It took me a while reflecting on engineering and design practice to come around to understanding planned obsolescence as a potentially positive thing. Imagine

It took me a while reflecting on engineering and design practice to come around to understanding planned obsolescence as a potentially positive thing. Imagine designing a very high quality metal chain. However, some of the links need to be made of an inferior strength plastic, perhaps to stop them corroding. It's therefore not worth designing the rest of the chain to a higher tensile quality than the weakest links. To do so would actually be very wasteful. One must distinguish genuine design efficiency, which is a kind of designed obsolescence, from strategic sabotage. That's what most digital goods contain; remote kill switches, countdown timers, deliberate weak fuses, remote updates that remove features, embedded DRM and all manner of user-hostile shitfuckery that amounts to no more than vandalism.