Wall Street Journalist Backs Right to Repair

Geoffrey Fowler has a friend with a Samsung TV that inexplicably stopped working halfway through a movie. Geoff’s friend thought she had no other option than to replace it. Geoffrey—a writer with Wall Street Journal—wondered what it would take to fix the flat screen TV. And so, he went down the repair rabbit hole.

“We ended up with a project that changed my view on our shop-till-you-drop gadget culture,” writes Geoff. “We’re more capable of fixing technology than we realize, but the electronics industry doesn’t want us to know that. In many ways, it’s obstructing us.”

Geoff’s story is common enough. Things break every day—that’s the nature of entropy. But being a tinkerer is knowing that “broken” isn’t the end. Indeed, for most tinkerers, repair techs, and DIY masters, “broken” is an origin story. It’s how most of us got started: with one broken phone, or one broken toy, or one broken radio. And that repair journey broadened into a hobby, or a passion, or even a business. iFixit, for example, got its start after our co-founder dropped a laptop from a bed, broke the charge port, and decided to fix it himself. In the process, he learned that manufacturers aren’t making it easy to repair stuff: most companies don’t release repair information and many don’t sell repair parts to either the public or to independent repair technicians—and that’s something that needs to change.

Geoff came to the same conclusion. Geoff’s 2008 Samsung 40-inch television was out of warranty. A little Google troubleshooting revealed that the television suffered from a problem endemic to his model: a blown capacitor. But Samsung doesn’t publish repair instructions on its website. Instead, a Samsung spokesperson pointed Geoff to an official Samsung repair center, which wanted over $200 for diagnosis and repair—that’s more than half of the cost of a new, similarly-sized television.

Read more here.

Consumerism: The scourge of our world

by Michael Smith (Veshengro)

Ever since the end of the Second World War the developed world – and also some other countries have followed suit now – has headed for the consumer society and industry created built-in obsolescence.

Companies had made huge profits from the war as the military was using stuff at the rate of knots and then some. Now, with the cessation of hostilities, they saw their profits diminish like the proverbial furs escaping down the river.

In order to counteract this they realized that if they could but produce goods in such a way that they could not be repaired (no user serviceable parts inside, used to be on many products), and then even to such an extent that even repairmen could not longer do it, or if they could be repaired make it in such a way that parts and labor would be more expensive than buying new and design products in such a way that they had but a limited lifespan and would break down, irreparably, in a short number of years, they could keep selling the same product to people over and over again they would be on to an absolute winner. And so they did just that. This also meant that they did not have to invest too much in designing new and better products and thus also saved in that department and made bigger profits still.

There was a time when products were well made and made to last and could be repaired, often even by the users themselves. New sales were mostly achieved only by designing and making new and better products and such.

Repair constituted an entire sector of the economy with small repair shops for everything in even the smallest towns. Today the so-called show repair shops can't do more than glue a rubber sole (leather, if you are lucky) on a shoe or boot. Don't ask them, though, to resew upper to midsole, for instance; the majority can't do it as they “haven't got a machine to do that”, as I was told. This is how far we have fallen!

Not so long ago everything was made in such a way that it would be repaired and spare parts were available for those products almost ad infinitum today, even it something can be repaired, spares cannot be had after five or ten years, even if the product would continue for a long time were they available.

This is just another way of manufacturers making sure that we have to buy new all the time, as with the built-in obsolescence where a PC, a printer, or what-have-you will, literally, stop working after a given time and it is designed so that it cannot be repaired, thus requiring new products, of the same kind, all the time to be produced, putting a great strain on the resources and the environment.

Ever after World War Two, as already mentioned, the course has been set for this stupid way of making us into consumers and forcing us to buy more and more and as we would not do so if products would last and be repairable as they used to be they just simply moved the goal post and made things so that they could not be repaired or limit the availability of spared to but a few years and bingo; a new this or that will have to be bought, and that goes for (almost) everything.

But it is also people who have become shall we say lazy and are not even – but things are changing with some – prepared to learn simple DIY repair skills such as sewing on a button on a shirt, for instance. They rather throw is and buy a new one and the fact that sweatshop produced garments are sold so cheaply nowadays also makes for that. Rather than putting on a new button, even if a spare may be sewn into the shirt somewhere, they throw it away and buy a new one and the same goes, alas, for so many other things.

We have been conditioned to consume and to consume ever more to make ever more profits for the corporations, to the detriment of our wallets and especially the Planet and all its inhabitants. But, the good thing is that we can change it through how we buy and by demanding to have things changed back to a proper way of doing things and that means also that products are, once again, repairable, for instance. This is not going to happen by itself. It is us who have to bring this change about.

© 2015

Re-thinking our ‘built to fail’ society

In-built obsolescence may seem a forgivable quirk of the modern technology many of us love, but it has a force of its own, placing us on a wheel of consumer slavery. But there is another way

When I first heard of planned obsolescence – products being purposefully built to fail in order to fuel our buying more and more – I felt shock and disbelief. The concept was the very antithesis of the values I’d been brought up on by my dad, a skilled woodworker who had made a guitar and a clavichord from scratch, who had spent 18 months when I was younger, lovingly poring over the joints and cornices of an oak dresser. Pieces infused with expertise and care, built above all, to last.

But the story gradually came together for me. Members of planned obsolescence club range from the light bulb cartel of the 1920s who collectively decided to build their bulbs to fail more quickly, to the endless iterations of iPads, televisions and computers created and marketed today, creating a culture in which something more than 12 months old is worthy of being scoffed at and out-of-date. Or so we’re told. One of the pre-cartel light bulbs still shines in a fire station in Livermore, California, going strong after 112 years, a symbol of long-forgotten constancy completely at odds with our culture of trend and aspiration.

As James Wallman explored in his book Stuffocation, keeping people spending more and solving the problem of underconsumption became a key business focus, firstly in the US and then spreading quickly worldwide.

“A real estate agent in New York called Bernard London, in a pamphlet called Ending the Depression Through Planned Obsolescence,” he writes, “suggested that the government stimulate demand by defining the time any product was allowed to be used. It would work like the use-by date that comes with food.”

Read more: http://positivenews.org.uk/2014/economics_innovation/social_enterprise/16343/re-thinking-built-fail-society/