The story of industrialization is very much the story of humankind's mastery over science and technology. In the post-industrial future we're moving towards, however, much of those gains seem to be slipping away.
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A Poor State of Repair
I'm not usually one to feature the same source of inspiration two Moment of Inertias in a row, but I was once again very taken by what Drew Austin had to say in yesterday's edition of Kneeling Bus. (Again, folks, you should subscribe to this newsletter - Drew does some of the best writing on the internet, period.)
"Max Read wrote a delightful piece this week arguing that the internet hasn’t precipitated a gleaming, hyperrational cyberpunk future as expected, but instead is making us act like medieval peasants who are 'entranced by an ever-present realm of spirits and captive to distant autocratic landlords.'"
A more concrete example of the sentiment is given a little later on...
"In the 20th century, one manifestation of agency was knowing how to fix and maintain the important objects in your life, like your car. Now the iPhone embodies our default relationship to tools—that of the user: For the unprecedented amount of power Apple compresses into a single device, its smooth metallic surfaces offer no portal for apprehending or tweaking its inner workings, and we’re largely happy to abdicate that responsibility..."
Drew's overall musings in the article were focused on our behavioral return to a more "medieval" style of thinking, subject to the often-ethereal wills of the algorithms that govern us. I was more taken, however, with the physical issue at hand: by and large, we can't get inside our own devices anymore.
Since the creation of the transistor, most of the problems we have with our devices can be traced back to an electrical issue of some kind - a fried resistor, a broken trace, insufficient (or too much) solder, etc. For a long time, those issues were dealt with by getting a screwdriver, opening up said device, and poking around until it was fixed. Even if you didn't do it yourself, there were plenty of shops with skilled electricians and/or tinkerers that could help.
This Right to Repair has been rapidly eroded, however. I'm not even 30 yet, but I can remember when cell phones (read: flip phones) became consumer commodities, when they transitioned from flip phones to flat panes of glass and plastic, and when I suddenly lost the ability to take the battery out of my phone. Remember when that happened? I bet many of you still have one of those "old" smart phones sitting around somewhere, one where you can still pop out the battery and swap it when it starts to get old, instead of trading in the entire phone.
The battery example is just the most prominent example of the closing off of hardware designs. Between hardware design choices and software customization, it's never been harder to get inside the inner workings of our devices. Some of this is due to the ongoing miniaturization of electronics - it was easier to fix an electronics board in the 1960s or 1970s than it is today, if only because the components have gotten so much smaller. Even considering the miniaturization of electronics (and the specialization of hardware required to work on them), however, there's still been a rapid (and deliberate) closing of device designs.
For all the increased quality control this closing gives manufacturers over their products, it also ends up reducing the lifetime of those products and/or increases the cost of maintaining them. If my phone battery is dying, or my screen is cracked, and I can only go to a subset of all the places that could take care of my issue, I either won't go and just upgrade or change my device sooner than I otherwise would have, or I'll supplement the product's flagging capacity with some auxiliary device.
This consumption cycle is good for manufacturers, but not good for the planet. In a time when we should be moving towards a circular economy, the closing off of hardware makes us more linear than ever. Furthermore, turning hardware into a black box makes it harder for enterprising and innovative individuals to come up with improvements to that hardware. To go back to Drew's musings, we got out of the medieval Dark Ages when we started thinking critically and probe the function of the "crystals" we had sought for guidance. 600 years ago, it was societal, environmental, and geopolitical factors that enabled western Europe to break free of that Dark Ages thinking. Being complacent with surrendering our ability to remove the batteries from our smartphones shouldn't be the reason we can't break free again.