Aaron Perzanowski

Corporations are so out of control, they have changed the very nature of the age-old tradition of repair. In Aaron Perzanowski's thorough, level-headed and powerful The Right To Repair, the BS machine has managed to undo thousands of years' worth of consumer smarts. Where people used to repair, adapt, conserve, patch and make do, now the slightest imperfections lead consumers to toss the old and buy new. The result is burgeoning landfills, the loss of skills, and, as always, monopoly and massive excess profits.

Perzanowski says it takes 75 tons of ore to produce the metals needed for one iPhone. The total resources wasted on constantly replacing iPhones is staggering. Making it repairable and adaptable to future improvements would cut waste by a factor of five, as people could hang on to their phones longer than the current year or two. Instead, Apple does everything in its immense power to prevent third party repairers from even existing, denying them parts, diagnostics, and especially, credibility. It will not sell replacement parts to owners, and makes it all but impossible for repair shops as well. iPhones used to tell consumers their phones won't work with third party parts installed, even if they'd been salvaged from another iPhone, crushing the credibility of the repairers. Aside from quick fixes like screens and batteries, any time a consumer sends an iPhone in for repair, Apple just tosses it and sends them another. And charges them nearly the cost of a new phone. So doing the right thing doesn't even work when you try. Meanwhile, Apple's earbuds (Airpods) are completely unrepairable by design. Any attempt to get inside the casing results in their total destruction. As soon as the battery begins to weaken, the only recourse is to toss them and buy new. This is "Think Different" at Apple.

Apple is not alone (though the book likes to focus on it, because it is the biggest and most influential of the anti-repair gang). Microsoft's Surface Pro computer used to be sold filled with glue, so any attempt to open it for repair would result in its total destruction. The owner has no right to even look under the hood, in the Microsoft universe.

Meanwhile, John Deere tractors can no longer be repaired by farmers, denying the smarts they have accumulated over hundreds of years of repairing, replacing, and innovating on their equipment. Today, only a John Deere company tech is permitted to examine and repair a tractor, and a second tech must come out to activate the new part, costing farmers two very expensive visits and denying them use of their equipment while they wait, often weeks, for someone to show up. "Tampering" by the owner results in purposeful crippling of the system, rendering a several hundred thousand dollar machine useless. Deere cites repairs as being five times as profitable as sales, Perzanowski says.

This has been going on for a hundred years, as corporations have figured out they could force customers to buy new, and far more often. A 1920s cartel of light bulb manufacturers managed to halve the lifespan of bulbs from 2000 hours to 800. It produced so much volume they were able to lower the price of bulbs substantially, but the consumer paid more anyway. Customers simply got used to light bulbs needing to be replaced more and more often. They had to be stocked in every home, further increasing sales.

Modern car manufacturers long ago convinced owners they needed to buy new every two years, as opposed to Henry Ford, who pledged to always have affordable replacement parts for the Model T, long after he stopped building that model. Today, drivers spend three trillion dollars a year largely pointlessly, while cell phones sell at a half a trillion dollars annually. This is a massive amount of wasted money, money that could be applied to something useful by the consumer instead of simply buying new again and padding cash reserves at Apple, which are several hundred billion dollars these days.

Corporations have built a laughable line of BS regardiing repairs, claiming, among other things, that repairmen are a danger to consumers when they enter their homes, that they abuse consumer personal data, that their work is inferior, that third party parts are inferior, that user manuals are trade secrets that cannot be posted on the internet, and on and on. Anything to get people to throw out perfectly good products in favor of the new.

They refuse to sell parts, refuse to open their own repair centers, refuse to stock parts for older or even new products, patent every little component within a product, claim unfair competition from local repair shops, claim everything is a trade secret that mere owners can't be trusted with - it is endless. By choking the potential for repair (raising parts prices to the sky, claiming more components need replacing, overcharging for service, forcing customers to buy whole modules containing numerous parts that don't need replacing), they push customers towards buying new. They cement the deal (if not the product) by offering an appealing (under the circumstances) trade-in allowance, making it seem worthwhile to buy new. Might as well. And so more money is wasted by the unsatisfied customer.

Incredibly, they've even managed to impose this fraud on the US military. Soldiers are no longer allowed to make repairs in the field, even if they are mechanics. They must ship damaged equipment back to the manufacturer for service. Even during a war. This is part of why so very much military equipment is simply abandoned where it broke down. The taxpayer will purchase new for them. Manufacturers are delighted.

Perzanowski cites a COVID-19 pandemic example: "When a hospital in Chiari, Italy, couldn't secure valves for its ventilators from the manufacturer, local volunteers designed and 3D-printed 100 replacements that cost $1 a piece. The volunteers managed the feat in just two days, with no help from the manufacturer, which refused to share design specifications." Mere death cannot stand in the way of planned obsolescence.

Corporations have all kinds of tricks to make their customers give up trying to extend the life of their products. Besides gluing the insides of the gadget, they can use a wide variety of screws that no one has the screwdriver for, and which cost a small fortune because there is so little demand for them: "Torx and hex screws, neither particularly common to begin with, come in secure varieties that feature a protruding pin in the center of the screw to prevent removal without yet another specialty tool. Likewise, Bryce Fastener manufactures a pentagonal drive with a pin. The company is careful to prevent sales of its drivers to the general public. Other companies sell one-way screws that can be tightened but not removed, as well as breakaway fasteners with heads that are sheared off after installation." It is a mean-spirited and extraordinarily greedy way of lowering customer satisfaction. It works because everyone does it and there is no alternative. This is the normal that corporations have sought and refined for their valued customers.

In 1966 there were 200,000 Americans employed in appliance repair, and another 110,000 in tv and stereo repair. Today, those numbers are 40,000 and 30,000 despite the huge jump in the variety and availability of electronic gadgets and appliances that recent decades have unleashed on the market. It certainly isn't because the goods are more dependable now. Quite the opposite: corporations have gotten the consumer to assume nothing lasts very long.

Just know this: they used to. And they still could.

One trick Perzanowski missed or dropped from the book is the innovation of licensing. It seems that though consumers pay for products and take title to say, their cars, they don't own them any more. They merely license them from the manufacturer, which claims to be the real owner. This allows the makers to prevent any kind of customizing, tampering, adjustment or repair of what remains their property even after purchase. Those 40 page legal dox we are forever "accepting" are EULAs - End User License Agreements. They all basically say you get to use the gadget, widget, app, extension or whatever it is, purely at the pleasure of the company.

That John Deere or Tesla can cripple their products remotely at will should be ringing alarm bells everywhere. Forced updates to software have led Windows customers to lose everything in their Documents folder. Apple customers found their older phones totally crippled and unusable after a forced update. Apple refused to roll it back, forcing milions to buy new. They are Apple's phones, not yours, and Apple will tell you when you can't use them anymore.

The book is perfectly divided into very focused chapters. There is the history of repair and how it has enriched society as a whole. There is a chapter on legal shenanigans by corporations and the mostly sane denial of their absurd claims by the courts. Perzanowski breaks corporate claims into eight distinct components (planned obsolescence, trademarks, patents, trade secrets, etc), and shows how each one fails, logically, morally, and judicially. And finally, there is the rise of the right to repair all over the world, as individual countries and American states have been legislating more and more in that direction.

Even the US government has awoken to it, as the Federal Trade Commission stirs from its decades long slide towards irrelevance. With Lina Khan pushing her antitrust agenda, the sins of the corporate giants are not only coming into focus, but are finally in the line of fire. Anti-repair is a monopolistic strategy to deny potential competitors their very existence, while bilking the consumer for insane amounts of totally unnecessary purchases. America already has plenty of laws in place to deal with this. But money talks.

Sadly, we need an FTC because consumers are denied the kind of knowledge in this important and revealing book. When buying a phone, no one demands to know which parts can be replaced, what the cost of a new screen might be, who are the third party repair shops if the manufacturer refuses to make repairs itself, how much warranty service will cost, and what will cause users to have to give up this new phone because the cost of repair is too ridiculous, or because repair is not even permitted. It all makes The Right to Repair an invaluable public service. It is a very fast-paced read, with a constant shower of points and examples to back them. It is as dramatically relentless as the system is unfair.

In the what can be done about it section, readers should be grateful to Aaron Perzanowski that it's not the usual call to action by demonstrating, writing letters and forming protest movements. There are actual, concrete changes afoot, and more arising. Perzanowski says there can be tax deductions for buying products that have bona fide warranties and service set-ups. That would cost far less than for example, the nearly trillion dollar fossil fuel industry subsidies, among others. The Biden administration is already giving large tax credits for the purchase of electric vehicles from unionized US shops. There could also be labeling badges for products that come with great service, much like an Energy Star system where companies are rated by their consumption. These could rate repairability, availability and recyclability. They do this in France.

It is delightful to read that things are changing. Perzanowski cites fixit seminars, stores and educational training popping up all over, often going to court against the corporations to stop the harassment and obtain the right to repair. There is an iFixit website where consumers can learn to repair their appliances, and which is suddenly and finally getting some co-operation and respect from manufacturers. Even Apple is playing at giving owners the tools and the knowledge to do some repairs on their own - a total reversal in policy.

There are now some cell phone makers selling completely repairable models, most notably the fairphone. Their designs incorporate snap-in modules for batteries, cameras, and such. Consumers can replace the screen themselves, using only a Phillips screwdriver, for a cost that isn't even remotely close to the price of a new phone.

Europe is heading toward the right to repair, with the example of France leading the way. As for consumers, "In Ireland consumers have up to six years (of warranty). The burden for making good on these guarantees falls directly on the seller. So if a product fails to conform to these standards, a consumer can simply return it to the retailer who sold it to them. There's no need to take on the often-burdensome task of contacting the manufacturer directly. Once a consumer complains of nonconforming goods, they have the right to choose between repair and replacement, unless that choice would impose disproportionate costs on the seller. Such repairs must be provided for free, within a reasonable period, and without any significant inconvenience to the consumer.'"

Imagine that.

David Wineberg… (mais)