For me, right to to repair isn't just about ewaste, and preventing corporate gouging.
It's about mental health. Being able to fix your gadgets is therapeutic. Empowering. Good for the soul.
In a world full of complex technology it's easy to feel small and helpless. And maybe I'm too much of an idealist, but I think that if everyone could experience the joy of fixing or modifying a gadget now and then we'd all be a little more open minded, a little more daring. A little harder to push around.
And if you’re not going to fix it yourself, having the quiet guy with his little repair shop in the old service station or the funny woman with cool hair in the basement shop under the sandwich place is a public good whether you need something repaired or not. Those places existing are good for a community’s ephemeral spirit.
In "New York Cities Hypogeographies" (the novel I've been working on for two years) the old woman who runs the repair shop is the connection that unites the robots who are having a revolution and the people of Deep Brooklyn who are oppressed in less obvious ways by the Distributed Prison. She helps families to locate the pods of inmates and free them, and is one of the few human people aware what is really going on at the lower margin of the excavations.
@futurebird We have a public library here in Nashville that started a Repair Fair by recruiting volunteers to perform repairs and randos to bring their things to fix. Big success!!!
@futurebird the right and ability to repair also gives important outs from the cycle of constant crises that comes with poverty.
So many of those crises boil down to 'an essential item broke (because it's low quality/second hand, because poverty), now I'm between a rock and a hard place: pay money or try to exist without it'.
@futurebird Not everyone likes to tinker, but would pay to repair if it didn't cost more to repair than to buy new. So repairmen would be an industry again, folk would save money, less would be thrown out, so still a win for everyone.
@futurebird so true. We had a TV die a little over 18 months after purchase (days after the warranty expired). It happened on New Year's Eve. The following day, we went to Radio Shack and bought the supplies to replace the capacitors that had swollen on the power supply. It was incredibly empowering (no pun intended) to be able to feel like we had some say. The class action lawsuit and free repairs came years later, probably too late for most people.
Bet this is a part of the reason city mayors, the local lords of capitalism, come so hard against homeless encampments even when we're on the outskirts.
Every camp of unhoused people becomes a hotbed of scavenging and repair.
One of the best things that comes with the stability of the camp is fixing up your own stuff and own space.
@futurebird the first time I fixed something that was breaking (breaking solder in my small mp3-player jack) I was really elated - and whatever you fix and works again is more valuable to you afterwards, there are only upsides
@mmby@futurebird Helped a friend with his old audiophile stereo that turned out to have a failed op-amp, had one of those rip-van-winkle electronics moments when I realized that the specs on the new cheap-generic op-amps kicked the shit out of the old specialty "audiophile" op-amp.
@dr2chase@mmby@futurebird It can be tricky with sound though. Sound is extremely subjective. Internal supersampling to 1MHz or what-have-you sounds great on paper and can certainly do a lot in a number of situations, but in the end, what matters is what it sounds like to one's own ears. It's very tricky honestly. It can come out better, worse, or no discernible difference when changing such a thing.
I'm using a hybrid-tube amp these days and the difference of swapping tubes is insane.
@futurebird As an Autistic person who hates the distress of something breaking and the change of having to get a different replacement (and the difficulty of finding one that I like), 100% this.
I'm intelligent too and good at learning things, so if something breaks I like to learn how it works and how to repair it. Even if I mess it up, I haven't lost anything because it was already broken (and also so far I haven't found anything that I can't repair with access to the right tools and parts).
@futurebird
Over the past few months I've been deliberately making time for myself to do little tweaks and fixes to my bike, my car, assorted old laptops - anything around the house that needs a little TLC - for this exact reason. Fixing stuff feels good for days afterwards and it's only now in my 40s that I've realised how important that glow is to my mental health.
@futurebird I haven't been able to make this switch in a hardware way yet, but just switching my OS to Linux has been so great for my mental health because instead of a few big problems I have no control over, I get a bunch of little problems I can easily figure out the solutions to
If I could do that for hardware too I'd be so happy
When I was a kid, my dad had a late-1960s flip alarm #clock that became #unreliable, losing random amounts of time daily. He replaced it with a newish-at-the-time LED clock.
I went to the basement, took the flip clock apart, figured out how it worked, moved every moving part in it, and put it back together. Basically knocking the accumulated dust out of the mechanism "fixed" it.
I've been hooked on #fixing#things ever since. It's great.
@futurebird "Man must be master"… a saying one of the Ipswich and District Radio Club members used to say often.
In this case, "Man" is not referring to a specific gender, but rather that the human should be in control of the technology, including having the power to fix things when they stop working.
@futurebird
In that respect, YouTube has been the most liberating & empowering technology I have ever experienced. No matter what I need to repair or create, if I am patient and persistent I can find exactly the guidance I need there.
@futurebird Every time I learn a new way that I can fix, or even modify, an object that I had previously experienced as a black box, the world feels a little lighter and a little more malleable.
@futurebird I remember going through a minimalist phase and just getting rid of a ton of stuff and rejecting materialism. Took me a while to figure out what I wanted to reject was consumerism.
@futurebird some stidies have also shown that copyrights and patents actually harm creativity and thereby cause economic losses, which is another good argument for repairability.
@futurebird Actually I really miss that if something is no longer working you simply open the case to take a look inside. My dad always used to do this, from toaster to washing machine, from bike to car. Not being able to do that any more feels... unnatural.
@futurebird haven't really repaired much, if anything, but seeing very similar things from creative hobbies that leave you with physical proof of your time and effort I believe you without a second thought.
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