Gambiarra: repair culture (2015)
efeefe-arquivo.github.io
efeefe-arquivo.github.io
My father is an old school car mechanic in eastern europe who (at least while i was young) hoarded all kinds of things and reused/repurposed them. I inherited his mentality. At some point he partnered up with a guy and they started their own business. His partner is more of a capitalist. He would run the computer diagnostics on the car, replace whatever the computer says is broken without much root cause analysis, then the old parts are thrown out. This gets repeated until the car runs. They make money on each part. The insurance company pays and everyone is happy. My dad's quality of life is better. He has a weekend house now. He sometimes complains how in the old days one would really fix things instead of replacing them, but he is getting older and not in a position change how the world works.
My own story is playing out a very similar way and I am constantly struggling to decide what is the right thing to do and what kind of person I want to be. Most people of my age (especially in the US) don't even think about these things though.
Edit: formatting.
For anyone interested in how Cubans do it, I recommend this 8 min video from Motherboard (it has subtitles):
> In 1991, Cuba's economy began to implode. "The Special Period in the Time of Peace" was the government's euphemism for what was a culmination of 30 years worth of isolation. It began in the 60s, with engineers leaving Cuba for America. Ernesto Oroza, a designer and artist, studied the innovations created during this period. He found that the general population had created homespun, Frankenstein-like machines for their survival, made from everyday objects. Oroza began to collect these machines, and would later contextualize it as "art" in a movement he dubbed "Technological Disobedience."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJPqe1baowA
they got paid to do fast and furious promotion, but instead concentrated on Cuban ingenuity when it comes to fixing cars without replacement parts. What you see in the episode (30-50 year old cars held together with ducttape) is not that far off from what was the norm in Eastern bloc under Russian occupation.
PC recycling was easier in the desktop era, where you could take a pile of discarded PCs and swap around boards, hard drives, cases, and power supplies until you had something that worked. All you really needed was a screwdriver. Laptops are tougher, but still repairable without too many special tools and training.
Mobile phone repair takes special skills, training, equpment, and parts, all of which are available.[2] Third-party iPhone parts are available. I'm amazed that people are doing SMD board rework in small repair shops, but they are.
In fact, I think most brazilians of my generation which share same taste for building things are used to prototyping things with "a lot of duct tape" and reusing parts by disassembling unused/old toys, small machines/appliances, etc, and reusing what they can to make something new.
About the "gambiarra" term, it has a lot of connotations associated (some bad), but it also carries an idea of "subverting the original intent of the designer" or "subverting the intended usage of the parts/pieces". Which is why it fits perfectly in the idea of "hacking" for repurposing and recycling.
The 'desenrascanço' culture in Portugal has two sides to it, because on one hand people do appreciate the art of finding quick hacks on the fly ('desenrasques'), but on the other it just overlooks thorough planning and design.
The way I would explain "Gambiarra": it's a quick fix that relies heavily on an ad hoc solution instead of following the generally accepted principles for solving a problem.
In all honesty, my impression is that some admirers of the Brazilian Portuguese language frequently believe there are words and concepts that are exclusive to that language while in reality there's, more often than not, a very good translation in English or other languages.
From http://www.dictionary.com/browse/hack?s=t
hack, verb
1. to cut, notch, slice, chop, or sever (something) with or as with heavy, irregular blows (often followed by up or down): to hack meat; to hack down trees.
2. to break up the surface of (the ground).
3. to clear (a road, path, etc.) by cutting away vines, trees, brush, or the like: They hacked a trail through the jungle.
4. to damage or injure by crude, harsh, or insensitive treatment; mutilate; mangle: The editor hacked the story to bits.
5. to reduce or cut ruthlessly; trim: The Senate hacked the budget severely before returning it to the House.
6. Slang. to deal or cope with; handle: He can't hack all this commuting.
7. Computers:
a. to modify (a computer program or electronic device) or write (a program) in a skillful or clever way: Developers have hacked the app. I hacked my tablet to do some very cool things.
b. to circumvent security and break into (a network, computer, file, etc.), usually with malicious intent: Criminals hacked the bank's servers yesterday.
Where and when I grew up, the term was "jury rigging", which I think much more narrowly captures the same meaning as "gambiarra", and likewise escapes the commercial colonization of "hack" and "make". Jury rigs by their very nature are one-offs - necessarily individuated applications of ingenuity, with whatever resources happen to be available, to solve problems often unique to the contexts in which they arise. You can't reasonably call such a thing a "prototype"; it's not an exploration, but rather a (semi-)permanent solution, and should it need to be replaced later on, likely it will be another jury-rig, itself unique although perhaps similar to the first, that does so. Such efforts are the very antithesis of off-the-shelf solutions.
To that point, I think the article author is both right and wrong to decry commercialization, and the commodification of industrial manufacturing techniques, as antithetical to pure ingenuity. I'd agree that when one can 3D print, laser cut, and CNC mill custom parts to a fare-thee-well, the jury-rigging or gambiarra style of ingenuity tends to fade into disuse, because why bother jigsawing together expedients when you can just design the exact thing you need and then manufacture it at a lot size of one? If it doesn't work as expected, throw it out and make another. If it does, the nature of the process lends itself well to the idea of productization (ugh, what a word), because the result is already necessarily designed for manufacture at industrial scale, with only some optimization required. And the large-scale commercialization of "maker culture" in general, with publicity and marketing firms opportunistically adopting the term in a transparent bid for the same sort of exploiting-the-naïve business as those "We Can Get You Published!" ads in the back pages of an old Writer's Market, certainly merits being looked upon with distrust and distaste.
On the other hand, human ingenuity isn't a limited resource requiring conservation; be it ever so disdained, it will nevertheless rise anew in each generation, in each person, faced with a challenge for which no easy off-the-shelf solution or CADed, CNCed custom manufacture is available. We live at a moment of historical coincidence where such solutions are far more easily available than at any time in the past - but that may not always be so, and either way, "the future is unevenly distributed". In those places where it's thin on the ground, people still jury-rig and gambiarra their way past problems, just as we have always done - it's just that we don't hear about it much, because it's not terribly fashionable, and in any case people who do it can't be relied upon to noise it all over Facebook. And should we find ourselves exiting the current historical coincidence into a world where "the future" is less available to everyone, we'll see human ingenuity rise to meet the problems that new world poses, just as we always have.
"POG"? No... should I have?
He smiled and explained it to me - Programação Orientada a Gambiarra, or "Gambiarra Oriented Programming".
Go further afield, and tech cultures spring up around technology we'd otherwise take for granted in the Anglosphere. Sure, there's some cultural cachet around old 'things,' but to my cynical mind, it's cachet for the sake of cachet. The label of useless is applied to last generation's gear, and it's thrown out, recycled, or stuck in a drawer.
If only we had a more open and less, shall we say capitalist/IP-based view of our technology, we could create an ecosystem where 2012's iPhone, with ample computing power for many tasks, could become a valuable part of said ecosystem instead of being a relic. Similarly, instead of trashing broken things, we could repair them; there exist almost a stigma surrounding a broken phone screen. Why repair when you're due for an upgrade in a few months? Don't be so base as to actually fix your shit, that's not what you're being sold; upgrade, advance, incrementalize.
Very insightful reading how the general culture of the movement has changed from a repair-reuse-recycle to a prototype-industrial-capitalistic mentality.
I think we're seeing the same problem in the modern form of the "gig economy" versus what people initially idealised for a freer, less contractual workforce.
When the maker culture becomes eminently entrepreneurial,
we should wonder what mechanisms are set into motion. It
may as well be the old capitalist drive to turn the
critique to itself into the gears of its own reinvention
gaining ground. Could we ever escape that path?
Not the prettiest phone but it does what it says on the box/ it's easy to fix it yourself