This morning brings an astute opinion page article by Adam Minter of Bloomberg, about how we are more vulnerable today to anti-reuse and anti-repair (planned obsolescence) strategies today than we were a couple of months ago. Apple has closed its "authorized" repair hubs, and the crackdown on trade in Asia during the pandemic has made replacement devices much more difficult and timely to order.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-03-28/apple-s-rules-make-iphone-repairs-hard-to-get-amid-coronavirus?srnd=opinion
This excellently explained column may give Right To Repair legislation the push that it needs in Vermont. I will certainly be sending it to my legislators in Addison County.
Adam Minter is a swordfish - a reader who is interested in, understands, and re-conveys messages better and more broadly than you can. The meta-blogger should not be interested only in the number of readers (the most widely prescribed blogging strategy) or page rank, but in the ability to draw in a deeper intellectual with the capacity to make change. Of the three books of 1960 which influenced me deeply - To Kill A Mockingbird (Harper), Silent Spring (Carlson), and The Waste Makers (Packard) - the third is perhaps most under threat by big manufacturers. It is getting cut out of school books. More below on why that matters...
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| Fishing for Swordfish |
Minter does an excellent job connecting the dots between the COVID-19 pandemic - a critical current event - to the repair and maintenance of the devices (like ventilators) that manufacturers are sneakily making more difficult to repair.
This is a battle long fought.
Minter's next to last chapter of Secondhand is based on a quote from my grandfather Clarence Fisher (my son's middle name is Clarence, in his honor). "A Rich Person's Broken Thing" is about how a poor, but crafty, and hard-working person can add as much or more value to a broken device as a manufacturing plant.
Let that sink in.
We see how manufacturers battle each other with advertising and price. We have heard presentations about "market cannibalization" by HP during the ink cartridge refilling lawsuits. My grandfather was complaining during the late 1970s that it was getting near impossible for a man to change his own spark plugs, that in the future you'd have to own a motor hoist to get to them.
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| Beyond Repair and Endangered |
If Clarence Fisher of Ridgedale Missouri can fix a broken thing, and sell it into the market, he's as much a rival to Ford Motor Company as GM or Toyota.
Microsoft Authorization pact with Intel and IBM was probably over my grandpa's head, but he would sure have caught up to the threat if he needed software to fix his Ford tractor. In fact, he predicted it.
And he and his wife survived the Spanish Flu of 1918... his sister in law did not. My grandmother though had some insight into pandemics and cancers. I'll take some liberties to update her comment... "There is so many scary words today, like SARS, Swine Flu, Leukemia, Coronavirus, COPD," she'd say (I'll take some liberty to update the quote). "But less people dying. Back in the day, we didn't know what people was dying of. We just heard 'she got the fever'. Everything was called 'the fever'."
Our right to own, maintain, fix and resell things we buy now has "the fever". Right To Repair is a new word for what the FTC already should be policing - which is consumer property protection.
The Right To Repair movement isn't particularly new. It's because of the weekends beneath grandpa's trucks, tractors and cars (and no, it didn't take, I'm not mechanically adept, just deeply appreciative) that I took keen interest in a Fayetteville Arkansas High School American History - Social Studies chapter. I don't recall my teacher's name... I didn't much like her and she deservedly didn't seem to think much of me either. But there was a chapter in the book, and one I did not skip, with a paragraph or two about Vance Packard and Planned Obsolescence. Packard's book, The Waste Makers was described as having made an impact with young Ralph Nader. I was impressed at how people were taking action in the democracy to form the FTC - Federal Trade Commision. Our teach pointed out that the result, the Magnuson Moss Warranty Act of 1975, had taken 15 years to pass (from the date Vance Packard's book was published).
Years later I learned that manufacturers were buying textbook companies (DC Heath was owned by a defense contractor).
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| Surrounded by Tilapia |
During the decade I've mostly been focused here on the firehose of filthy lies about Africans, Asians and Latin Americans who I observe making the same advances my grandfather did on the Missouri-Arkansas line in the Ozarks. So many hours I spent, on visits during his winter years, in his house in Hollister Missouri (he'd given up farming) connecting things he'd said to me as a kid with things I saw happening in Cameroon, Mexico, Peru, Malaysia, Indonesia, China.... He and his wife Lauradean, and their siblings (Buford, Buck, Cleota, etc) were died in the wool Pentecostal Red-State conservatives. But he was not "Ignorant and Proud Of It" (the bane of the midwest and south's Dunning Kruger culture), he was a really brilliant man. And when he was picturing these people in countries he'd never imagined going to, fixing and repairing and doing the things he'd had to do, he was genuinely enlightened. And profoundly less racist.
Anyway, this historical approach is not the way to get the next Mag-Moss Act amended or passed... or so I am told by the leaders of the Right To Repair movement. The do show me some respect, and when FTC took a solid interest in the Act (we helped sponsor a Vermont cell phone repair woman to testify), I think my references to the importance of Mag-Moss made more sense.
My testimony about right to repair has been about poverty relief, and how "good enough markets" rely on a "critical mass of users" to make investments in mass communication infrastructure investible. If not but for grandpa's side business fixing rich peoples broken things, which he resold in competition with manufacturers, Missouri and Arkansas roads would not be paved. If not but for the laptops imported to north Africa by my WR3A partners in Cairo 20 years ago, internet infrastructure would not have been investable. If not but for the used cell phones, purchased by the "more suitcases" African "fly and buy" entrepreneurs #freejoebenson, who would have paid for mobile phone towers that today criss-cross Africa, and leapfrogged cables and telephone poles?
But my more important testimony is that Right To Repair legislation will "future-proof" ever more pernicious anti-reuse technology in the future. Blockchain is now - or already has been - developed to make every single sound card synced and locked to its own original device (and in fact deployed to track used Boeing parts "typically reused 4 times" in a partnership with Honeywell). The used parts market is being hunted down like so many other endangered species. We have to respond to the threat the way we respond to virus spread. With TMI like https://nextstrain.org/ncov
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| Surrounded by Perch |
The real value of the Magnuson Moss Warranty Act of 1975 was to end the "creativity" in warranties. Manufacturers were not forced to have warranties at all. But it put an end to cleverly-written and confounding language that left consumers in the dark about what a warranty was actually worth. If a manufacturer SAYS that a device we buy has a warranty, then the legal office of the manufacturer will put the kibosh on trap doors... it's just not worth a trip to the FTC office. In fact, after Mag-Moss was introduced, even before it passed, manufacturers realized they'd been too creative and began to straighten up. And that may begin to happen with Right To Repair.
Ok, who reads these long blogs? Here's the thing, I'm casting for swordfish, not tilapia. Every few years, via this blog, I'm introduced to a Dr. Joshua Goldstein (USC), a Dr. Josh Lepawsky (Memorial U), a Reed Miller (MIT), and of course Adam Minter. I'm introduced to people who create Retroworks de Mexico, I'm introduced to documentary filmmakers. I create a window at Interpol to speak through, and eventually we blew apart the cringeworthy-titled "Project Eden". It takes time. I don't know what effect we had on Joe "Hurricane" Benson's original 60 month sentence (reduced to 16). But if only 1 in 50 people searching the topic will read this, that one in 50 is more likely to be a swordfish than a perch.
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| Meta blogging is writing to attract astute and influential listeners |
"You're fishing for swordfish, and surrounded by perch"... that wasn't a quote from my grandpa (it was an old Vermont farmer, Ross H, on the board of the thrift shop I helped set up as "Retroworks" in 1999). But Grandpa Clarence Fisher liked the quote and understood it. I replace "perch" with "tilapia" and get a big grin, nod, or laugh with my African, central American, and Asian WR3A members. Adam was a swordfish, the Joshes are swordfishes, Jacobo Ottaviana and Juan Solera are swordfishes. There are just enough people out there who give a damn about lies and truth. Write for them. And fan the dandelion seeds when they vet and publish their own work, written for a much wider audience of decision makers.
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| Just one or two seeds |
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