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Every now and then I'll read an article about a 1940s warbird that was found in a peat bog somewhere, or an old Cessna that crash-landed in the wilderness fifty years ago. Enterprising aviation enthusiasts will salvage the wreck, restore to airworthy condition, and fly it back into the skies. Similar stories are often heard in car communities, in which jalopies are found in an old barn or warehouse, purchased, restored, and brought back onto the road. Sometimes these restored cars sell to collectors for tens of thousands of dollars.
If I open up a dresser drawer and find a smartphone I haven't used in ten years, the story is quite different. If the battery can no longer hold a charge, I may not be able to open the back to replace it without using specialized tools. If the battery is good but the charging port is broken, I'd have to open the phone and solder in a new charging port--assuming I'm able to find a replacement charging port at all. Even if the phone can boot, it probably can't connect to a cellular network due to its age, and it may not even be able to connect to WiFi.
This applies not only to smartphones. My wife and I recently had to give up one of our cars because the computer inside the vehicle shorted out, and buying a replacement, combined with other necessary repairs, was prohibitively expensive. A otherwise costly but manageable repair job was made unreasonable due to a technological problem.
I worry about what this sort of thing means for the future. Already a vast number of tools and machines can be made unusable and unsalvageable because of possible technological incompatibilities. If the supporting company goes bankrupt, if it's bought by another company that ends support, if tech or business trends cause the technology to become obsolete, if patent or copyright disputes force the company to abandon the product--all these things can (and do) cause perfectly viable devices to becomes worthless for anything other than scrap material.
The problem seems a far-reaching one to me. From an ecological standpoint, the entire concept of engineering devices not to be useful after a certain period of time is antithetical to the goal of wanting to reduce consumption and waste. When storage devices become irreparable, data is lost as well; thus humanity loses a part of its history and its culture. Encrypted data that becomes unreadable due to changing technologies are lost in a similar way. The constant need to manufacture new devices to replace the old ones uses more of the planet's finite natural resources, wastes energy, and drives prices up unnecessarily, as material from old devices often goes straight to landfills and isn't recycled into the economy.
What's the solution? I see great promise in the open-source movement, both for software and hardware.
Information is power, and when people have the power to repair, maintain and support their own devices, they're less willing to throw them out. It's a more economical solution: people don't have to spend a premium on new devices, don't have to be nickled and dimed by big companies, don't have to pay as much for software (which is often free in the open-source community), and don't have to replace good parts of a device along with the bad. It's a more environmentally-ethical solution: fewer new resources have to be taken out of the Earth, less energy is wasted from assembling entirely new devices all over the world, and less waste goes to the landfills or into rivers and oceans.
I dream of living in a world where someone can open up a storage locker, find a technological device of any vintage in it, replace just a few bad parts, and get it running again. That was the spirit of tools many decades ago, and in the decadence of our modern world, we've allowed big companies to take away that freedom. It will do us, the planet, and our future much good to take that right back.
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[Last updated: 2021-10-28]