the right to repair (redux)
this girlie? writing about tractors? not as strange as you'd think!
The first version of this letter went out riddled with mistakes. My fault for scheduling it and then forgetting to do a final edit. Please accept this take two and my apologies <3.
Dear friend—
This morning, as with every morning, I have made coffee. It is decent coffee, but nothing to write home about. I made it in my little coffee machine that came with my apartment. But the making of this coffee began in the grocery store.
As I stood in the aisle among the throng of fellow shoppers, the bag of coffee I needed stood beside all the other brands and varieties. The package had fancy minimalist type that read “P R E M I U M R O A S T” and in smaller type “(samsung compatible).” This coffee cost $2 more than every other coffee on the shelf. But what can I do? Buy another coffee maker?
Okay, the jig is up. I have made coffee, but I did not make it this way.
A few years ago I read Cory Doctorow’s “Unauthorized Bread,” a short story in which a young refugee hacker takes on Big Tech to help her community: dozens of fellow refugees and immigrants living in the publicly subsidized apartments of a high rise housing complex. The rents are cheap. The apartments come furnished.
But the catch—nothing is ever repaired. Their floors are segregated from tenants who pay market price, with separate elevators that are slow and perennially broken. And the appliances only work with manufacturer-approved inputs. For example, toasters that only toast “authorized” bread.
Of course, this is a strategy to keep the poor, poor. The brands that work with the appliances are more expensive.
But besides being a damn good story, “Unauthorized Bread” portends a world to come.
That world creeps forward day by day as we cede—or are forced to cede—control over our purchases to the companies that make them. By buying into systems like Spotify, Apple, or Google for our daily joys and functions, we place a lot of trust in huge corporations not to take advantage.
Take Spotify. My entire music history for the past 10+ years is embedded in the platform. Every playlist I’ve painstakingly created, the years of memories and music. But that library is beholden to the deals that Spotify can make and the artists who decide Spotify’s ubiquity is worth the pennies the company throws at them.
Perhaps Spotify raises their subscription a few dollars. Perhaps my favorite artist decides the tradeoff isn’t worth it after all, and pulls their music from the platform. Perhaps something so egregious happens at Spotify that it’s not just Neil Young leaving Spotify because of Joe Rogan, but thousands of artists who leave Spotify en masse.
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Spotify is a service. One could argue (and many argue) that if we find ourselves no longer happy with what Spotify provides for us, we can easily cancel our subscription. But more and more, it seems, we are buying things, objects in the real world, that are following a Spotify-esque model of service.
Once we buy something, I think we’d all agree that we expect some kind of control over that thing ad infinitum. But the wild and new thing about connected products, like computers and iPods, but also, increasingly, Smart TVs and Smart refrigerators, is that the company retains ever more control over their product long after we hit the “purchase” button.
For instance, in 2019, Google announced that it was dropping service for a host of Nest smart home products. They essentially “bricked” these smart devices that people used to operate their thermostats and open their garage doors.
These folks had gotten rid of their “dumb” switches, expecting Nest to be around for the foreseeable future. And then suddenly it wasn’t. (Google has since returned service to Nest products after public outcry.)
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A perhaps more societally pressing level: farmers across the country depend on John Deere equipment to plant and harvest their crops. As reported in Bloomberg, as tractors become more computerized, farmers have less control over their equipment. The computer systems inside require special software keys known only to John Deere’s technicians.
When it comes to changes or repairs, non-Deere parts won’t be recognized by the system. In the sometimes days it takes a technician to get out to a farm, that hundreds-of-thousands-of-dollars worth of tractor is essentially a huge boulder. And because harvesting and planting is so time sensitive, a few lost days could mean hundreds of thousands in lost income for farmers.
The connectivity of these gadgets and services is what makes them so helpful and convenient, precise and efficient, but it’s also what makes them easy to change at a moment’s notice. Apple can push software updates to millions of iPhones seemingly at the flick of a switch. So far, this has meant security updates and new features. But maybe, one day, it won’t.
The connectivity allows manufacturers to control exactly how and when a device works, even from thousands of miles away. And it also makes a device harder to repair because all that extra technology—the screens, the chips, the Bluetooth and the wifi—makes the device much more complex.
Once upon a time, you could buy an appliance and they were all relatively similar enough that you could take it into a repair shop and get it fixed up. From a stereo, to an oven, to a cell phone, you could avoid buying a new version by just taking it in for repairs.
But now, our devices are so complicated, full of things like digital keys (a la John Deere) and proprietary screws. Now, many devices require a company-trained or certified technician to take a look at it.
This is a consumer problem, an environmental problem and ultimately a political problem. Denying the right to repair is one of the many ways that corporations inflate prices and maintain their vice-like grip on markets.
For instance, John Deere makes more money on repairs than it does selling new tractors, and their dominance in the industry means they can charge whatever they’d like for those authorized repairs. They essentially have monopoly power over the business of tractor repairs.
For Apple, phones can hardly be repaired except at the company’s own Genius Bars. That means they can get away with charging huge repair costs. And their market dominances means they get away with pulling ridiculous anti-repair strategies like gluing parts together, which makes repairs harder, riskier, and more expensive.
And, without the ability or right to repair, we jettison untold pounds of e-waste into landfills each year for gadgets that just needed a new battery or a new screen. Those chemicals and metals leech into the ground and into our water.
Gadgets have hefty climate costs, too. For a new iPhone, 83% of its lifecycle emissions come not from charging and using the thing, but from mining and manufacturing it. PIRG, a consumer advocacy group, estimates that if Americans all held onto our phones just one year longer, we could save the same amount of emissions as taking more than 600,000 cars off the road.
It doesn’t matter much whatever Apple’s doing to increase the “sustainablity” of their production line if they’re still incentivizing customers to toss perfectly good phones away for a single bad battery or broken camera.
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When it comes down to it, manufacturers’ control over technology is not an inherent evil or an inherent good. The death grip that Apple holds on its product line means that it can push smooth updates to all of its phones in a blink of an eye, again and again, including important security updates. Google can’t do that for all the bajillionty different Android phones, which means those phones get vulnerable, slow and outdated much faster.
But there are important trade-offs when it comes to autonomy and quality of life. I’m starting to think about those tradeoffs more critically and consider the environmental impacts of them.
Moreover, antitrust and technology laws are outdated. They’re not keeping up with the pace at which technology develops. This makes it much harder to take companies to task when they’ve overstepped their bounds. But without taking them to task, we may end up in a future with “unauthorized bread.”
Thanks for reading, chat soon,
—mia xx