Trying to fix broken gadgets

Have you ever tried to fix a piece of technology that you own and come unstuck? Well that’s what happened to John Naughton, a senior research fellow at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities at the University of Cambridge. He set me off on this investigation into the Right to Repair when I paid him a visit…

John - Well, my most precious object, precious electronic object anyway, was given to me by a dear friend. But after a while it gave up the ghost: battery went, the hard drive failed and it was hard to get into. That was the real problem. How did we open it up so we can get at it? It had cunningly designed screws for which nobody, no normal person, has a screwdriver. Now you could not bring that to a store. In fact, if you tried to, they'd say, well, that's an interesting antique, now would you like to put it in the bin?

James - There's an environmental cost to all this as well, isn't there?

John - There is because given that these devices have actually quite long lives if you ignore the fashion side of it, the model of making consumers or persuading consumers that they really want the next one raises a question, which is what happens to the old one? And they're getting discarded. So where are they going? They're going to mountains of e-waste. They're not really being effectively recycled. And it's unnecessary waste in some respects because if this stuff works for 20 years, why don't we keep it for 20 years?

James - So what do we do about it? Is this something that the government can intervene in?

John - It's something that only governments can intervene in, really, because the only way of making this better, I think, is to have legal restraints because the one thing you can, in general, hope for is that corporations obey the law. They don't do much else, but they do obey the law in general. Partly because they're worried about the legal consequences. So you need legislation. And one of the things that we have needed for a long time is a legal right to repair devices. Because, at the moment, in many cases, the corporations who make the modern kinds of devices that we now have come to rely on, they have been very determined in opposing any kind of legal requirement in this respect. And they will use, they do use, a whole range of techniques for making the right to repair difficult to implement. For example, they make their devices very difficult to open.

James - As you found out.

John - As I found out. What you'd need to open a device requires the kind of screwdriver you have never heard of. As we speak, you're looking at the iFixit toolkit that I've got that has screwdriver heads that you've never seen before. Right?

James - I can attest to that.

John - And so that's one technique. And also then they use the law. For example, this is true for most of these manufacturers. Somewhere in your device there's a thing which says no user serviceable parts. If you ignore that, then you void your warranty and you lose your rights in all kinds of ways. Corporations have been resisting the right to repair. Slowly we're making some headway. I think it's about feeling that our rights are being taken for granted. Because in a lot of cases we buy these things, we think we own them, but actually we can't do anything with them that hasn't been approved by the manufacturer. That's not acceptable. There are cases, there are good arguments sometimes why we shouldn't be allowed to tamper with stuff. Many cars are like that now. And for example, I have a Tesla, it would be really very, very dodgy if I started to think I could fiddle with it. And so there is a case for there not being a right to repair, but it ought not to be a general thing. It ought to be specifically for where this is actually dangerous.