In Livermore, California, a light bulb has burned continuously since 1901, still glowing over a century after most bulbs die. That bulb is the film's proof that products can be built to last, and its starting point for investigating the Phoebus cartel, the group of manufacturers who agreed in the 1920s to cap bulb life at 1000 hours, engineering failure into a product on purpose to keep sales up. Historians, economists, and designers trace how that logic spread, citing Bernard London's 1932 proposal to mandate obsolescence as a cure for the Depression and Brooks Stevens's postwar marketing gospel that turned planned obsolescence into standard business practice. Shot over three years across Europe, the United States, and Ghana, the film follows the idea into printers designed to stop working and iPods with batteries that can't be replaced, then into the electronic waste dumps of Accra where the discarded hardware ends up. It closes with Warner Philips, great-grandson of the Philips founder, building an LED bulb designed to run for 25 years.