The Lost World Of Fixing Things That Last

 

Self Repair Manifesto from iFixit, a booster of right to repair. Creative Commons license

 This past week, I accepted a deal to trade 12 Sphero robots in my classroom set for new Bolts. The Spheros are at least five years old, but at most seven, since they came out in 2016. Since the robots are no longer supported, it is time to trade up. Since when did things six years old become obsolete? Six years is a long time in our current world of planned obsolescence and products controlled at every point by corporate nannies that want your product to be repaired by them and to die when they want us to buy something new. Of course, things are very technical today, but not beyond the skills of avid hobbyists and repair professionals that would emerge in a world where I could keep the old robots going. The new robots have a few better features, but not enough to make the old ones obsolete.

 

Painting with a Sphero robot. My photo

  

 I have several robots from another manufacturer; a set of a dozen robots called Ozobots as well. Several don't turn on anymore and a call to technical support was basically to get a big fat "No" to my repair questions because they are no longer under warranty. With no trade offer, they are e-waste unless I can repair them. With nothing forthcoming from the tight-lipped company, I found some things online that I will try once I get the chance. 

 

 Take my humble iPad circa 2012. It now sits in a box because I can't bear to dispose of a piece of e-waste, and it may find future use in some creative project. A few years ago, I had to quit using it because even simple browsing was impossible. Thanks to Apple and those like them with their excellent obsolescence programs, they are filling the developing world with toxic e-waste from devices that could have a longer life. We need a world more like the one discussed in the now twenty year old book Cradle to Cradle. As the age of the book suggests, our systems don't change easily.

Cradle to Cradle concept by M. Braungart and W. McDonough. Creative Commons license Wikimedia

 As a collector of old farm manuals, there was a time when repair was considered the domain of anyone with basic skills using a"repair manual" that the manufacturer often published. Today, things are much more technical, but the average person is also more tech-savvy, and many, given the information and tools, would be able to fix their stuff. Companies seek to restrict the ability to repair devices, the most insidious examples being things put together never to be taken apart or only with special tools and unfixable parts. In a world where our consumption and waste are destroying the planet, creating waste should not be allowed. 

 

If companies had to pay for the products they willfully put into our waste stream, it wouldn't be that way. It is darkly comical that many companies want to control their products right up to the point where it will cost them money. As I have written before, we pay twice for certain things, first when we buy them and second when throw them away, the same is true for many of our devices. Somebody, somewhere, possibly a tiny child melting toxic motherboards for the metals, are paying with their life. Guys like Rich Benoit and his humor-filled videos  like the one below about his struggles to repair Tesla's have broader implications for our rights, freedoms and the sustainability of modern life. He is the comic master of the right to repair movement and as with all humor, it often has deeper meanings.

 

 

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Pages from an early 20th century mechanical grain binder parts manual illustrating the expectation that the owner would repair their own machine. How things have changed from then to Rich Benoit's current struggles with Tesla. Public domain from my collection.

When I was a teenager, I worked on and off for an old mechanic and World War Two veteran who had retired from a lifetime of work to a place in the country with a little shop. It was a little farmstead next to a quarter of land my dad farmed, tucked within the largest tree claim in the area.  Checking it on Google maps recently, it hasn't changed much since the late 1980s. When Sigbert Haugen moved to the farm, it was the start of a relationship that would last many years. My work started as a labor for repair scheme suggested by Sigbert. Sig also helped me on my projects in return for me helping him remove and install engines and other jobs made easier with two. He helped guide me in my complete overhaul of a classic inline six-cylinder engine out of our 1952 Chevy two-ton grain truck. In his reserved way of speaking, short phrases interjected within long pauses, he would convey his disdain for the already emerging world in the late 1980s of things that couldn't be repaired. I learned a lot from that quiet, acerbic and curmudgeonish little old man.

 

 As a teenager, I looked at the older generation of "machine philosophers", aging farmers, and mechanics like "Sig" as larger-than-life characters who held the keys to vast libraries of experiential knowledge and oral histories about the workings of mechanical things. Things from the time before they were corrupted by technical wizardry and corporate control that robbed the agency of the farmer or an average person from repairing their machines. Even as a teenager, I was an early adopter of the now blossoming "right to repair" and open source movements. 

 

 

A 1941 guide to repairing mowers from my collection. Manufacturers today could  prevent such things from even being produced by claiming it violates their intellectual property. The imbalance of our current copyright and patent regimes are also part of the erosion of our rights. Public domain from my collection.

 

I have always loved the technology of the age of Charlie Chaplin and Rube Goldberg. It was intelligible technology where a person with basic mechanical aptitude could often repair things without a manual. It was the type of technology that allowed Tom Joad in Grapes of Wrath to do a major repair on their car's engine while on the road. All that he needed was mechanical skills, parts and essential tools. Steinbeck, a writer, still had enough mechanical talent to write about it in an age when ordinary people could still fix things. Steinbeck worked on some of his own vehicles, which comes through in his writing. In Cannery Row, he wrote, "Two generations of Americans knew more about the Ford coil than the clitoris, about the planetary system of gears than the solar system of stars" Decades later, we still know more about the solar system than the clitoris and much less about cars.

 

 Like many things, World War Two was a dividing line between the age when the lives of average people were filled with things they could fix themselves and a world of increasing technical sophistication filled with specialized everything in a relentless drive by manufacturers to control the entire life cycle of a product from birth to death. The Second World War saw the emergence of the computer, plastics, complex chemicals, and electronics that sought peacetime purposes after the war. Wartime products were looking for peacetime applications; some needed, while some in retrospect, were not. Fuel powered machines produced in proliferation by American auto manufacturers had won the war. In the postwar world they looked to not lose a beat by turning their profligate production to an America reshaped in the image of the automobile and the corporation.

 

 While I appreciate the world that modern technology has given us, it has robbed us of our agency to do things for ourselves. Dr. Mathew Crawford, philosophy scholar and motorcycle mechanic, decried the loss of mechanical aptitude and skill while highlighting its importance in his 2009 book Shopcraft as Soulcraft, one of the finest books I have read. I had hoped he would follow up and write more on the subject as it is the best defense of the trades by a member of the ivory tower ever produced. He is the Mike Rowe of the literary world.

 While my generation and Millennials bought into tech future and present, I have been excited to see Gen Z questioning the world that tech has wrought, creating new markets for music on records, typewriters, print books and living offline like those written about by David Sax in The Revenge of Analog . The New York Times recently did a story on "luddite" youth. that has me hoping for an intelligible future that isn't a cyber punk dystopia. The young have realized that the unmanaged excesses of modernity are destroying our world and are seeking to reclaim it by reconnecting with a world the rest of us left behind. The famous Luddites of history were not about destroying machines, but about destroying the systems of control that took agency out of their hands as tradespeople, putting it in the hands of the powerful few. Their times and ours were not so different.

 

 

A Classic Olivetti portable. Public Domain via Wikimedia

 

 

I foresee an interesting future where elements of the old return as people seek to take back agency and control from companies that see them as mere extensions of their products. It is our current dystopian zeitgeist discussed at length in Shoshana Zuboff's The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. that makes us question the umbilicals that tie us into the system. Many, including myself are rethinking the role of "things" in our lives at the level of privacy and sustainability. Something that is repairable, long lasting, can be "air gapped" from prying eyes and that isn't going to become planet killing waste is how we should consider every purchase.

 

The hundred-year-old version of the iPad is the typewriter, like the Olivetti 22 above. While typewriters were still products of the industrial economy, they were mechanical devices that could be fixed. While I will struggle to find a usable first-generation iPad from 2010, I can go online and purchase a refurbished classic Olivetti 22 made from the late 1940s to early 60s. I grew up learning to type on typewriters when computers were little more than expensive toys. I never got to use a classic like the Olivetti and think it would be the perfect "off-grid" writing tool.