Tractors, cybernetics, and the radical at the RadioShack
I don’t know when or how this story starts, but I know when I became a bit player in it.
Several years back, I put my Volkswagen's key through the laundry. I maintain to this day that there is such a thing as too many pockets, and that my wife’s cargo pants have too many pockets to properly check every laundry cycle.
The key looked fine, but it didn’t work. I called the dealership. They offered to replace it for me for $300, but also would charge me another $80 to “re-program” the other key, otherwise my existing key would become useless when I got a new one. I told them that that was ridiculous, and politely passed. I resolved to to get my key repaired. I tried the mall’s “copy any key!” kiosk, but it demurred, in pre-programed corporate approved language, to help me or name why it couldn’t. The hardware store said sure, they could help me--until I told them what kind of car I had. “Oh, we can’t make those. The computer parts. But try the Radio Shack!”
So I tried the Radio Shack. I explained what had happened, and the young man behind the counter took one look at the Volkswagen logo and sighed deeply. He leaned across the counter, lowering his voice. “As a Radio Shack employee, I can’t repair this.”
I sighed, frustrated. He popped the key open, and pulled out a little chip. “This here is what you need.”
“Can I like…buy one online or something? Are they expensive?”
“Sure. They’ll run about $2-6.”
“Two to six hundred?”
“Two to six dollars. And I know a guy who would put it in for you, off the clock. But it won’t do you any good. You can repair the key, but without the proprietary Volkswagen software, you can’t make it work on your car. The only legal way to get it programed is to go to someone who works for Volkswagen.”
I explained about the nearly $400 Volkswagen wanted, and he nodded, and, glancing around surreptitiously, he wrote down a few words on a scrap of paper, and slid it across the counter to me. “Look this up, if you want to understand.”
Props to that kid, for his style and drama. That’s hard to pull off in Radio Shack lighting and uniform.
But in fairness to him, the information he was guiding me towards was worthy of a cyberpunk android speakeasy, and connected to an authentic worldwide movement of makers, hackers and activists that would grab any scifi fan’s attention.
The phrase on the paper was “right to repair”, and it’s made the news several times within the last year.
At first, it might not seem that exciting. Maybe you saw that a bunch of farmers were suing John Deer for the right to repair their own tractors, for example. I don’t have a tractor, and if I hadn’t already been thinking about the complicated array of currently legal techniques that companies use to limit consumers ability to repair or alter their technology and machines, this one would have whizzed right past me. The farmers who use these tractors “buy” their machines; but in order to do so they have to sign contracts that limit what they can do to those machines. Monopolies and copyrights have created a system that constricts repairs to few, expensive options.
But it’s tractors. It feels far removed from my life and day to day interests.
If you follow these laws to their natural conclusions, and give a moment’s thought to all the medical implants out there in millions of living human bodies, things get thrown into sharper relief.
Just this week, the BBC put out this story about several hundred people with ocular implants. The company that made their implants ran into financial trouble and was bought up by a company that’s discontinuing the product- and most of the support, in favor of trying to make brain implants instead. Imagine having a device implanted in your body- that you rely on every day, that you just…can’t get repaired anymore. Attempts to contact the company that bought the company that made it are met with silence. Your legal recourse is more limited than you might have expected.
Luckily for these specific patients, this company doesn’t seem to be aggressively trying to interfere with those they've left behind. That's allowed for the growth of a unofficial and borderline underground network of patients and doctors MacGyvering their own fixes, scrounging their own parts, and developing their own patches.
But the developers that provided both tech and promises of maintenance aren’t exactly helping either.
My guess is that if they had an alternate product available that they could push these patients to accept instead, they’d be doing just that.
When a company owns copyrights, patents, and software for your body parts and the law supports their claim to the associated powers, it creates a very wonky system with regards to bodily autonomy, money and power.
That’s more or less the plot of a short anime series I watched (and enjoyed) this month- Orbital Children, which features a couple of kids who have deteriorating brain implants developed by a company that no longer exists. They never had the legal rights to the full schematics, and there isn’t any person or entity to hold legally accountable for fixing them, or even to sue for their expensive ongoing medical needs. The kids face the knowledge that this will, eventually, be fatal. And in the mean time, for complicated plot reasons, it means they can't survive on planet Earth, instead making due with living in an orbital hotel, in isolation.
Companies sometimes stop existing. Even when the companies continue, when they have the legal option to hold health and ability hostage for profit, we know that, overwhelmingly, they will do so.
So all that has been on my mind as my dad prepares to get assessed for a sleep apnea implant right in his airway next month.
Mind, this isn’t his first implanted tech. He is my favorite cyborg and I’ve learned about many normalized and newly available implants via my dad. He’s a dyed in the wool technophile and a proud cyborg with a variety of artificial joints, artificial eye lenses, and more. This latest would be the most technologically sophisticated, and in the most critical location, but by all accounts it’s a safe, effective, easy to use treatment. It connects to an app on his phone.
My wife also has sleep apnea, and hates the bulky, uncomfortable device that helps her sleep through the night. But we have a harder time believing we’ll have consistent healthcare and a functioning device for the rest of her hopefully 40+ years.
I don’t want it to come across as if I’m against implanted tech. I’m not. Some of it is life saving or life changing, and I believe people can make choices about what technology goes into their bodies.
But I think that, in the coming years, we’re going to see a lot more about how the eroded rights of tech consumers and the eroded rights of patients can interact in nasty ways that need correcting.
And you can expect my own work to fulfill the tradition of exploring tech problems on the horizon.
Thanks for reading. Before I go, let me share another little work-in-progress from the Secondhand Origin Stories animated trailer!
As always, if you've enjoyed this email, please feel free to share it with others. I want more penpals! And you can now get Secondhand Origin Stories, as an ebook, for free, on Itch.io here.
Till next time!
Lee Brontide