user psychology right but we want starts to be successful but if we train users that you know taking a risk on the new life starter project is you know a fool's errand then like we're gonna see a lot less innovation and adoption of new new projects another dimension to this is tech technological stagnation so this is something that Peter Thiel talks about a lot he says they have a lot of innovation in the blog bits but not products now that you one part of this is that were we're redoing the same work over and over again so we go back to the center showing before one of these products one on the left that's not like this mailbox was it's kind of innovative you know mail out that came up this is you know nice of us you know features it was acquired by chocolates and shut down the inbox came around later basically just copy the exact same set of features and then should I switch to that and then that will shut down and you know I'm sure there's you know your to my another startup said hey you know those two dots are really creative of us rebuild these you know same features and so you know I'm gonna argue that in 10 years from now we're still talking about the latest like talent graph to do this map mail app then like we haven't done our job correctly so it's going to nominator that you'll see with a lot of products that are designed to be obsolete is what I call bundling and specifically bundling uh parts that have different levels of durability properties so it's very common to see you know parts that have really swung it's the you know the greatest being information was you know infinitely durable with you know Hurston are immortal ccs across the board when it comes to planned obsolescence so you see a physical components so like how many likes for example there was a study that's so that like for outdoor LED bulbs in only tempers like a suave leaders was the LED bulb itself responsible and then the other 90% it was either the power supply or some other you know parts that would kind of let them into the LED poll but they don't designed these things to be like swapped out you know autonomy so we're just throwing working LED bulbs in the trash with my new ones you know that we still hoping you see this with the latest issue not prose writing were very accepted they solder they include the other random battery on some other work meaning that one of these parts bills now you're swapping on your tire another board instead of replacing one of these things piecemeal kind of talked already about information this is will media right so they were still in the world when we were printing our books on you know think network paper and you know I mean then like we would still be in a world where books were designed to fail right less intuitive this information and resources so a lot of people don't realize we don't think about what happens when we now eight to a about Mitch you know we put the URL via and the you know the browser textbook deal but really what that thing is doing is it's mounted to an IP address through DNS so like if you want to like Wikipedia for example it's gonna go to your DNS provider you're going to get he address one that IP address really represents is a physical location on the network so so we're taking this thing that's just information Wikipedia and Atlantis visible spot on the network and at that location fails that the information is coming we see that all the time by the way it's called Big Rob if you want to look it up when we get it to the wrong like software like Web Apps it becomes a little bit more complicated so we're bundling software with the compute storage and other services required to make that software work and not only that were also running those compute storage resources to sustain business and economic kennedys right through these kind of complex like value chains so if you're using you know main applications today like Facebook you know you might have a user watch your past that's the one station strategy that kind of indirectly goes to you know that goes to Facebook and then Facebook we browse that value to this you know computer sort of resources to keep service right and so we're in this world today where if the business stuff you know working my stuff and for those resources then everything stops working and that's what I wanna focus on today about doing an analogy is would be like if when we want a television from like a company you were also like buying the electricity to run a television from a company like that's that's kinda cool today with the software so the answer to this I use will stack conceptualisation and this is what a lot of us in the space are working to works right now we're kind of just at the bottom of the stack right you know the networking layer of stack is what we've come to think of as operating like a utility which is to say that the value flows that keep the network money aren't directly tied to the businesses that want applications on that network right you can through your internet service it's not like your reader uses or that service and a future that's not we think every part of the application stack should work so we're focused on two major parts of this one is data storage which we saw in the previous slide so instead of having web pages like Wikipedia that be tied to specific locations on the network like a physical box we can address these things by the information that they contain so this is called content addressing and then you can use that content address to go to a decentralized network of note operators and say okay who has this piece of information but no longer have we want to hold the information with a specific location where you can find a nation with services it becomes a little bit more involved not only now if we want to be couple the information from the physical location we also want to decouple the value flows so in this diagram is that you know the developer who builds the application deploys the logic to this decentralized network of service providers but then the value flows that keep that service running our direct between the end user and a network right so this developer wants to walk away he wants to work on something else you know goes out of business this piece of infrastructure continues to operate this is how variant works right you know the developers you know deploy our contract but you unless there's some weird logic built into it you wouldn't expect it to stop working you know most definite other walks away it's going to be current infrastructure this is how they are to service protocols like the graphic or black pure work we're in a forest you deploy a subgraph to the graph which defines your you know the query and indexing layer for your application but once that's deployed is these value close between the graph and the end user that keep that piece of infrastructure working so the goal here is postdoc you centralization right and this is what we're going to see over the next few years that for every piece of the stack we're going to the service network either a base layer of their to later three that kind of adopts these properties we're really the only thing that's a product is this very top little thing you know the front end application and everything below that is kind of based on like the meter usage not yet user so this is part of the long path that we've been on for for some time this isn't something that started with decentralisation so we've talked before about the physical media and information so that kind of started with the map admin you know digital computing been announced and runs this popular Technic business blog that's for temporary great talks about aggregation theory and how the internet unbundled products from distribution channels and all the ways in which that you know changed our economy and we kind of leave this as being like the logical next step to aggregation theory we're now not only a bundle you know products from distribution but we also have a muddled you know information and software from the computer storage resources required to operate and yet here is in addition to getting stopped unstoppable products we move towards an economy that starts recognizing the time and you know labor that time and data the neighbor that we put into our the products that we use as a house neighbor right so you know these things how value that we confer do it by virtue the fact that we used it and so we shouldn't accept the world in which the businesses that we you know I software from how powers to about as far as fairly I think this is going to be to unlock you know a lot of innovation entrepreneurship not because consumers will be more amenable to trying out new products with the knowledge that these things won't fail the startup fails but also because you know going back to that you know a full-stack slide there's going to be so much more shared shared like infrastructure for new developers to do businesses to go on rather than azmuth today a developer wants going internet application also have to rewrite TCP and like the rest of the networking stack right they came to how much less innovation you get but that's what we're doing with the rest of the application stack today right the other thing that we're doing here is were unbundling ideas and labor from corporations so this is going to change the nature of work and so I think it's actually going to change work to be much more like the work that we've done of other information products right so like the way movies get you know built for example when you kind of you know how they do that you assemble a team there's kind of many you know contractors or you know consultants involved and that team gets together to like build this information product and then it's done right like we wouldn't expect you know the team that built like Jurassic Park for example to stick around for 20 years as a corporation and I like monetize is an extract value from Jurassic Park you know instead we have Studios that you know come together and build you know many different information products and the other thing we're going to see here is that as you know shared infrastructure grows we're going to see billing software is much more small business activity right we're going to reduce the barrier of entry to building useful and needs to complications that maybe wouldn't have worked in a world where depends you know you had to be built into our personal snack just to build something new and useful you know the reason I want to talk about this today is just said I think we tend to get caught up a lot on the idealism about 3:00 and like I think that times sometimes that face it disconnect between you know people on this base of a really excited and I don't mean to try and talk about you know about three o'clock change people out in the real world but I think this is something that's really tangible concrete that we can all rally right everyone's used to product or spent on their product that's available and I think the solutions to this are you know becoming very real today and so there's something that yeah I'd like to see you know spoken up more as part of the promise of blockchain and what three [Applause] you