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.... we are trapped in an ever costlier spiral where nothing is ever good enough and everything must keep being replaced by things supposedly better.
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David,
There is a great documentary about this topic, it is called The Light Bulb Conspiracy, its on you tube. It is not just about the way that in the past light bulb makers agreed to set the life (life cycle) lamps to run 1000hrs, but how also we are coached to believe that old tech is bad and new is good, so as to keep our industrial complexes running. Throw away the old and buy the new.
Of course it has created mountains of E waste now and across the course of a century fantastic devices and appliances have been sent to waste all over the world. Also appliances with long expected life times (like Einstein's refrigerator with no moving parts) are not selected for manufacture & sale.
A good thing about everybody on this forum is they can see the beauty and value in much of the old tech and try to preserve that, despite the brainwashing and life cycling tricks used by the marketing engineers from industrial complex.
Now things get life cycled at a software level, like a print counter IC in a printer, that disables the unit when its reached a max count. This guarantees obsolescence.