The Tech Industry Has a New Plan to Stop Proliferation of Right to Repair Laws
404media.co
404media.co
For agriculture I'll look at things like tractors. For that, it's when tech entered the space that the repair story changed.
That is a shady way to get out of regulation.
It clearly shows that the companies doing this — which is most — are sustainability focused as long as it’s for more profit and don’t have honest environment commitments.
You can have all the low carbon datacenters you want, but if your primary product and its colossal manufacturing footprint is designed to fail and you oppose allowing people to use what they already paid for through planned obsolescence or even go out of your way to make your products impossible to repair you’re a total hypocrite.
I get why — profit. But consider this: try explaining why you spent years at Apple or Amazon doing everything you could to improve profits at the cost of the future even while ice melted and the ocean currents were clearly slowing to your great grandkids. You can’t. You’d just be another card carrying early 21st century moron.
Bringing our companies back into alignment with the life support systems of the earth is necessary and a priority, and we need to find a way to penalize this kind of behavior harshly and quickly. The real market incentives are not aligned with human survival on this planet.
Oh and btw, the people on HN are the most likely people to answer this call and make this change. The nerds and founders and execs and creatives. We make the system they’re talking about. It’s up to us.
IMO the interesting question is: why are so many corporations so focussed on short-term profit. With the answer seemingly being evolution by natural selection subject to the regulatory environment they find themselves in. Less profit-focussed companies are usually outcompeted.
There is only one solution: The population valuing repairable products.
After that, problem solved. That will make them the more profitable one, penalizing production of non-repairable products through loss of profitability, and companies will jump at the chance to produce that which is repairable.
But so long as we, as a population, don't value repairable products, companies are going to continue to produce what we actually value instead. After all, a company can only stave off bankruptcy by producing what people want.
There is no other option. Even if you want to penalize through law, or similar means, democracy requires that the population first value repairable products to usher in such a law, and at that point the company's quest for profitability will have already solved the problem anyway.
I want a repairable phone with extended support for around 400e can you find me one ? Fairphone are not too bad but look at the price and they are probably doing the best they can. But you might have heard of economy of scale ?
If right to repair becomes law then repairable product might stop being niche and so expensive.
Edit: but no let's not pass any law and just continue to let society subsidize corporation pollution.
Does 400e speak to you meaningfully valuing such an item? That's little more than a single meal at a high end restaurant, for a highly complex device that takes many thousands of man hours to create.
You can't even buy many non-repairable smartphones for that much. This does not demonstrate you valuing a repairable device at all.
I don't know where you eat but in Paris a high end meal would start along the line of 100e.
You can buy a repairable Nokia G21 for 134e at the moment would probably be sufficient for my usage but sadly support is crap :(
At 134e support might be crap. What kind of support contract are they offering you if you throw, say, another 1000e at them? How about 10,000e? 100,000e? To value something requires demonstration of actually valuing it. You can't just say "I value this" and expect things to magically change. Words are meaningless. Only action gets things done.
I get the impression that what you actually value is a phone leveraging economies of scale with decent support.
What the heck kind of restaurant costs 400 EUR for a single dinner?!
it's a three-pronged problem with no single faultee. So there are 3 different approaches.
- change consumer demands to be more environmentally aware. This is the hardest but most effective angle. because if demands shift, business will shift to make money and consumers in democratic regions will vote in those who also care and enact proper regulations.
- make a business that creates that demand. The "Tesla of phones" if you will. This is the "easiest" solution (in the loosest sense of the word) but also the least resiliant. It could fail, or you yourself could fall into the very same rush for profits.
- change the regulations. By encouraging others to support certain laws or being in politics yourself as a champion. Middle of the road, in terms of difficulty and effectivenesss.
>But you might have heard of economy of scale ?
yeah, that's probably why we get these duopolies. providing a global hardware product is absurdly expensive, not really something that can be done by a scrappy startup like software. At that scale companies take every shortcut they can.
Unless you convince existing OEMs to provide these products, the "right" solution will never be the cheapest one. And if consumers care about price comparisons over sustainability, that's a stance in and of itself.
I absolutely disagree it's not because society has not caught up and there is almost no cost to pollution that company are not at fault ...
I don't see the advatadge in playing the blame game here. I'd rather provide solutions than focus on who did it worse.
But so long as people don't truly value repairable smartphones (see the other comment about someone wanting a repairable smartphone for practically free – that's not valuing something), there is no realistic avenue for someone to create a repairable one, just as there would have been no realistic avenue to creating smartphones in the first place if the consumer did not see value in them.
I just looked at the website of a camping-equipment brand that extols its care for the environment, but if you read through the lines, you find that the brand is just taking an existing Chinese manufacturing and having its own logo stamped on the goods. Again, companies seem to feel that if you have any web presence, this is the kind of stuff you have to write.
"well I lived a good life. Good luck, kiddos"
and that's the generous assumption if they feel they are even responsible for anything.
>Bringing our companies back into alignment with the life support systems of the earth is necessary and a priority, and we need to find a way to penalize this kind of behavior harshly and quickly.
They were never in line to begin with. They simply kowtow to the local regulations while trying to make as much money as possible. So of course the answer is to lobby and weaken regulations.
Solving it on the business end is one solution, but not the only. We also need to ensure the right supporters are in office and vouching on the politcal side as well.
You can try to enact change via a bottom-up approach, where all of the employees decide to introduce a new primary metric, e.g. climate impact, alongside profits, but it's pretty clear that humans are not terribly good at agreeing and acting for the good of humanity (see all the wars happening right now).
I think a top-down approach where the government includes 'climate impact' as an existential metric for all businesses would have more success because it wouldn't require all the people in all the businesses to agree, only the elected officials would have to agree. Unfortunately, elected officials are people too, and by definition they're not terribly good at agreeing either. That said, it's a more tractable problem.
This is why I think enacting laws to change the purpose of businesses is more realistic, than to appeal to employees. The latter is useful too, but as part of spreading the message to all the people that "it's up to us" to influence the results of elections, so that we elect people who could enact this change from the top down.
From some angles, it seems like the sole point of most businesses is to keep people busy and employed so that they don't actually try to meaningfully change their circumstances.
That's not the sole point, but it is important.
That said, it doesn't mean we should accept the "as much profit as possible regardless of societal cost" stance a lot of businesses take. A more sustainable, human, and less harmful thing would be to go back to the idea that businesses should make a reasonable profit, not profit at any cost.
Wealth without work.
Pleasure without conscience.
Knowledge without character.
Commerce without morality.
Science without humanity.
Religion without sacrifice.
Politics without principle.
As in wealth without work we indulge in commerce without morality to make more money by any means possible. Price gouging, palming off inferior products, cheating and making false claims are a few of the obvious ways in which we indulge in commerce without morality. There are also thousands of other ways in which we do immoral or unethical business. When profit-making becomes the most important aspect of business, morals and ethics usually go overboard. We cut benefits and even salaries of employees. If possible we employ "slave" labour, like the sweat shops and migrant farm workers in New York and California where workers are thoroughly exploited. Profit supersedes the needs of people. When business is unable to deal with labour it begins to mechanize. Mechanization, it is claimed, increases efficiency, but in reality it is instituted simply to make more money. Alternate jobs may be created for a few. Others will fall by the wayside and languish. Who cares? People don't matter, profits do. In more sophisticated language what we are really saying is that those who cannot keep up with the technological changes and exigencies of the times do not deserve to live--a concept on which Hitler built the Nazi Party. If society does not care for such people, can we blame them if they become criminals?
Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20050308215331/http://www.gandhi...
Now for the pedantry. I think the repairability concern is more about owner-user agency & rights, not material efficiency /sustainability. The latter is very important of course, but we should expect it to follow from ownership. This isn’t a disagreement - I think you’re saying the same thing - just a difference in emphasis.
Imagine a population of users who, when replacing broken parts, would actually just toss them in the local river rather than properly recycling them; and imagine a corporation who sells unrepairable electronics, and touts “green” and perfectly upcycles every last bit of silicon from returned devices. (Scooping the effiencies for themselves, of course.)
On principle, I would still prefer the former scenario of users with the rights to do what they wish with their goods, than the scenario where corps essentially rent out their manufacturing expertise under the guise of selling.
Luckily, that’s an abstract thought experiment and not likely to actually occur. But corps WILL try to convince us of their benevolence and sell us the latter scenario. We need to steel against it because, like you are emphasizing, we can’t trust the profit incentives to ultimately align.
As a side note, we need non-corp entities (or at least, much smaller businesses) to handle proper electronics recycling - after all, that river-dumping scenario is not great! They exist but it’s not as easy to use them; for instance, unlike paper/glass/etc recycling in most US cities, they typically don’t come to your house to pick things up (at least in the places I’ve lived). Some shops will take this part but not that. The whole ecosystem has a LONG way to go before competing with the gravity well of the big corps. But I don’t have confidence that we can somehow get them aligned with human interests without the emphasis on individual agency and rights.
And this is just based on the sustainability issue; right-to-repair is related other ownership concerns, e.g. DRM and data privacy, neither of which are directly related to material sustainability.
> “Memorandums of Understanding,” Not Laws
> There is a long history of MOUs in the repair world, and, generally speaking, they all seem to eventually favor big corporations.
> At the same time, as repair advocate Louis Rossmann, tech rights expert Cory Doctorow, organizations like iFixit, and Proctor have pointed out, Apple has found a new way to restrict repair, by “pairing” parts with specific phones. This means, for example, that an iPhone screen from one phone will not work if you put it on another phone, unless Apple recalibrates that part. This is a software, not a hardware limitation. I’ve written about this a handful of times, but it is essentially DRM for repair parts.
> It is possible that Apple and other big manufacturers believe that by supporting right to repair laws as currently written, their practices won’t actually be affected that much because they can just move toward a system where parts are artificially paired with individual devices (it is not clear, exactly, how the California law will deal with the parts pairing issue).
IBM?
404media blows. Why is it everywhere suddenly? This is just another Vice/Buzzfeed clone.
I added it to YOShInOn's RSS feeds three weeks ago. (If you need to ask what YOShInOn is, suffice it to say that YOShInOn posted that link to HN on my behalf.)
Astoturfing.. I mean "growth hacking"